Read/Watched/Listened/Ate

10: March 2026

TV: Last week I finished series 4 of Industry (BBC), which while fun, has got increasingly soapy and over-the-top and probably should stop soon. It’s a bit of a shame because I found the first couple of series captivating, if a bit triggering. What I felt they evoked brilliantly was the disorientating experience of being a graduate in elite professional services, feeling simultaneously like you are at the pinnacle of society and also fodder at the bottom of the food chain. It was also good at grasping the sense in which almost everyone is a little lost as well as dazed, somehow drifting into this world rather than grabbing it with purpose. Which is why I’ve found the discourse around its immorality and glamorisation of money odd, and a little alarming insofar as it reflects a broader tendency for audiences to struggle to handle even the mildest ambivalence. Almost all the characters are miserable, broken people, looking to fill emotional holes in the wrong ways. I don’t see how people mistake it for aspirational - if anything, the trouble with the more recent series is that they have started to lay it on too thick, going way over-the-top, producing sensational crises and downfalls. When we all know that elite professional services is mostly ennui and quiet despair (or it was for me, anyway).

Article 1: Clawed by Dean W Ball. Last couple of weeks I’ve been riveted by the Anthropic-Department of War fight, and this is as good an overview of the stakes and the rights and wrongs as any, all the more powerful for coming from a former Trump official. The bit I’ve found particularly interesting, though, is the argument over democratic legitimacy. One interpretation of the fallout - from the US government’s perspective - is that Anthropic overstepped the mark by trying to make policy rather than setting technical limitations. Now I understand why the elected president has more democratic authority than a private company. But it’s also worth remembering that military activities are particularly far removed from democratic deliberation and consent. The armed forces and security agencies who use the technology in the first instance weren’t elected, and even the politicians mostly weren’t voted in on the basis of their approach to defence tech. A great illustration of how far the notion of a democratic mandate can be stretched.

Article 2: Measuring the intrinsic value of choice by Christoph Feldhaus et al (European Economic Review). New paper finding that in a hypothetical experiment, people are willing to give up 9% of their budget in order to be sure getting their preferred option, which they interpret as a measure of the intrinsic value of choice - the value of being to choose in itself. Particularly interesting since my PhD research back in they day was on the intrinsic (dis)value of choice when it comes to choosing schools. I ended up focusing more on the costs of choice (“choice overload”), which this paper doesn’t disprove - at least some people in their sample put negative value on choice, paying money to avoid it. And I would highlight that the choice in the experiment is quite abstract and stylised, while the value of choice seems quite context dependent: we’re more likely to enjoy choosing things we like an understand. All the same, it’s an interesting effort to quantify something quite tricky.

Podcast: Are football’s new laws overcomplicating the game? (Athletic FC Tactics Podcast). One of my more eccentric football takes is that the problem with the laws of the game is that they are insufficiently democratic (why are we worrying about control of autonomous weapons when the real problem is that we have too little say over the rules of football?) So I really enjoyed Michael Cox’s insights on the absurdities of the opaque body, IFAB, which decides how football is played - dominated by the UK nations who for years thought substitutes were unmanly or something. But I also appreciated his deep insight that the challenge the framers of football have had from its very beginning is to maintain a healthy balance between technique and physicality. I’m sure the vast majority of fans have never thought of it that way, but I do think that is one of the debates we should be seeking to have as part of a broader conversation about what makes the game good, what we want to protect and what we should change.

Food: I went to Tattu in Leeds, described by Grace Dent in The Guardian as “somewhere the Kardashians would enjoy”. As Dent describes, it is a place for Instagram and not a place for value for money. So, yeah, not my usual scene. But as a one off it’s an experience, all strikingly presented and the food is reasonably good, so not totally style over substance.