Margaret

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the chapter on Priests, Festivals and the Politics of the Supernatural (and am taking a break for a bit of lighter reading). All these civilisations had public rituals as well as the hidden but more routine cult practices, and these both provided societal cohesion & reinforced the idea of the upper class as the mediators of interaction with the supernatural. Fear of witchcraft was common and had been common in the societies that preceded these civilisation – the focus of the fear had changed tho. Previously it was a way to keep wealthier individuals generous & humble, now it was used by the upper classes to target the lower classes.
• “Spiderlight” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Monday 19 October 2026. Felt like quite a short book, tho I was also quite sucked in to it so perhaps read it quicker. It’s very much a Dungeons & Dragons set up, you can pin point the class of each character in the party except for one and the quest feels pretty straightforward too – tick off the boxes on the prophecy check list & you’ll defeat the Dark Lord. But it’s much more interesting than that sounds – it’s got a lot to say about consent, and coercion, and assumptions (particularly those based on appearances), and what being good means anyway. Quite a few “are we the Baddies?” moments for the characters (and even more time when I was thinking that even if they weren’t). But I still genuinely wasn’t expecting the ending, even tho in retrospect I can see how it’s set up.
• “Green City Wars” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  I’ve really only just started this so nothing to say yet.

Podcasts

• Talk 90s to Me
  An interview with Melissa Auf der Maur, who has recently published a memoir on her 1990s.
• The History of Egypt
  Dominic Perry (the host) being interviewed by Ask Historians podcast.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • main part looking at the last week in public statements from Trump’s administration and how it’s all stuff that would’ve seemed nuts prior to Trump 2, also commenting on their Andy Burnham interview, the situation between the Saudis & the Houthis, the situation in India currently, and what people (and they themselves) thought of Michael Gove as Rory’s replacement
  • the Q&A episode was with Alan Milburn talking about the report he’s about to publish about what’s going wrong such that 1 million young people are not in work, training or education, and how to fix it. Obviously short on detail for proposed policies, but his diagnosis is that there’s two systemic issues. One is that the health-related benefits system in particular gets you trapped on benefits because the system gives no support towards finding a job that you can do & in fact if you try to get a job but it doesn’t work out then you may lose some or all of your benefits in the process. The other is that employers simply aren’t employing young people, a lot of people who want to work are applying for hundreds of jobs & not getting even a form rejection back, and that’s creating a generation who disengage because they’ve been shown that there is no point engaging.
  • start of a mini-series (the rest will be for subscribers) about Alastair’s new book, Persiviliance. Which is about people who overcome the negatives in their life by turning them into positives, being resiliant & persevering. This episode is an interview with Alastair mostly about the bad points in his own life and how he handled them
• The Bunker
  • an episode about a book recording what people were dreaming about in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, as collected by a Jewish woman who escaped to the US in 1939 with her notes, the totalitarian nightmare of life definitely filtered into people’s dreams and in pretty explicit ways rather than via abstract symbols
  • an interview with Margaret Hodge, who has just published her memoir, I’d heard of her as a Labour politician across a long period of time but didn’t know much about her
  • Weekly Wrap Up, mostly concentrating on the war in Ukraine & how Trump is betraying the Ukrainians
  • an interview with a Russian-American journalist who’s just published a book about being locked up in Russia as a suspected spy (he’s not) so he could be exchanged in a prisoner swap
  • Start the Week, amongst other things talking about the riots in France and what might happen in the future election-wise there, what’s going on with the Brazilian elections, Trump going all in with Russia probably out of desperation over high petrol prices
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  
  • an interview with Luke Harding, who’s written a book about Trump & Putin (which he can’t publish in the US as no-one will take it on), there were a round of other interviews with him a few weeks ago iirc
• The Rest is History
  
  • an episode about James Bond, the books & the films (which came out round about the time of the last Daniel Craig Bond film)
  • an episode about all the German chancellors from after the Second World War up to Angela Merkel (who was stepping down at the point this was released)
  • an episode about the Norse Sagas
  • an episode about Macbeth, both the real king and the Shakespeare play
  • an episode with Mary Beard about the way Western civilisation looks back to Rome & Greece and how the subject of Classics interrogates those civilisations
  • first episode of a two parter on Watergate
• Empire
  
  • the Norman conquests of the Celtic bits of the British Isles which happens in the decades after England is conquered
  • the Normans in Sicily, their guest is Peter Frankopan who was definitely keen to pop the bubble of “but they were so tolerant and magnificent”, better to imagine them as the mafia or as characters in Peaky Blinders, and to think of the Capella Palatina (which I rather liked when we visited) as a rather naff piece of nouveau riche bling (think tech bro not aristocrat)
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, where one of the questions got a discussion of doubt and how it’s important to science, and another a discussion of how a lack of curiosity and a lack of doubt can be why people do terrible things
  • an episode about the Navier-Stokes equations, about half of it about the actual equations which are descriptive of how fluids move & is what Hannah Fry worked on a particular application of in her PhD, and about half on the Open AI proof that these fail under certain circumstances (which was one of the great unanswered questions of maths), Hannah made the point that not only was the answer not the actual point of the question it was the figuring out, but also she doesn’t think the solution is an inherently interesting one (there’s a term f for external forces, and they set that to some particular set of terms and then it breaks which still doesn’t tell you a more general answer). They’d recorded the episode before the second dump of 700 or so AI generated proofs of other mathematical questions, so had to insert an extra bit at the beginning to say they were just covering that first paper.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • the main subject was the way that politics now seems to be trollitics – the right in particular competing to wang on about policies whose entire purpose seems to be to upset other people (live streaming executions for instance, but also having the Navy shoot people in small boats, or switching off the asylum system entirely)
  • the main subject followed on from the previous episode – this time about the normalisation of violence & violent rhetoric in society, in particular the masked thugs out on the south coast
• Literature & History
  An introduction to the subject of Season 8 – early Medieval literature of the north western part of Europe. He’s going to be covering Irish, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, and Germanic literature over the next 25 or so episodes, and this episode gave a bit of the historical & geographical context.
• In Our Time: The Evolution of Trees
  Trees are specific sort of plant life which are free-standing tall (over 3m) plants with a trunk and a canopy. They are not a group of plants, and tree-ness has evolved multiple times over the course of evolutionary time. Trees & forests create new ecosystems because of the way they alter the environment (cooling, shade, trapping moisture, providing different levels for other flora & fauna to live in).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Han metaphysics, in particular the five phases and how they underpin the whole structure of the world
• Your Time Your Way
  Building resilience into your system
• The History of England
  A cross over with British Food History podcast, about traditional British foods (and otherwise) – I was surprised to learn that crumbles don’t appear till the middle of the 20th Century and are quite possible American
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump

TV

• Wilderness with Simon Reeve
  The Yukon this time, icy & very remote. Part of it was with some First Nations people, who are still hunting for part of their food supply, an odd mix of traditional methods and modern tech. And then some time up near the Arctic Circle where there should be loads of salmon & thus grizzly bears, but fishing further down the river system means that even tho that bit is protected the wildlife is still suffering.
• Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
  This episode covered the Peloponnesian War (Athens v. Sparta, Athens lose), the subsequent events including the rise of Thebes, and got us right up to the threshold of Alexander the Great.
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  Tracing the development of jazz from the cross pollination of the music of the Africans brought to the US as slaves with European music & the music of Indigenous people, and pointing out that jazz & the blues underpin most of modern Western music.
• Later … with Jools Holland
  I begin to wonder if there’ll ever be much to our tastes! Royal Blood were not bad, but given we own an album that neither of us listen to it’s not a long lasting like. Shygirl did a track that felt quite Prodigy influenced, but as J said it sounded like the Prodigy on tranquillisers, it was really quite polite.

Games

• Diablo IV
  I think we may’ve got to the point where there aren’t really any big gains to come, just the grind of upgrading glyphs & finding gear that’s a bit better. We’ve just done the Rank VIII capstone, furthest we’ve got I think and are playing on Torment VIII as well. I do think we’ll get quite a bit further tho, just it’ll be slower progress.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the chapter on Cult. One of the key take homes of this chapter is that a major feature of the religions of all these early civilisations is the use of sacrifice to nourish the gods as part of an explicitly reciprocal arrangement. Most of the civilisations thought the gods would die if humanity didn’t return energy/power to them via sacrifice, and those that didn’t go that far thought that bad things would happen if they weren’t fed. Sacrifice was generally animals, but all the civilisations also sacrificed humans at some point but to varying degrees (e.g. Egypt & Mesopotamia stopped doing that fairly early, but the Aztecs sacrificed large numbers of humans throughout). This idea of sacrifice is different to the cultures before them (where energy mostly passed into the human realm) and the transcendent deities we’re more familiar with now (who don’t need fed). In all case the rulers act as intermediaries between gods & humans, and this provides a justification for why so much needs to be given to the ruler & why he must keep his people prosperous (so he can provide the gods with what they need) and a culturally safe avenue by which the ruler can be criticised (the accusations are couched as not upholding his duties to the gods).

Podcasts

• The History of Egypt
  The rest of Siptah’s reign – the possibility that the king isn’t very healthy and that’s why power isn’t really wielded by him, and the chancellor Bay’s seeming inexorable rise until suddenly he is executed.
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode with Alexis Conran about whether your phone is listening to you (yes if you have your assistant switched to use voice) and how that isn’t the problem for why it serves up ads that seem a bit too uncannily targeted (all the apps on it are tracking every other thing about you and building a profile that knows you better than you do, and knows where you go & who you meet)
  • an episode about spiders, the myths & folklore
  • an episode about misperceptions of crime, where it’s actually necessary to hold two things in one’s mind at once – crime is down overall, in particular major crimes like murder, but some crime is up significantly, for instance shoplifting which is much more obvious on an everyday basis
  • Monthly Hot Takes, the main story this month was the Andy Burnham speech and the right wing reaction to it, the non-serious one that caught my attention most was a column about parents tracking university age children which is a phenomenon that appals me
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the big story was Andy Burnham’s speech as that really has energised the left (and sent the right wing commentariat into a flap)
  • an episode about relations between Britain & Germany beginning in the 18th Century when obviously it was very good, and going through to now via the 20th Century when it was very bad
  • an episode about far right parties in Europe and the various ways they are & aren’t being kept from power
  • Start the Week, covering the Conservative conference that’s coming up & Kemi Badenoch’s pamphlet that’s basically a manifesto, the Greens conference that just ended and how the membership voting in a frankly anti-semitic policy (Zionism = racisim, the desired outcome is a single Palestinian state) is both a disgraceful thing to do in general and also isn’t going to play well in the by-election this week where Zack Polanski is standing as a candidate
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with a man from Trinidad & Tobago who has worked in the field of drug demand reduction both in Trinidad & Tobago and in the UK, but has run into problems with new UK immigration rules
• Oh God What Now
  
  • bonus episode covering Andy Burnham’s conference speech, which set out a hopeful & radical vision of where he would like to take the country
  • main subject of discussion was obviously the Labour conference and a more in depth look at Burnham’s speech – they are generally in favour and pleased to see someone articulating a vision for where to go and also pleased to see him treating the electorate like grown-ups who should get to have an informed discussion, also talked a bit about the Fairford affair which is seeming more & more bizarre (not only are all the men out on bail quite quickly but one of them actually rang 999 about it himself)
  • covered both the Conservative & Green conferences – Badenoch’s manifesto (which they found a bit thin despite this pretence of having lots of heavy weight political policy in it), and that awful new anti-semitic Green policy. Also talked about the Man City business, which is turning political in a foreign policy way as the Abu Dhabi owners are making threatening noises about stopping investment in the UK if they are punished for breaking the football spending rules for the last decade.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • an entire episode discussing Burnham’s speech which both were taken with, in terms of both vibe & content
  • Q&A episode, amongst other things covering Xi’s visit to the US, the Orange Order march that’s trying to happen in NI and threatening the peace there, the breakdown into civil war in Ethiopia
• Empire
  
  • moving on in the story of Stalin to The Great Terror
  • the battle for Stalingrad, which is a pivot point in the Second World War where Hitler starts losing
  • looking at Putin’s obsession with Stalin and how he’s using this part of Russia’s history to bolster his current war, with Fiona Hill as their expert
  • starting a new series about the Norman conquests (not just the 1066 one), starting off with the Norman origin story and looking at how Viking they actually were
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode where for show & tell Hannah geeks out about fountain pens (prompting me to wonder if mine is still functional, but to be honest it’s like with tea – other people geeking out sounds so neat but I always turn out not to have that level of appreciation (tho it beats Michael geeking out about pencils, coz that didn’t inspire any desire to copy cat it))
  • an episode about fire, both what it is and a discussion of why we like sitting looking at a fire (particularly with other people) which morphed into a discussion more generally about soft fascination and how that’s a useful part of one’s life
  • Q&A episode where the show & tell thing was a Japanese skill game like ball & cup (so didn’t work audio only), the questions included could you go right through Jupiter but the answer is not really as the gas in the centre is a pretty sluggish liquid (even if not quite solid)
  • an episode about witch hunts and why we accuse innocent people of things they haven’t done, and how confirmation bias means that’s so hard to defend against (I think Hannah is in the current series of Celebrity Traitors)
• The History of China
  
  • The end of the Second Opium War, which includes the deliberate destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing by the English & French – as a response to the Emperor’s atrocities committed on the people he was supposed to be negotiating peace with. At the end the British are keen to prop up the Qing as they now owe the British a lot of money.
  • Back to the Taiping Rebellion which is still ongoing and still regards the Europeans as potentially friendly despite the changed situation (which they don’t yet know about), and that costs the Rebellion a victory as they wait in order not to inconvenience the British.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • two main parts, one on Hegseth’s speech where he uses pretty bigoted language to talk about how he’s remaking the military into a testosterone-fuelled “Christian” organisation, and the other on the Republican senator who made a tit of himself thinking he had a gotcha that “proved” the guy involved in investigating Trump’s involvement in Jan 6 was corrupt (the gotcha relied on some sports game the guy hadn’t been at)
• The History of Philosophy
  
  • to mark the 500th episode of the main sequence he’s doing some special episodes of interviews with experts filling in some of the gaps he left (as with all projects it’s expanded in scope as he’s gone along), this one was about Sappho
  • an episode about Herodotus & Thucydides and how the history they were doing is not quite the same thing conceptually as what we do (for instance they were much more explicitly interested in the recent past or even current affairs)
  • an episode about St Paul, and situating his philosophy as a development of the Stoic tradition
• The History of England
  James II & VII thinks everything is going swimmingly, he’s pushed through his reforms to let Catholics hold government office again and now he has a newborn son who’ll grow up Catholic and keep England Catholic forever. His (Protestant) subjects and (Protestant) daughters are much less pleased with this state of affairs.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  A second interview with Mustafa Suleyman (just Rory, not Alastair), which … well, I don’t have the same worldview surrounding AI so it’s pretty toothgrinding even tho it started off promisingly (Anthropic are idiots who think they have made god in a box, on which we agree, but the “harm” is not that this anthropomorphism will unleash dangerous god-like AIs, but more that people’s brains are being fried by their departure from any basis in factual reality). I may’ve ranted to J about this episode for quite some time while we were having dinner.
• Talk 90s to Me
  An interview about Andrew Weatherall, a dj who remixed a lot of iconic songs of the 90s.
• In Our Time: The Garamantes
  The Garamantes were a large, sophisticated, urbanised, agricultural society that existed at oases in the Sahara Desert from roughly 1000 BCE through to 600 CE. Despite Roman & Greek dismissiveness they were a key part of trade across the Sahara linking Egypt to West Africa & the Mediterranean Coast to sub-Saharan Africa. I was particularly struck by how even as the Romans got better knowledge of the Garamantes they started to refer to them as nomadic hunters in texts – so people had been there but the received wisdom was less accurate than Herodotus had been centuries earlier when he was working from hearsay.
• Your Time Your Way
  How to get back on track if your system falls to pieces and you seem to have too much to do all at once – stop, figure out the one most important thing to work on next and explicitly renegotiate other commitments so that you have the time to complete the most important one.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  First part of a series on the biography of Aphra Benn, a Restoration playwright, in this episode focusing on what little is known of her early life plus her time as a Royalist spy
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An overview of Han ideas of cosmology.

TV

• England v. Czechia (2-0)
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  Episode 4 looked at the development of more sophisticated instruments, using the guitar (older than you think) and the piano (younger than you think) as case studies. It also talked about recorded music (focused quite heavily on vinyl) and programmed music (starting the latter with those pianos that could play music from a roll of paper with holes in).
• Paris to Rome with Bettany Hughes
  Episode 2 took us to Venice and then Bologna and slightly further into Italy, still very shallow but a bit less “bumping into” old friends
• Wilderness with Simon Reeve
  Season 2 of this, and I looked back at my notes for season 1 which mostly boiled down to “… and this is why I’m a city girl”. This season is no different! First episode in a rain forest in Papua New Guinea hunting for a particularly rare sort of tree kangaroo (these animals occupy the monkey niche) to film it for science. They did find the tree kangaroos, but they also found a lot of very big insects which left me doing that whole startle at dark splodges on things for a while afterwards.
• England v. Croatia (7-0)
• Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
  Third episode was looking at how the Athenian democracy grew out of a very violent period of Greek history, in the wars against Persia and the war between Athens & Sparta. And at how the system only worked because there were many slaves to do the actual work.

Games

• Diablo IV
  We’ve continued to make a lot of progress, zipping up the Season Ranks quicker than usual this season as we’re up to Rank V already and the capstone for Rank VI feels in reach.

Talks

• “Revisiting North Saqqara: From Archives to Soundscapes” Sergio Alarcón Robledo
  The talk was in three sections. The first half was his use of modern photography & GIS techniques to identify sites within the North Saqqara necropolis that are only documented in assorted plans & photographs from archives and limited publications. He’s had a lot of success where he’s actually got archival data to work from. The second half broke into two. The first part was looking at the use of the structures over their lifetimes. Normally we think of a tomb’s lifecycle as construction → burial → post-mortem cult. However there’s evidence that there were earlier phases of ritual use before the burial, and that the structures were remodelled in order for the burial to take place. He drew parallels with the funerary enclosures at Abydos, where the kings had both a tomb and nearby enclosure, he suggests that these were the same idea but occupying the same space at different times (and at a much smaller scale). The second part was how he’s investigating the architecture of the tombs. He’s beginning with audio, and looking at how the walls affect what you can hear when people speak in different places within or outwith the building.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Halfway through the Cosmology & Cosmogony chapter (so I’ve read about Cosmology). The way all the religions conceive of the universe is actually pretty similar – there’s a circle or square a few thousand km across with the civilisation at the centre, there’s often a central vertical axis of some sort, the universe is divided into 4 quadrants and the east-west axis is the most important, the land we live on exists between a concave bowl of the sky and an underworld (except the Yoruba), the underworld is a place of death and also of fertility, the land is surrounded by an endless sea. There are also lots of differences in details. Some of the similarities come from cultural connections, but in the main it seems to be down to being an upright ape living in a world. All these civilisations near the sea so a sea round everything makes sense, no-one knows much about lands very distant from their own so being finite & small makes sense, for people who inter their dead it’s obvious that down from the land is the place of the dead, and as plants grow out from underneath the surface the underworld must also be the place of fertility. Even the four quadrants round a central vertical axis makes sense if you think of yourself as the vertical with forward/backward/left/right as the places you look around you.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode where the show & tell thing was visualisations of the fact that the human egg cell is in the very middle of the sizes of everything (something like 10³⁵ smaller than the observable universe & bigger than the Planck length)
  • episode about what’s the smallest thing you can sense with each of your senses in terms of matter – the winner was that your eyes can detect between 1 & 10 photons reliably (1 is just better than chance, 10 is definitely reliable)
  • Q&A episode where the show & tell thing was a collagen tablet and they discussed the science behind whether these actually do anything (there are some small measurable & statistically significant effects, and there’s also no harm to taking them, but it’s not really worth spending lots of money on, boiling up your own chicken bones & eating the stock would do the same thing)
  • an episode about how your body really needs gravity & other parts of being on the world, things like your eyes change shape (perhaps permanently) if you’re in space for a while, and your temperature regulation doesn’t work well off Earth, and you end up getting kidney stones because your bones deteriorate & the minerals are peed out
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about how our high streets are full of dodgy looking vape shops & American candy shops – the thesis of the interview guest is that this isn’t to do with money laundering but is a tax thing (at least, in London that’s the case). If you set up a company which runs a shop that doesn’t bother to pay tax then you make way more profit than a tax-paying business, and if someone starts to investigate or suggest you should pay tax or business rates then whoops the company goes bust and a new company turns up to run the exact same shop
  • Weekly Wrap Up, opened with the Piddington “referendum” about leaving the UK where Jonn Elledge expressed my views (let them actually go through with it, and they’ll soon feel ridiculous as they have no water, sewage, bin collections, passports, pensions etc), more seriously covered the ongoing donations scandals for Reform, plus the latest stuff about AI & slowdowns
  • Start the Week, which mostly concentrated on Burnham’s meeting with Trump this week, plus a bit of chat about the upcoming Labour conference and a mention of the Lib Dem one that just finished
• The History of Egypt
  
  • Interview with the author of a new book about the Fifth Crusade, which invaded Egypt (ultimately unsuccessfully) in the 13th Century CE
  • The beginning of Seti II’s reign and the rebellion/civil war with Amenmesse.
• The History of China
  
  • The Qing control of the area near Nanjing continues to collapse with the withdrawing Qing army looting their own cities as they go. So the Taiping Rebellion is still riding high at this point but mostly because the Qing are just doing so badly
  • lots of refugees converge on Shanghai, which used to be a small county town and is now a place the Europeans have set up their trading communities, so it’s defended not by the Qing but by what the English, French & Chinese cobble together between them, which is quite a lot as the English & French are setting up armies to go make war on the Qing in the north later
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • released the Q&A episode first, as they had Ed Milliband on as a guest, so he was answering questions about his announcement on sanctions on illegal settlements in the West Bank as well as some more broader discussion of how he’s aiming to run his foreign policy brief
  • main episode started with the Houthis taking control of the Red Sea and creating big problems for Saudi Arabia’s ability to get its oil out (and thus causing problems for the rest of us) and Trump’s failure to do anything there, there was also a bit on AI which I must’ve zoned out during coz when I ranted at J about the next episode he said some of it had been mentioned during this one, and also a section on Canada & the EU
  • an episode that was part of a mini series Rory’s doing for paid subscribers so I’ll only hear this one (tho I don’t think I’d listen to the others anyway coz this one made me grind my teeth), this was half an interview with Yuval Noah Harari about the risks that AI poses which had all of the things in it that annoy me about Rory’s attitude to this – oh yes, it might kill us all which is terribly scary but lets talk more about how we need to make one of our own otherwise the US will own us, and frankly I think both risks involve AI being something it’s not but if you believe both a & b why would you worry more about b?? Also had that silly thing about how the AI can tell a terrorist how to make a super virus that will kill us all and so now terrorists don’t need biologists to do this the AI will do it for them, which totally ignores the fact that even if you know what edits you need to make to the viral sequence you still actually have to do the lab work before you have a virus & can do tests to see if it does what you’re hoping!
• Empire
  
  • continuing the story of bin Laden, getting us from him beginning his exile in Afghanistan (which he framed as being an echo of the Prophet Mohammed’s exile in Medina) to the point at which the intelligence agencies of the US see him as a person of interest
  • the story of the lead up to 9/11, how the terrorists got themselves into the US, who was or was not noticing them in the intelligence agencies
• The History of England Shedcasts
  More listener questions, he’s doing one of these a month now, included amongst other things a question about process, one about what is the most interesting year (he picked 1649 after discussing some options, when Charles I is executed & England figures out how to govern itself without a king for a while)
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Anthony Scaramucci talking about his book about what’s gone wrong in America (economic policy destroying people’s lives, essentially, with the three big missteps being letting China into the WTO, over-reacting to 9/11, bailing out the banks & stomping on the population after the 2008 banking crisis)
• Oh God What Now
  
  • looking at the Holborn & St Pancras by-election and what it might mean for the Greens (and for Zack Polanski in particular) or for Labour, also touched on the various other candidates – no Binface this time, but amongst the randoms is George Galloway who apparently these days divides his time between Russia & China which probably tells us all we need to know about where he’s at, also talked about Canada’s potential joining of the EU as an associate member
  • how Andy Burnham’s doing and can he keep the positivity going (they seemed to think he was doing much better than expected in terms of keeping people on side and also keeping people from leaking), also some coverage of the Lib Dem conference
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • some discussion of the Houthis (because it’s trashing the US economy even more and shows how little Trump actually cares about his allies), also covered the interest rates in the US going up despite that not being what Trump wanted, and wondered where the Democrats are and why they’re not making hay with all of this
  • the unifying theme for the episode seemed to be boggling at the decisions Trump’s making and where his focus is, they seem to think that the snipers on the arch nonsense is coz someone told him to say it was for “national security” then he’d get the money and he … elaborated
• Talk 90s to Me
  Interview with Mark Kermode about soundtracks to 90s films (he has a book out about this)
• Starship Alexandria
  Discussing the book Lolly Willowes (by Sylvia Townsend Warner), which I’d never heard of before but did sound interesting
• Origin Story
  Audio from the recent live show, the bulk of which was discussing the decline & fall of The Telegraph (tho to be fair, it started pretty ropey but the high point was in the late 80s & the 90s when it was a serious paper doing fairly boring rightwing news, now it’s a place of hysterically rabid right wing populism)
• Your Time Your Way
  Don’t time block the whole day, but when you have time blocks then both stick to them & don’t stress over number of tasks just did you do the time (you’ll end up doing the tasks)
• Literature & History
  Wrapping up his season on the early Islamic period, with a look back at the coverage he’s done of all the Abrahamic faiths and talking about how they are the religions that swept a lot of the world (not just that monotheistic religions were in the air during the long development of the three traditions but also the focus in each case on a written scripture gave a stable centre to each of the religions). Also a section looking forward to the next season, which returns to Europe and goes back in time a bit to cover early Medieval European literature.
• The History of Philosophy
  The first episode in this whole podcast where the philosophy discussed was explicitly atheist, mostly focused on Bayle’s Dictionary again
• The History of England
  James II continues his campaign to return Catholics to government & give them as many rights as Anglicans, stepping up the pace and unsettling his Protestant subjects.

TV

• Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry
  A really well done programme about both the tapestry and the set up for the new BM exhibition. So it interleaved the stories of the Norman Conquest (as told in the tapestry with editorial commentary from a whole suite of talking heads) and the story of the transport and set up of the tapestry for the exhibition (which looked incredibly nerve wracking, particularly the 14 hour unboxing from the travel case and re-boxing in the display case)
• Bronze Age Apocalypse
  The second & last episode of this pulled together what the current theory is for the collapse around 1200 BCE – a drought that lasted more than a century, a cluster of earthquakes (most cities where there’s evidence of destruction are on known faultlines), and the knock on effects of those which would include disease and mass migration of refugees from the disasters.

Games

• Diablo IV
  New season started, with content from across all the previous games (it’s the 30th anniversary of the first game coming out) as the season gimmick. We’re up to level 50 already, and have progressed to Season Rank II.

Exhibition

• The Bayeux Tapestry
  The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the BM is quite different from other exhibitions they’ve put on – there are very few other items in the exhibition, the only thing you really see is the tapestry itself. I enjoyed the chance to see it, it’s bigger and more vibrant than it seems in photos in books (bigger in terms of height). It’s also full of lots of quirky details & I wish there’d been time to really look at it in detail (we may go back later in the run armed with having read the books we bought to pay attention to different bits than the main highlights). The negative about the exhibition is that it feels like they’ve misjudged how long people will spend looking at it even if they encourage you not to stop moving while you’re looking at the tapestry and they appear to have sold numbers of tickets based on the ideal with not enough flex – if you’re going, be prepared to queue a lot before you get to the tapestry (1h10m for us from ticket check to tapestry (50m inside the exhibition proper not the antechamber), by the time we came out the queue was longer) and be prepared to feel rushed as the staff try to keep everyone moving smoothly on (I think we were in front of it for about 30m or just over and we were moving at the general pace people were moving but it was clearly too slow for the timed slots to work).

Books

• “On the Calculation of Volume IV” Solvej Balle
  Finished Monday 7 September 2026. In a way this was a book about living the life you have, finding contentment & happiness in where you are not hankering after what you don’t have. At the very end tho there’s a cliff-hanger (as I think all of the books in the series have had) where something shifts and Tara’s life is upended once more (but I don’t know how yet! the book just ended!)
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Starting the chapter on conceptions of the supernatural in these early civilisations. He makes the point that there’s a paradigm shift somewhere in the 1st Millennium BCE for a lot of the Eurasian civilisations that divides up the world into three distinct parts: natural (plants, animals, objects), social (the human sphere) and supernatural (gods etc). Before that this wasn’t the way anyone thought about it and it’s hard for us to think our way into that mindset (e.g. he describes it as “it was assumed that the natural world, of which humans were a part, was suffused with and animated by supernatural powers” which necessarily uses our language of the three separate spheres). The ancient view extended our social sphere through to everything, so interactions with deities might be like a lower class person interacting with the king or interactions with animals like a king interacting with a lower class person, and the difference with the even older more egalitarian societies that preceded these early civilisations was that they had flatter social structures so the whole worldview was flatter.

Podcasts

• The Bunker
  
  • Start the Week, the big story was Burnham’s first week as PM is starting
  • an interview with the author of a book called “Nerd Reich” which looks at the anti-democratic and fascist ideas of the tech bro billionaires
  • an interview with an academic who makes the argument that the age of surveillance that we currently live in is actually making us less secure, in part because the collection of all this data by governments & companies can be stolen by those who might wish us harm, and in part because we live with this constant sense of threat because we hear about more threats and that is counterproductive & makes us feel less secure even whilst there isn’t much threat
  • an interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore about his new book about how the Middle East got into the state it’s currently in
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the big story was, of course, Andy Burnham’s first PMQs, but other things touched on were the death of Gloria Steinem, the ludicrousness of Trump’s attempted renaming of Lake Ontario
  • Start the Week, the big story was the Reform funding scandal and how it overshadowed their conference, also talked about the policing of the “protests” involving masked & uniformed men blockading Dover port which was a much more hands off version of policing that people in Extinction Rebellion or coming out in support of Palestine Action have experienced
  • first in a mini-series about the long term consequences of 9/11, this episode interviewing a counterinsurgency/terrorism expert looking at the immediate aftermath and the wars that the US launched, he’d been in an office overlooking the Pentagon on the day so had some thoughts about how it had felt like World War III had broken out at the time & whilst he thought the wars had been mistakes he could understand the rush to do something initially
• The Rest is Science
  
  • an episode about how the GLP-1 drugs work (including a bit on how Pringles are specifically engineered to never make you feel full)
  • a Q&A episode where Michael did a show & tell of several weird watches, like one that runs anticlockwise, one that is a 24 hour one etc
  • an episode about getting into space and getting into orbit, ended with a bit of a discussion on the ethics of going to space at all when we could spend the money better here
• Empire
  
  • the Vikings, and their raiding & later settling in the British Isles and how that affected the sacred landscape
  • more on the Vikings, this time focusing on their mythology and how that hybridised and sat alongside Christianity in Britain
  • start of a new series on the history of al-Qaeda, beginning with its ideological underpinnings in Islamists in Egypt in the 50s, 60s & 70s
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • an interview with Kirk Field, who was a raver, a provider of drinks at raves, and an journalist about raves during the 90s
  • an interview with Smokin Jo, a rare female DJ in the 90s
• Oh God What Now
  
  • again the main story this episode was Burnham’s first week in parliament as PM with the added info that Kier Starmer is stepping down as an MP after all
  • a bit about Burnham’s first PMQs plus a more extended discussion about why this court decision against Meta simply doesn’t go far enough (and included the point that generally a dead child means that laws change even when cause & effect are a bit shaky, but when it comes to social media many dead children haven’t begun to have an effect)
  • extra episode to cover the breaking story of the Channel 4 sting on Reform where they basically admit to encouraging illegal donations
  • bonus episode which was an interview of Vince Cable who has written a book about the changing world order that we’re living through (which is not a very optimistic book despite his best efforts, as he seems to think one quite plausible scenario is that we collapse into a sort of global anarchy with few agreements between states).
  • main story this episode was the Reform donations documentary and whether or not this will sink Farage or Reform (probably not, as their base don’t have a problem with it, but things may change if there is an investigation by the police that leads to criminal charges), also quite a bit of discussion of the masked men attending “spontaneous” organised protests in Dover & Portsmouth
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • an episode almost entirely about AI, where Rory was really making it clear that he both doesn’t really understand this stuff and also has spent too much time talking to the tech bros & lapping up their propaganda
  • Q&A episode that covered things like the Icelandic rejection of opening negotiations with the EU, US attitudes to the UK and how that’s changed recently down to the rhetoric about how we’re a lawless broken country, & party conference season
• The History of Egypt
  Merenptah & the various influxes of Sea Peoples in his reign, including chat about how some of them might be Greeks of the era the poetry of Homer is set in
• The History of China
  The war has reached something of a groundhog day state and generals on both sides are trying to think outside the box to break the stalemate, including the cousin of the Heavenly King who got promoted in the last episode who does come up with a strategy to do this
• The History of England
  James II starts to try and bring Catholics back into the fold of the establishments of his various kingdoms, which (except for in Ireland) is very much against the wishes of the majority of his subjects
• Your Time Your Way
  The cause of over-commitment is often that you haven’t got your priorities straight so are doing the stuff you should put on the back burner & not getting to the important stuff in a timely fashion.
• The Rest is Politics US
  The US debt hitting over $40 trillion and the G20 meeting which they characterised as the G19 plus 1 as the US seemed fairly isolated, plus the Senate race in Texas where the Democrats might win unless Trump starts funding the Republican candidate he pushed through the primaries

TV

• KGB – The Sword and the Shield
  Second episode was about the Cold War and international spying – mentioning of course the KGB’s great successes in recruiting from Cambridge and the CIA.
• Seven Wonders of the World with Bettany Hughes
  
  • The second episode was the Colossus of Rhodes & the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, so perhaps a little same-y but unavoidably so as the wonders were where the wonders were. So some bits of a hunt for where the Colossus was and what it might of looked like, and bits of evidence from the workshop where the Zeus statue was built
  • The last episode focused on Turkey where two of the three wonders she talked about are to be found (the Mausoleum & the Temple of Artemis) and she fudged a bit for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as I guess travel to Iraq wasn’t on the cards (and anyway there’s no evidence at all of gardens in Babylon, tho there are in Nineveh). A bit of a shallow series, it’s more a travelogue than an archaeology series, but quite fun to see the various places & their reconstructions.
• Newcastle v. Bournemouth (2-2)

Exhibitions

• M. C. Escher Exhibition
  Covered the whole of Escher’s career not just the more well known tessellations & optical illusions, plus some interactive bits & bobs based on the illusions. I didn’t know that Escher had started with straightforward landscape pieces before he moved into the stuff I already knew. Some of the interactive stuff didn’t really land, but we did really like the infinity room (mirrors on all sides) and the relativity room (where one of the corners made you look large to an observer from outside the room & one small).
• James McNeill Whistler
  The whole of Whistler’s career, and as with the Escher exhibition I hadn’t known anything about the earlier stuff – in this case the stuff I knew before hand were his large portraits of people surrounded by shadows and his Nocturnes which are landscapes in the mist of evening with indistinct shapes in the grey & lights reflecting on water. I was also much taken with the Japanese & other Asian art that had influenced some of his work.

Music

• iamthemorning gig
  I’ve not been bothering to add the music I listen to into this roundup recently, as I often have nothing to say about it, but I thought I should mention the gig we went to. iamthemorning aren’t easy to describe, I think one possible description is Russian chamber rock but I’m not sure that summons up a mental image for me & I know what they’re like. Rock music but also ethereal, with lyrics about death & dead people, mostly. The singer told us she was wearing her ghost dress or dead Victorian girl dress – floaty & white and pre-Raphaelite.

Talks

• “Amenhotep son of Hapu: nobleman and demi-god” Aidan Dodson
  The biography (as far as we know it) of Amenhotep son of Hapu, and the long running cult established after his death which kept going into the Roman Period.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Not much Diablo this week, we’ve been busy or out of the house in the evenings, ticked off several more of the Season Journey things but still don’t think we’ll manage the Rank VIII capstone so we’re spinning our wheels a bit.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve finished the chapter on Wealth Appropriation now. Basically all the early civilisation have some mechanism(s) for getting the commoners to hand over all their surplus wealth (which is mostly agricultural surplus) to the ruling elite. The ways that people are taxed varies across the civilisations but corvée labour is always part of the mix. City states also acquire wealth by making weaker city states pay tribute, which is wealth appropriation at the level of one elite giving to another. Next chapter is summing up the chapters on the economies of these states.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • used the idea that the Mayans predicted the end of the world to be in 2012 as a jumping off point to talk about how our world in the West really did change around about then – that’s the point where more people had smartphones than didn’t, where more people used social media then didn’t, where more people watched streaming than broadcast TV (not quite the same time but close)
  • Q&A episode, where Hannah’s show & tell object was something from the giftshop at the Korean DMZ (so unexpectedly topical given this was from a month ago) which she used as a jumping off point for how quickly nature takes back over our abandoned places (even most of the ones with radioactive contamination)
  • an episode about how lithium batteries aren’t really that great (entertainingly they were invented by a man with the surname Goodenough)
  • Q&A episode, where the show & tell object from Michael was a whole collection of crayons sparking a discussion both of why we have an artistic colour wheel from a linear electromagnetic spectrum (our brains basically invent the colour purple for the experience of the longest wave lengths & shortest hitting our eyes together with nothing in the middle) and a discussion of colours our cameras don’t see (some of the crayons are neons that just don’t photograph the way they look to the eye)
• Empire
  
  • starting a new short series on the big tech giants, looking at their origins and explicitly drawing parallels with the East India Company
  • interview with Karen Hao, talking about her thesis that the AI companies are the new empires, and talking about how the myth they are selling us about the tech is just that, a myth and knowingly so
  • starting a new series on the pagan religions/practices of Britain & Ireland up to Viking times – this episode had Ronald Hutton telling us about the pre-Roman period, which we don’t have much actual evidence for so it’s all quite “maybe, perhaps”
  • second episode of the pagan religions series, focusing on the ways we can see the local pagan deities show up in the Roman archaeological evidence in Britain
• The History of China
  
  • The Taiping Rebellion begins to tear itself apart in a spectacularly bloody fashion leaving thousands dead including several of the leaders
  • Once the bloodletting ends the war between the Taiping & the Qing continues but neither side has its best commanders in charge (the Taiping one is still alive but no longer co-operative, the Qing one is the chap who’s being thwarted by the bureaucracy at all turns because he’s not official recognised so when he had the opportunity to depart he took it)
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • Interview with Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream
  • Interview with Shirley Manson from Garbage
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • first half was about Afghanistan on the 5th anniversary of the withdrawal of US & allies (which included Rory’s wife Shoshana’s take as she still runs a charity there), second half included Russia & the banning of an anti-war party from the election, as well as Trump’s getting cranky with South Korea in favour of a relationship with North Korea, and a section on Jason Arday
  • Q&A episode which started with a long section on Andy Burnham’s communication style & strategy (Alastair approves overall), but also covered the Settlers in the West Bank
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • is Trump really going to bomb Oman or nuke Iran? They’re not as reassuring about either of those as I would like but do seem to think the answer is no because other people around him have lines they won’t cross. They also discussed the walking back from the US alliance with South Korea.
  • first half was on the breakdown of trade agreement talks with Canada and how it’s showing that no-one believes the US administration any more, and the second half was about the Iran war & how desperate the administration seems to get out of the quagmire it walked into
• The History of Egypt
  
  • First episode on Merenptah as king, campaigning in Canaan and other diplomatic relationships to Egypt’s northeast
  • the next episode covers an incursion by Libyans & some Sea Peoples, who are not just coming to fight but are coming to settle, which is the first harbinger in Egypt of the Bronze Age Collapse
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode with a guest who spent 16 years in prison after killing someone in fight but turned his life around and now writes & speaks about how to reform the prison system to produce more outcomes like his (employ more better trained staff, be tougher on people selling drugs inside, encourage prisoners to take responsibility for their own lives)
  • an interview with Annie Jacobsen about her new book “Biological War: A Scenario”
  • Weekly Wrap Up, main serious section was the Trump & the Koreas story, also covered some of the Ukrainian domestic politics (including why elections seem improbable – too difficult during the war even if they changed their constitution to allow it)
  • an episode about what might happen to Russia if it loses the Ukraine war (which isn’t as unlikely as we all thought at the start of the war), potentially breaking up into its constituent parts, potentially in as unpleasant fashion as Yugoslavia did in the 90s.
  • Start the Week, looking a bit at what Andy Burnham has going on this week (visit to Ukraine, prisoner release stuff), plus more international stuff including the breakdown in trade relations between the US & Canada, and the attempts by Russia to get us to stop supporting Ukraine (which aren’t working, see the first bit)
  • episode about Donald Trump Jr’s involvement in an investment company and how he’s leveraging his connections to the administration to both make money & fund things he (and his father’s Republican Party) are ideologically in favour of
  • interview with Hannah Lucinda Smith who’s written a book called “Hinterlands” about the various places that are neither quite in one country nor another, places like northern Cyprus
  • an episode about how there’s beginning to be a trend of TV shows in the US where the realities of being middle class are on show – money worries rather than those enormous houses that no-one with the jobs the characters are supposed to have could afford
• The History of England
  
  • the early years of James II’s reign, which actually goes quite well for him, he’s promised to uphold the Anglican Church, he has the Tories onside and sees off a rebellion lead by his half brother the Duke of Monmouth
• Oh God What Now
  
  • the big topic this episode was the climate crisis, and in particular the National Emergency Briefing movement which is trying to get us to a point where the government provides regular briefings from experts like we had during the first months of Covid (presumably at a lesser frequency) that don’t just tell us it’s all shit but tell us what the government is doing and what we can do as well
  • their guest was Paul Mason who is just about to publish a book about the history of Communism, from the perspective of a self-described radial social democrat trying to show how when Communism has been put into practice it’s always failed into an authoritarian state & could young people who seem to be flirting with the idea just not
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Histories written in the Han period, mostly concentrating on the one by Sima Qian which shapes a lot of how we think today about the preceding period and also invents the idea of China as a cohesive thing
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Another questions episode, quite a varied selection but the ones that have stuck in my mind include the Prime Minister during the time of the US War of Independence (Lord North) as the second worst Prime Minister (prior to the modern batch) with Anthony Eden as the worst, also the way that English place names often have pronunciations at odds with their spelling (which doesn’t really have a general answer but is always entertaining to discuss in specific cases)
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode after the end of last season, including amongst other things a rather depressing discussion of whether the theme of things tending towards the griftiest version of themselves (epitomised by the Evangelicals, paranormal investigations & think tanks episodes) is the fault of the US, capitalism or just people – it’s just people really, there’s always some people who see a way of getting status & attention and exploit it to a point where it warps the original thing
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode about the new technology of war & how that’s affecting the way wars are fought (but also about how the changing posture of the US is affecting what technologies their increasingly disaffected allies are pursuing)

TV

• Evolution
  The final episode used the horse as the jumping off point to talk about the evolution of movement, muscles, the heart and the hoof.
• A House Through Time (Season 5)
  
  • The second episode covered roughly the second half of the 1930s, so up through the start of the war. More & more of the Berlin building’s inhabitants are joining the Nazi party, while in London the only people really affected by the war are those who aren’t English – an Italian man who was head waiter at the Savoy is rounded up & deported as an “enemy alien” but dies when the boat he is on is torpedoed.
  • the third episode was a trifle grim, the British segment focused on the Blitz while the German segment inevitably covered the deportation and mass murder of Jews
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  This is on youtube but I’m counting it as TV as it’s a long form documentary series filmed in a way you might expect on TV (tho a little more youth coded in style). First episode covers what sound is, how hearing works, and has a pretty good stab at (inconclusively) defining music and discussing (also inconclusively) whether it’s a solely human thing.

Film

• The Odyssey
  Really enjoyed it, liked the psychological reality of it alongside the ambiguity of whether any of the mythological stuff was real, didn’t feel like it was 3 hours long, either. Of the reviews I listened to beforehand The History of Egypt felt way off the mark (I’m assuming he likes the linear films I find too obvious) and The Bunker one was much more aligned with my view. Also appreciated selenak’s review, which I read afterwards.
• The Terminator
  Our DVD of this had deteriorated so we picked up a 4k Bluray version in the sale at HMV and I watched it with J (I hadn’t been going to last week but given we’d ended up talking about it while discussing replacing it I changed my mind). The guy in the shop when we bought it referred to it as horror which I’d not really thought of before but certainly fits. It holds up pretty well, tho a few of the special effects look very clunky. It used to be what I said was my favourite film but I think my tastes have changed a bit (despite the time loop it’s a pretty straightforward film and everything is well telegraphed, with dialogue to explain the loop in case you missed it).

Games

• Diablo IV
  I got my 5-charm set that I’d been looking for & it seems to’ve made me much more powerful, and J managed to get his sorted out the day after. We’ve opened up Torment VI as well, and followed that up by quite swiftly doing the Capstone to finish off Rank VI and get our pet. We’re now trying to knock off as many of the season journey objectives as possible – we might be able to do the Rank VII capstone but it feels less plausible than the previous ones.

Books

• “Circular Motion” Alex Foster
  Finished Friday 7 August 2026. I liked it less and less towards the end, and liked the protagonists less & less as they continued with their inward looking lives while the world quite literally ended around them. Perhaps an accurate climate change metaphor, but a very gloomy one (and I think I would quibble about the accuracy, a lot of people are trying to change things the problem is not the little people like us it’s the big companies and ultra wealthy who are not making changes).
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Started on the chapter about trade & crafts, but I’m not very far through it. The two bits I’ve read so far covered metalworking (which shows a lot of variety across the civilisations, from Yoruba which had iron working with no prior evidence of bronze working to Egypt which stuck to mostly stone tools with some copper long after nearby cultures were making bronze), and trade (foreign trade seems to break down on city state/territorial state lines, as in a city state it’s better if private individuals do the trading as then it continues even when you’re at war with the other city, but in a territorial state it’s something the state controls as part of enhancing their power).

Podcasts

• Oh God What Now
  
  • is the Burnham government actually competent or is it too soon to tell?
  • first half was on the climate crisis and why the right of our politics seems to’ve decided to push back against any idea of changing how we live in order to mitigate it & prevent further ramping up of problems, second half on Kemi Badenoch’s bizarre endorsement of someone actually convicted of antisemitic hate crimes to stand as a Tory candidate in a council election (he’s since backed out, and whilst one must leave room for people to change he doesn’t seem to have come to a position of expressing remorse for what he did just says that his opinions have changed)
  • the way the culture has changed to one where people just try to block things that may be useful or enjoyable for others on a “what’s in it for me” basis, also covered the latest outpouring of racist rioting
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • some Republicans pushing back on Trump but not very much, plus talk about the Democrats strategy for choosing candidates
  • part 1 of a series about JD Vance, covering his early life and how that shaped the politician he’s become (the rest of the series is for members only so I won’t hear it)
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode, where Hannah’s show & tell object was a sphere of obsidian (I didn’t know that pumice & obsidian are the same stuff but formed at the beginning & end of volcanic eruptions – the beginning involves a lot of water vapour so pumice ends up full of air bubbles & cools slower so ends up more of a mineral)
  • an episode about pain, and how it’s not a literal response to damage but something that the brain creates as a warning signal and thus is a lot more subjective than one expects
  • Q&A episode where Michael’s show & tell object was a mug he has from his daughter (who is 6) where she’s ranked him as something like the Number 1,000,000,000th Dad (the number is more precise than that), which they used to talk about estimating things like that
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • a whole episode on migration, with Gerald Knaus joining them (he’s an expert on the subject), using the appalling event in Ceuta where several people died as part of tens of thousands of Moroccans arriving encouraged by rumours that they could get to mainland Spain from there
  • Q&A episode, which mostly focused on the situation in Gaza and the Israeli elections, but also covered a bit of the Fifa crisis.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  
  • the third & final part of the local history of Kent & Sussex
  • a members questions episode, where the one that most struck me was about whether George III actually personally had much to do with the American Revolution (probably not, really, he never contradicted his government when it came down to it so they are the ones who made the decisions, and wasn’t in any sense a tyrant and in fact believed strongly in the idea of a constitutional monarchy)
• Empire
  
  • an interview with Ken Burns about the American Revolution and other significant events in American history (I realised while listening I have seen his long series on the American Civil War)
  • the start of a series on Algeria and the Algerian Revolution, beginning with how the French ended up with it as a colony & the initial resistance to their rule
  • second episode of the series on Algeria, setting the scene for what the country was like immediately prior to the Revolution, and in particular pointing out that the conquest of France early in WW2 and the French being pushed out of Vietnam both demonstrated to the Algerians that the French were not invincible
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An overview of Han Dynasty history & philosophy to set the scene for the next episodes.
• The Bunker
  
  • Weekly Wrap Up, where the main story was Kemi Badenoch backing that neo-Nazi again making the point that whilst he’s changed his mind he still has indicated no remorse
  • Start the Week, it’s the Clacton by-election this week so that was the big story
  • an episode about Stanford University in the context of turning out people whose startups get far too much VC funding and how the system is pretty much designed to lead to people like Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes
  • an episode about corruption in UK politics, which the guest posits is significantly worse than we generally think
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Ben Rhodes who was a speech writer for Obama and has recently written a book about significant US speeches.
• Origin Story/Oh God What Now
  As part of the Podmasters 10th birthday celebrations they did an Origin Story/Oh God What Now cross over – we’re a few months late listening to it, so it was partly out of date (Starmer is gone) but still entertaining listening.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Interview with Elis James, who is apparently a comedian and (definitely) Welsh.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with a maritime lawyer about the various laws & norms of the sea that are being broken by the US and also by Iran.
• The History of China
  The Qing actually begin to organise themselves better and start to defeat the Taiping army in the west.
• The History of Egypt
  An episode looking at a list of absences from work that survives from Deir el Medina (where the people who build the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived), going through what it can tell us about their lives – so some absences are for things like illness or a death in the family, but others are for birthday parties.

TV

• Evolution
  Using the bat as a jumping off point to talk about the evolution of our digestive system, jaws & ears. I was particularly ticked by the statement that “in order to evolve a head we needed to evolve an arse first”!
• Bettany Hughes' Lost Worlds: Dawn of Civilisations
  A piece of fluff, but an entertaining piece of fluff – this episode was Bettany Hughes travelling around Turkey visiting medieval sites, including monasteries & mosques, as well as meeting people who live in those places today.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Ticked off the Rank IV capstone dungeon quite easily, then after a bit of a grind did the Rank V one as well. It’ll take a while before we can do the Rank VI one but I think we’ll get there before the end of the season (which gets us the seasonal pet).

Exhibition

• The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape
  Second of the three exhibitions at Christchurch Mansion celebrating 250 years since Constable’s birth, this one centred round The Hay Wain which has never before been displaying Suffolk so quite a coup for the museum. I enjoyed seeing the exhibition but The Hay Wain was definitely the standout piece and most of the rest were more minor works.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Reading the chapter on land ownership now, which can be split into three types, all of which show up in all the civilisations – collectively owned land that stays in the group (family or whatever), institutional land (e.g. belongs to temples or the king as an institution), private land (that you get to sell or buy as you please). I’m not far enough through the chapter for the conclusions yet, I’m still in the mass of detail for each civilisation.

Podcasts

• Oh God What Now
  
  • Emergencycast, with initial reactions to the cabinet announcements many of which were not what was being widely predicted in the press, they seemed to think that various of the people being put into post might be prepared to do more radical things in their new jobs.
  • regular episode about Burnham’s announcements to date plus more discussion of the cabinet, and discussion of how AI is transforming the jobs market – their guest is Secretary of the TUC so was explaining the union perspective on both of those segments
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about how the breaking down of social cohesion should be constituting a national emergency, and working to build that back up would help to fix some of the problems we currently have or at the very least help us navigate these uncertain times better
  • an interview with a Northern Irish journalist about the rioting in Belfast (about a month ago now)
  • Weekly Wrap Up, obviously focusing on how Burnham’s first week in government has gone.
  • episode about Kim Jong Un and what might happen to the North Korean regime if he dies
  • episode about Trump’s fetish for tariffs
  • Start the Week, starting with the climate crisis & the awful fires in France & Spain in particular (tho also Scotland), also something on Burnham’s week 2 where he’s apparently going to tell us about some bigger policy directions
• The History of Byzantium
  
  • another round of listener questions, continuing to wrap up the loose ends of the podcast as this is the penultimate episode.
  • last episode of the podcast, wrapping up by making an argument that you can’t understand the modern world without understanding Byzantium. I think he’s convincing that it’s an important part of shaping the world we live in.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • talking about Burnham’s cabinet appointments and first policy announcements and what that says about his direction & strategy
  • Q&A with quite a bit about Chinese AI models & how they’re using their tech to bolster their soft power (unlike the US), also some stuff on Ukraine & the sacking of both a defence minister & a general.
• Empire
  
  • start of a series about the daughters of Duleep Singh, beginning with Sophia who grows up to be a suffragette.
  • the story of Catherine who ended up living in Germany with a woman who was once her governess but who she had a long lasting relationship with (precise nature unclear), during the Nazi years she was involved with smuggling Jews out of Germany before having to leave herself once her partner died.
  • the third daughter they discuss is Bamba, who moves back to Lahore, in the kingdom her father never ruled and ends up an old rather bitter woman who is the “last Sikh in Lahore” after Partition (note, like her sisters she’s not Sikh, she’s Christian).
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, included a question about what would happen if the sun vanished for 72hrs then reappeared (we’d likely get through the 3 days of dark OK, but nothing would ever be right again coz our orbit would shift, probably only life in geothermal vents would survive)
  • partly about archaeology & partly about land ownership and its limits, using as its unifying jumping off point that there are only a handful of archaeological sites that aren’t within the territory of a state, but also covering things like manuports (things that aren’t made by people but are transported by them, including a pebble from 3 million years ago that looks like it has a face on it and had been transported at least 30km from where it would’ve been naturally found), and the deepest borehole (it’s Russian and was 12km deep and they stopped coz it got way hotter than expected and the material properties of the rock changed which made it hard to drill)
  • Q&A episode that started with a “space pen” Michael bought as a kid, which does indeed write upside down, and ended with a question about the Kardashev Scale (which is a theoretical measure of a civilisation’s level of technological advancement, which Michael & Hannah point out is pretty much speculative fiction)
  • episode on audio & optical illusions, I’ve not finished listening to it yet but I think they are working up to the way that you don’t perceive reality so much as invent it
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Interview with an expert on Legalism.
• The Rest is Politics US
  First half was about the Iran War and the likelihood of a ground invasion of at least Kharg Island over the weekend (by the time you read these words we’ll know if it happened), and the second half was about how Trump is trying to cast doubt on the integrity of elections ahead of the midterms and what the Democrats are trying to do about it
• Talk 90s to Me
  Episode about Paula Yates.
• The History of Egypt
  More rounding up of Ramesses II with another interview with Peter Brand.
• The History of China
  The northern expedition that the Taiping Rebellion send out, which stumbles and falls just shy of Beijing. Beaten in part by the weather, in a similar fashion to Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Russia, but also in part because the Qing are finally learning how to deal with them.
• Origin Story
  Paranormal Investigations, which had quite a bit of resonance with their two-parter on Evangelicals, particularly the way things change with the rise of TV & films. In this case you go from a Victorian era of a mix of charlatans (& true believers) and people who want to figure out if there’s any truth to this, to a collection of am-dram re-enactments of The Exorcist (egged on in many cases by a pretty unsavoury pair of exorcists/true believers who make a lot of money from book & film treatments of their “cases”).
• More Jam Tomorrow
  About the Poll Tax, which came between rates & council tax as a way of funding local government, and was so unpopular that it was a contributing factor to bringing Thatcher down.
• The History of England
  Another At A Gallop summary episode, this time covering the second half of Charles II’s reign where he falls out with Parliament in his turn and buddies up with France.
• This History of Philosophy
  Another playwright, Racine, whose tragedies are a counterpoint to Decartes’ (and before him the Stoics’) idea that we can control our passions with reason if we only try hard enough.

TV

• Voyage to Mars: The Longest Goodbye
  Split this into two chunks as it was pretty long. It’s about the human difficulties of going to Mars – it’s bad enough for astronauts on the ISS but they are in a much better position than anyone going to Mars, they have real time communication with their families and the missions are measured in months. There was a little bit at the end with scientists who are trying to work out how to make hibernation work (but the psychologists seemed to think that’d make the whole thing even worse once you woke up at the other end).
• Evolution
  Chris Packham presenting a series about evolution, using 5 different animals as ways into the subject – this episode was the elephant and the aspect he was focusing on was going from single cells to multicellular to animals to big animals (tho that wasn’t all it covered). It has a visual style/trick we’ve seen before (in another Chris Packham series, Earth) where the CGI is in a letterbox aspect ratio and the live action is full screen. You’d be able to tell the difference anyway but I like it as a conceit.
• Greatest Guitar Riffs
  Series finished off with Nancy Wilson of Heart, who was a bit less awkward in front of the camera than the other two. J’s comment on the series was that it would’ve been nicer if the music had had more space as we really only got snippets of things, which I do agree with. A fun series to watch anyway.

Games

• Diablo IV
  We’ve ticked off the capstone dungeon for Rank II, and made it up into the Paragon levels. Completing Rank II also opened up the Pits, so we got up to Tier 10 & opened up Torment I. We’re probably not far off the capstone for Rank III.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the conclusions chapter for the first part of the book, about social organisation. Some clear similarities between the civilisations he’s comparing: everyone goes in for kings, everyone has very unequal societies where a professional military protects the elites. There are only two sorts of state – city states & territorial states – and they aren’t part of a linear evolution, they arise from pre-state cultures and if there’s a later evolution it’s a regional kingdom in both cases. If you have a big state there are only two ways to manage your administration – bureaucracy or delegation – and that seems to be influenced by what your family unit is (Egypt is most bureaucratic & their family unit is the nuclear family, China is very delegational and their family unit is the clan). Families vary a lot, but in all cases men are more important than women probably because the family is seen as a microcosm of the state so your one male king at the head is transferred as one male patriarch in the family (which way the causation goes is not clear). He also notes that many pre-state societies put men in more danger than women (as do other primates, from an evolutionary perspective that makes sense as females are the bottleneck for offspring, so you don’t want to lose any), and this may mean that men are more often the negotiators when you meet strangers and transition into leaders. He sees many of these similarities as functional – there are only so many stable ways to handle the sort of complexity these states develop. But other things aren’t obviously functional – for instance why monarchies? Variation in families may be down to variation in starting circumstances.
• “The Handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood
  Read this a long time ago (in the late 90s I think), and re-reading now coz J bought the ebook, I’ve not (and likely will not) watched the TV shows (too viscerally unpleasant for my taste in fictional TV watching). I remember some (tho not all) of the major plot points as well as the overall premise so I’m not coming to it cold, but it’s still a very tense & claustrophobic read – knowing some of what’s coming doesn’t undercut that. And I think I remember it feeling dated when I read it first a little more than a decade after it was published, but that’s changed – sure, it’s a future of a different past but it no longer feels like “… and so it can’t happen”. I’m about two thirds of the way through at the moment.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • Trump’s interference with the World Cup, and how that has undone all the soft power gains that the World Cup had brought, plus DOGE is now finished and hasn’t exactly achieved anything but the death of hundred of thousands of people via the cuts on USAID
  • the Plattner allegations and the fallout from that, the return of the US/Iran war
• Oh God What Now
  
  • an emergency episode triggered by Farage starting to do the hokey-cokey – he’s resigned and will stand in the by-election he’s triggered, as it was an instant reaction there wasn’t much substance to the episode it was more a first attempt to figure out what the hell Farage intends to achieve
  • normal episode talking first about the Farage hokey-cokey and Ros making the point that it’s a shame that Count Binface is standing as now there’ll be an election and people who don’t want to vote for Farage only have a joke to vote for, also talking about Zia Yousef as he’s becoming ever more prominent in Reform
  • Ann Widdecombe’s murder (tho mostly about people trying to make political use of it and also about the contempt of court restrictions & why they’re a good thing), also about what’s on Burnham’s shit list when he enters office and what if anything is possible to be done.
• The History of Philosophy
  La Rochefoucauld and the other French Moralists – witty aphorisms about how no-one does virtuous things out of actual virtue instead it is out of selfishness (burnishing their image & legacy). Tho may also be read through a Christian lens where if you do such things out of love of God then you are actually virtuous.
• The History of England
  The last few years of Charles II’s reign, where he attempts to completely neuter the newly formed Whig party and make alliance with the equally new Tories.
• The History of China
  
  • Still deep in the Taiping Rebellion, where the rebels have learnt a lot of useful lessons from their failed siege that he covered in the previous episode, but also the Chinese towns keep surrendering without a fight as the governors figure they can’t win and would rather be punished by the administration than captured by the rebels. Ended the episode when they reached Nanjing.
  • And in the next episode they take Nanjing and make it their capital. As part of that they commit genocide against the Manchu community who live in the inner city – part of the raison d’être of the movement is fighting against the Qing and their Manchu countrymen, who they consider literal demons. The taking of the city is a turning point for them as suddenly they go from a constantly moving force to a settled place, with all the changes that brings. They also set up their monastic way of living and enforce it on all the people in the city (men & women segregated, a very austere life). I was left wondering if any of the leadership thought this through, surely you’d want a next generation?
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Do you own your genome or cells? Included the story of HeLa cells, derived from a cancer in a woman called Henrietta Lack and the sample was taken with neither her knowledge nor her consent. Also things like cloning, and IVF and who owns what when (and whether it’s ethical anyway).
  • a Q&A episode which had a Tesla coil for the show & tell bit, the questions included is nothing a thing.
  • the interactions between thoughts & the law – like in the US you can’t be forced to give up your password for your phone (because of the Fifth Amendment) but you can be made to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, or if you’re in jail for a crime and looking for parole you can be asked if you still fantasise about doing the same sort of crime and have it affect things, but if you’re not in jail then you can’t be put in jail just coz you’re thinking of a crime
• Empire
  
  • the end of the Amarna Period, with Aidan Dodson as their guest
  • Nefertiti, what we actually know and what we can reasonably firmly speculate about, still with Aidan Dodson
  • Tutankhamun, again what we actually know and what we can reasonably firmly speculate about, with Campbell Price
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • they did the Q&A episode first this week as the main episode was recorded before Farage started his hokey-cokey, so they talked about that (still too early as they didn’t know that no-one else intended to stand a candidate) and also a bit about Andy Burnham & media performance in general (Rory wasn’t there so there was a guest standing in for him)
  • the non-Q&A episode for the week, talking about Trump interfering in the World Cup, also about the guest’s interviewing of an AfD politician and whether one should platform the far right
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • interview with John Niven, who worked as an A&R man in the music industry in the 90s
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I’ve only ever watched one episode of (at Ellen & Rachel’s place in Sacramento in 2002, iirc), amusingly for all the TV series episodes the host of the podcast has to confess to not having watched them as she wasn’t in often enough in the evenings in the 90s to catch much telly
• The Bunker
  
  • Hot Take Time Machine, mostly covering columns about Burnham and how ridiculous it is that everyone’s so obsessed with how he dresses
  • an episode about how democracy doesn’t reign in oligarchs and this is in large part by design (particularly in the US)
  • an episode about the lies AI companies are spinning in their hype & marketing
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the Farage hokey-cokey, the return of the war between the US & Iran
  • how do you prevent another Trump? The interview guest for this episode suggests that a good first step is imposing consequences for lying as a politician (in the same way that there are consequences for lying to Congress)
  • Start the Week, focused mostly on the murder of Ann Widdecombe but also talking about how Andy Burnham is almost certain to be the next Prime Minister by next week, and about the restarting of the Iran war
• The History of Byzantium
  
  • Interview with the author of Crusader Storm (recently released) answering listener questions about the crusades in general.
  • Interview with Anthony Kaldellis about how the people who completely considered themselves as Romans (e.g the people of Byzantium) came to be thought of as Greeks and as if they always had been (a lot of which boils down to modern (or not so modern) politics and construction of identity, modern Greeks want unbroken continuity back to Athens etc, modern Westerners want Roman to solely be the European bits etc)
• The History of England Shedcasts
  The first part of a mini-series on the history of Kent & Sussex (where the tour he’s leading this year will be going), covering from pre-history through to the eve of the Norman Conquest
• The History of Philosophy in China
  What we can tell about how Legalism saw human nature – which seems to be that they thought that if people have a choice they’ll probably do the wrong thing but if there are rules most people will go along with them.
• The History of Egypt
  The death & burial of Ramesses II and setting us up for the next chunk of the narrative
• Origin Story
  Second part of the Think Tanks episodes, taking us up to date (basically covering this century). A tale of two halves, in that they covered the partisan right wing ones (which are generally bad) and then moved back to the non-partisan ones and talked about what is good about having a proper think tank ecosystem.
• Starship Alexandria
  About Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

TV

• Discovering the Music of Antiquity
  A programme about ancient Greek, Roman & ancient Egyptian music, used as its jumping off point a papyrus with some Greek music and lyrics on it but covered a whole bunch of things like instruments from ancient Egypt that they’ve re-created. Rather light on the details I wanted to know – ok, so they have musical notation from Greece and some tables that help you read them, but how do they know which of the ancient notes map on to which of ours? Do we have any idea about rhythm?
• The Mystery of the Desert Kites
  Fascinating programme about large structures made of low walls that exist across a chunk of the world from the Arabian desert to Kazakhstan, which we’ve known about since people were overflying the desert in the early 20th Century but haven’t known anything about till recently. They turn out to be large traps to catch gazelles, built along migration routes and using the way that gazelles will follow a straight line to guide them into pit traps. They might kill 150 animals in a go then process them and probably trade quite a lot of the resulting produce. They date to 7000 BCE, and as part of investigating them the archaeologists found habitation sites of a whole new culture we didn’t previously know existed (I think they called them Ghassians), and those settlement sites include carved stones which have (as part of the decoration) scale models of the nearest “kite”.
• France v. Morocco 2-0
• Spain v. Belgium 2-1
• England v. Norway 2-1 (in ET, phew)
• Greatest Guitar Riffs
  This episode mostly focused the guitar player for Black Sabbath & his invention of metal riffs.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Haven’t played much this week, too much football watching. Made progress when we did play but it felt rather harder than we anticipated at first (tho we did get better weapons and are back on track again I think).

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the family organisation & gender roles chapter – take home was that each of the seven civilisations organised families differently but they did cluster to some extent geographically e.g. Egypt was more similar to Mesopotamia or Yoruba than to the Inka. Gender roles differed too but there were some strong commonalities: there were defined gender roles & that permeated throughout society (women’s work & men’s work, women’s clothes & men’s clothes etc), women were always the inferior class and were divided into respectable (e.g. under some man’s authority) and not respectable (e.g. not protected), for all the civilisations where we can look over time the status of women gets worse over time (e.g. in the early Shang Dynasty royal women have political roles but later these roles are performed by eunuchs). Homosexuality is frowned upon to at least some degree everywhere as sex is seen to be for reproduction, and men who take the “feminine” part are of low status everywhere even when homosexuality is partially tolerated.
• “Children of Strife” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Thursday 11 June 2026. Fourth book in his “Children of …” series. This has another world terraformed by the original humans being found first by the second wave of humans from Earth then by the spider/octopus/human/etc star-going civilisation. This one felt very much a reaction to our current crop of tech bro oligarchs, and also had a lot to say about simulations vs reality and about uploading & the effects of where your self is embodied. I enjoyed it.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • talked about Trump’s social media posting, and how people are saying “no” to him right now – the system is holding despite him trying to warp it, plus a bit about the race for Governor in California
  • Trump failing to achieve some of the things he’s trying to do (like not being able to set up this ridiculous to compensate the Jan 6 insurrectionists), plus discussion of the Democrat candidate in Maine
  • the Iran war, again, and how there is still no off-ramp and the long term repercussions aren’t being felt yet
  • the World Cup & the way that the Trump administration’s handling of it is destroying America’s soft power, plus the way that Trump is using an election in California to soften people up for election fraud claims for the mid-terms
  • Trump’s maybe Iran deal which is infinitely worse than the status quo ante let alone the deal that he cancelled in his first term, plus the UFC match on the White House lawn
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  An interview with William MacAskill, e.g. one of the main guys bedhind the Effective Altruism movement, I was surprised how little they pushed him about the situation with Sam Bankman-Fried and didn’t really talk about the longtermism side of EA or its implications much, instead they leant into his ideas of how AI will change the world for the worse
• Talk 90s to Me
  About Prozac Nation & Elizabeth Wurtzel
• Oh God What Now
  
  • the awful tragedy of Henry Nowak’s death & the police response at the time and the current incitement to violence by Farage etc, what can Burnham do if anything if he actually makes it to be Prime Minister, plus has optimisation culture gone nuts
  • the BBC documentary on Brexit which they didn’t think was much good (nothing new came out of it, and it was just anger inducing for those who think it was a shit idea), plus a segment on a book about how the culture & environment we grow up in tends to shape our opinions unconsciously (like rice growers have to be more co-operative than wheat growers, so rice growing cultures have ended up more collective & wheat growers more individualistic)
  • the riots in Belfast and the way that hate is being used in politics, and a whole bunch of listener questions of varying levels of seriousness
  • the proposed social media ban for under 16s in the UK including an interview with Bridget Phillipson which was every bit as bad as I expected (e.g. when pushed on the fact that this will mean all of us giving biometric data to social media companies she just waffled about voice recognition for banking then said that age verification tech is moving on all the time so by spring 2027 there will be no problems), also a bit on the resignations of John Healey & Al Carn over defence spending
• The Bunker
  
  • Monthly Hot Takes, back to the usual crew which was welcome to me, talked about some dreadful columns (including one in the Telegraph about how easy it is for kids these days as a “take” on the recent report about NEETs), very entertaining
  • Weekly Wrap Up, mostly focusing on the Henry Nowak stabbing
  • Start the Week, which led with the way that various prominent US figures are interfering in our politics around the riots kicked off by the Henry Nowak stabbing and a murder in Belfast
  • Weekly Wrap Up, more on the riots in Belfast, but also the breaking news about John Healey resigning as defence secretary
  • an interview with Katja Hoyer who has written a book that looks at Germany between the wars through the lens of Weimar the place & the people who lived there
  • Start the Week, covering quite a variety of stories including the promising signs of at least the start of a deal to end the Iran war, plus the government announcing it will ban social media for under 16s (while being very light on any idea of how they might do this in a practical sense), and looking forward to the Makerfield by-election, amongst others
  • an episode about whether we’re on the brink of World War III, with an interview with someone who’s written a book looking at comparisons between now & the run up to WWI
  • an episode about the hope that we might get a more sensible voting system rather than first past the post
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • talking about the Pope’s encyclical on AI & how instead we should celebrate that which makes us human, and about Tony Blair’s essay on what Labour is doing wrong
  • I did listen to the Q&A but didn’t note down what the subjects were (we were travelling)
  • the coming shock to our economy (and other European economies) of Trump’s adventure in Iran and the difficulties of actually becoming independent of shipping through the Strait, the Henry Nowak stabbing and the way it has been weaponised by the far right
  • another Q&A episode, included the election in Armenia, and the politicisation of the World Cup (including the various people who’ve been prevented from entering the US including a Somali referee who was travelling to be one of the officials in the World Cup)
  • an extra episode reacting to the politics of John Healey resigning as defence secretary
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  A reaction to the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary, discussing the military capabilities of the UK and why Healey would be upset at the lack of funding (quite depressing, essentially a paper tiger would have more effective forces)
• Words for Granted
  An interview with Laura Spinney who’s written a book about Proto-Indo-European.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • An episode about Fritz Haber who was both the man who saved us from the Malthusian crisis (by figuring out how to synthesise ammonia from nitrogen gas) and the man who essentially invented modern chemical warfare (by weaponizing chlorine gas).
  • a Q&A episode which included a bit on rocks from the bottom of the sea that have rare earth minerals in
• Origin Story
  The first part of a two-parter on Evangelicals. This one covered the history from around the 17th Century through to the late 1970s, a broad sweep that I already sort of knew the bare bones of. Mostly focused on the US in part because that’s the story they want to follow in part 2 to see how we get to evangelicals as part of the Trump voter base, and partly because there’s a divergence between the US & the UK c. 1900 where the UK evangelicals retreat into a small minority so there’s not much story there.
• Empire
  Second episode in their series about the Dutch East India company, with the Dutch & English in conflict over access to the only islands where nutmeg was grown – which ends with England retreating but in the long run getting the upper hand as they managed to transplant nutmeg trees to India (which they only went into because they were shut out of the East Indies) and also getting New York (which seemed like a poor deal at the time).
• Literature & History
  An episode about the Bundahisn, which is the Zoroastrian creation story as written down in the early Islamic period and explicitly sets itself up as being written when the Zoroastrian faith is declining. As an aside I’ve learnt that the Strait of Hormuz is named after the good deity of Zoroastrianism.

TV

• Later … with Jools Holland
  
  • Nobody really stood out in this episode, perhaps Westside Cowboy.
  • Stand outs this week were Mike D 5D (as in the dude from the Beastie Boys plus his new band which includes some of his offspring), and Bonnie “Prince” Billy (whose song sort of reminded me of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads).
• Scandinavia with Simon Reeve
  This was the last episode & covered more of Sweden and then Denmark. More on the way that Scandinavia seems optimised for the happiness of its people – but also looked at how immigrants from “non-Western” countries & their descendants are treated, which is much worse than the white Scandinavians.

Games

• Diablo IV
  We did the capstone for Rank IV and got up to Torment IV (now of XII not of IV so less impressive than before), but I don’t know we’re gonna get much further this season – we’re away again for 4 days in a bit and there’s only a bit under 2 weeks left in the season.

Films

• The Mandalorian & Grogu
  I’d not heard much good about this film but we rather enjoyed it as an afternoon out. The plot was mostly an excuse to string together as many fight/vehicle chase/aerial battle scenes together as possible, but I’m a sucker for that sort of thing in a film. Not sure how well it would land if you didn’t already have a good idea who the characters were, and I don’t think it’s got a lot of rewatch potential (or anything to say other than “look out for other people & they’ll look out for you”). But for a piece of fluff it was entertaining.

Talks

• “A Means to an End: Cultic Expansion and Consolidation in Late Dynastic Egypt” Penny Wilson
  A discussion of naos shrines from the Late Dynastic Period, telling us about their decorative schemes and how this had changed from earlier periods.

Exhibition

• Constable 250 – A Cast of Characters
  A small exhibition at Christchurch Mansion here in Ipswich, primarily composed of portraits either painted/drawn by Constable or of members of Constable’s social circle. There were also clothes from the period, and some sculptures by a direct descendent of Constable’s, most of which were not to my taste but there was a rather fine one of a cat. And they managed to shoe-horn in the same Gainsborough painting of Holywells Park that I think I’ve seen in every exhibition we’ve seen at Christchurch Mansion (here it was because Gainsborough was an inspiration for Constable, and also because it was local).