If there’s one thing more tedious than people who comment “didn’t happen”, it’s people who drive by in the comments with “AI wrote this”.

This from @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social struck a chord. The middle-aged are being radicalised online, with opinions leaking out from Facebook to supermarket queues and bus stops to become acceptable public discourse. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Amsterdam fam: I have a spare ticket to Kae Tempest at the Tivoli in Utrecht this evening. I’m nine thousand miles away so can’t make it. Shout if you’d like to go - free to first taker.

🇯🇵 Japan is a country built on education... but not on learning. Last week at Nagasaki Canvas - a monthly civic forum where locals, students and nomads gather to talk about the city’s future - the theme was learning.

I asked Copilot to fix a small flaw in my photo and instead turned me into someone who runs the neighbourhood watch Facebook group. It’s giving: – alphabetises her spice rack – leaves polite but firm notes about wheelie bins – owns at least three glue guns – hosts “sip and paint” nights

This week’s Weeknote: wandering Nagasaki’s old foreign quarter, visiting fruit-shaped bus stops, talking about curiosity and learning, and wondering what happens when a culture, city or company stops letting new ideas in. Openness, isolation and whimsy. sharonodea.com/2025/11/02/w...

The Telegraph’s quest to find the least sympathetic poverty case studies continues

A day late: October in One Second Every Day. Amsterdam, Paris, but mostly having the time of my life in Japan.

Even bus stops are better in Japan 🇯🇵

If you haven’t gone to Don Quixote at midnight to buy random crap, are you even in Japan? 🇯🇵

Phew. Thank goodness for that. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Go sports!

Visiting a local museum in Kyushu, Japan… I did not expect to see this panel about the UK’s COVID-19 Enquiry 🤷‍♀️

Japan keeps catching me off guard. One moment I’m making wax lettuce, the next I’m crying in a peace museum. Found a thread in Nagasaki that runs from my grandparents’ anti-nuclear campaigning to the modem that started my digital career and eventually led me here. sharonodea.com/2025/10/26/w...

Went to a talk by Derk Loorbach recently and couldn’t stop thinking about how his theories of societal transition apply inside organisations. So I wrote about it: why communicators are perfectly placed to help companies move from managing change to shaping it. strategic.global/Change-to-Tr...

Lloyds Bank announce Copilot saves their staff 46 minutes a day. A number so specific, it must be true Any CFO will tell you productivity savings aren't cashable savings. Is headcount down? Problem resolution improved? Come on lads, you can do better than this www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/l...

Instagram v reality: up the top of a very windy hill taking a photo of a beautiful sunset

Considering starting a rumour that Prince Andrew had AWS taken down to knock the news about him off the front pages.

Ohayō gozaimasu! おはようございます

Week 1 in Japan 🎌 Ferries, karaoke, challah baked in a rice cooker, and client calls from a mosquito-filled kitchen. Working remotely-remotely is chaotic, funny and brilliant in equal measure. Weeknote 42 comes to you from the Goto Islands. sharonodea.com/2025/10/19/w...

After a surprisingly cosy night sleeping on a tatami mat in a lovingly-restored traditional house in Japan’s Gotō Islands, I’m on to a round of book edits here. Life is good.

Paris for an exercise class, Japan for a new adventure, and my suitcase living its best life somewhere in France. New weeknote (comin' atcha from 39,000 feet above Mongolia) on change, chaos, gratitude, and doing ridiculous things just because you can. sharonodea.com/2025/10/11/w...

anyway, I am pleased with this column, I think it is good, I hope you read it rather than just shouting at me for what you think it might say www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...

The ridiculous exercise class I go to did a one off special at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. I love that building, so I blagged a spot and went all the way to Paris to do a single exercise class. And it was absolutely fucking beautiful. Life is short; enjoy the shit out of it.

I see the bros are all over LinkedIn this week, clutching their cappuccinos and defending Revolut’s Nik Storonsky for fucking off to Dubai, arguing we need to tax startup founders less. Because apparently if we don’t subsidise billionaires, they’ll flee.

This was a banger of a read. Well worth a quid for a Kindle download.

Kemi complains about Labour's magic money tree on spending then less than a minute later makes three pledges to cut taxes without explaining how it'll be paid for.

It's absolutely nuts. How do they not understand our economy? The creative industry adds £124bn to the economy. Universities contribute £265bn. Sea fishing is variable but hovers around £500mn, ie £0.5bn. Steel is £1.8bn direct, £2.4 indirect (via supply chains). These people simply cannot count.

This stuff is so tiresome. In a world where hard skills like coding are getting replaced faster than they can be taught, it’s the soft skills that arts degrees teach you that remain valuable. Me for the i Paper when Sunak tried this very same nonsense last year: inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...

Failing to support proportional representation might go down as the second-biggest error of the Cameron government (after holding a referendum to put the EU issue to bed for good).

Weeknote (for the Monday morning shift): Storm Amy, stalled projects, sideways rain, Little Simz, Swifties, transition as a hopeful form of collapse, and the sense everything’s shifting again. Autumn in Amsterdam, Japan on the horizon. sharonodea.com/2025/10/05/w...

Weeknote 40: Storm Amy, stalled projects, sideways rain, Little Simz, Swifties, and the sense everything’s shifting again. Autumn in Amsterdam, Japan on the horizon. sharonodea.com/2025/10/05/w...

Happy Mean Girls Day to all who celebrate

Over half of Brits do not meet these conditions, and the tax paid by immigrants pays for it.

The Eras Tour, but for divorced dads.

Given Copilot has today failed when given the task of putting eight things into a list, forgive me if I hold off on getting too excited about this

Americans are (sometimes even genuinely) appalled by the European attitude to free speech rights, but as a Belgian employer I would not be able to fire someone for this.

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where Donny outlives Dolly. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

Weeknote’s up, a little late. 🍂 Autumn in Amsterdam, and in the book. Both into the final quarter. 🗣️ Multilingual intranets > lazy English-only assumptions. 🎨 Career reflections (mine’s less a plan, more a Jackson Pollock). 🇯🇵 And the big news I teased in weeknote 38… sharonodea.com/2025/09/29/w...

The Fabians thing is hilarious. Probably the first time a conspiracy has genuinely made me laugh out loud.

Amsterdam be Amsterdamming

I am all for ID cards, but also agree with this take. In a world where ID is frequently needed, we should make it easy and cheap, to make citizens’ lives easier. It won’t “fix” immigration, nor will anyone planning to vote Reform believe it will.

A sensible take from @jamesomalley.co.uk on digital ID cards. Checks aren’t going away, so we do need to make them easier for citizens & employers. We have just such a system over here in NL and it does make life administratively a lot easier. open.substack.com/pub/jamesoma...

My favourite thing about this (old) Reddit thread about how to respectfully store your flag was the 100+ photos in the replies of people’s flags, shoved in crumpled Albert Heijn carrier bags and chucked in junk-filled cupboards.

Time for, as they say, 👏 Some 👏 Personal 👏 News. Starting next month I’ll be spending a few weeks living and working in Japan 🇯🇵 to research + write about the future of work. Particularly on comms and collaboration practices, global nomads and place-independent working.

One of the first interviews I ever did as a teenage journalist was with someone from the BNP. One of the team asked if they would split up families. The “yes” response was considered shocking; now the party leading in the polls are saying the same. Terrifying. vm.tiktok.com/ZGda5MuxU/

The rapture did not occur overnight and so, regrettably, I had to get up early and put the bins out.

Goedemorgen! Back in the ‘dam and it’s feeling decidedly autumnal out there today.

Ten days in the Balkans: swimming in Lake Koman, hiking the Valbonë–Theth trail, bunkers, bonkers bars and Boney M on repeat. Plus one Brussels summit squeezed in for balance. Weeknote 38 👉 sharonodea.com/2025/09/21/w...

Arrived at the IABC Communication Leadership Summit in Brussels. Expecting some smart ideas and great conversations, and hoping this will snap me out of holiday mode.