Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.