Read/Watched/Listened/Ate
9: March 2026
Book: Last week I read No Second Chances by Morgan Jones, an account of the campaigns to prevent or reverse Brexit. It’s a wry but reasonably charitable account of the eccentric characters that rushed into the fray after the traumatic defeat of the 2016 referendum. It articulates quite well why defending the EU formed an identity and a pastime for so many people, often those that hadn’t been particularly involved in politics beforehand. There’s a bit of me that is attracted to this surge of democratic engagement, that sees political participation - even smug, annoying, potentially counterproductive forms - as a good thing. And yet, there is something off-putting in that tendency to revel in the identity, to see political action as expressive rather than engagement or giving of reasons to the other side, which makes them hard to really love. (If you’re in London on the 19th - I’m not - go to the book launch, which looks great).
Article: US Aid Cuts Fueled Conflict in Africa by Lee Crawfurd (Development Economics Etcetera). In the day job, I’ve spent recent weeks grappling with the question of how African countries are navigating the steep recent declines in aid cuts, and being a little frustrated by the lack of concrete evidence of the impact on the ground. So this analysis by friend of the blog Lee, replicating a recent working paper, is not just methodologically interesting (reproducing the same finding at regional level that the original paper found at the country level), but useful insight too. Which is just as well, because the substance is depressing: places that were more dependent on US aid suffered 5% more armed conflict in 2025.
Lecture/Essay: Politics as a Vocation in a Post-Democratic Age by Nick Pearce. Last week I happened across this old lecture from 2014, riffing on Max Weber’s classic essay on the role and nature of politicians, and Pearce’s analysis seems startling prescient today. He argues that the big shift from Weber’s time to today is that we have grown used to expecting democratic participation to be a mass activity, and yet politicians today have been deserted by disenchanted and mistrustful masses, leaving them ‘ruling the void’. That opens the door to populists, who eschew the ‘responsibility’ that Weber lionised, presenting the answers to society’s problems as straightforward rather than the “slow boring of hard boards”. Pearce argues that the vocation of politicians is harder than ever - not just combining romantic vision with pragmatic realism, but doing so in a way that can display genuine empathy and understanding of ordinary people and reengage civil society, beyond Westminster. If that was the job in 2014, the challenge is even greater in 2026.
Music: morning burns the night by howl then. I am not deep enough into classics to get all the references, but I’ve been enjoying this emo rock opera inspired by Aeneid by my old friend (and occasional substack commenter) matt.
Drink: I’ve spent enough time working in alcohol policy to be troubled by the phenomenon of drinks companies inventing additional “occasions” to normalise new ways of drinking. On the other hand, as someone who has the palate of a six year old and loves puddings, I am quite taken by the concept of dessert cocktails, and in particular the Cherry Bakewell at The Rise in York. Sweet, creamy, cherry, almondy - tailor made for me.