PHIL FRIEND

Social care reform, the Assisted Dying Bill, and an economic argument nobody is making. Andy Burnham gave a big speech yesterday. He talked about 22 failed attempts to reform social care over 30 years. He promised a National Care Service, a fair pay deal for care workers, and a cross-party conversation. Good. All of it is genuinely good. But I want to add something to that conversation. Something that didn't make the speech. There are more than 400,000 people in England curre

What a cruise ship dining room, a damning report on PIP, and a conversation about ageing have in common — and why it matters for anyone managing people. I sat down to write this in a genuine quandary. Not because I had nothing to write about — quite the opposite. There was so much going on that I couldn't settle on just one thing. Picking a single storyline felt a bit disappointing, like leaving the other two on the cutting room floor. Then it struck me: I didn't have to choo

A tech writer spent a year using AI for everything and called it a revelation. I'd call it a Tuesday. Here's why disabled people have been doing this for decades — and what that says about the world we live in. Joanna Stern spent a year using AI to do almost everything. She's a technology writer. Her new book, I Am Not a Robot, is out this week. She appeared on NPR's Fresh Air to talk about it — the year she used AI to read her medical results, draft her messages, and process

AI-generated image Let's start with something most of us can agree on. Getting out of the house in the morning is a logistical challenge. Kids refusing to eat breakfast. School bags that vanished overnight. The dog who decides today is the day to throw up its breakfast. Life is complicated before 9 am. I know this. I'm a wheelchair user. I'm also a husband, a father and a grandfather. My morning complexity is the same as yours — plus a bit extra. This week, the extra arrived

Let me start with Mark Mardell. Mark is a former BBC journalist — World Affairs Editor, North America Editor. He has Parkinson’s disease. Last October, he arrived at Istanbul airport to catch a Turkish Airlines flight home to London. He’d checked in. He was at the gate. And then he was told he couldn’t board. Turkish Airlines had a policy buried in their small print: Parkinson’s was the one condition — just Parkinson’s, not heart disease, not diabetes — requiring passengers t