Tuesday 24 March 2026 to Tuesday 31 March 2026

Books

• “Shards of Earth” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Tuesday 31 March 2026. A far future space opera, that feels like it's genre-friends with James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series – external existential doom isn’t anywhere near as important to humanity as bickering about internal politics and who gets to be in charge of whom. It being Tchaikovsky there are also aliens in this universe who are also threatened by the existential doom (but I don’t feel like we’ve had as much alien perspective as I’d expect from Tchaikovsky, it’s more different flavours of human perspective). This is the first book in a series, so whilst there’s a sense of closure at the end it’s the sort of closure that is clearly setting up book 2 (which we don’t yet own) – so I’ve no real idea where the overall arc is going but I’m beginning to have suspicions. I enjoyed it, a good read.
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Only just started this, it’s bit of a weighty tome so I’ll likely split it into chunks and read fiction in between.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • A Q&A episode that covered stuff like what experiment would you like to go back & see (and Michael said he’d choose the Little Albert experiments so he could stop them, which was an unethical experiment I’d not heard of before where the researchers instilled a random fear into a 9 month old child to essentially prove that Pavlov’s findings worked in people then left him like that rather than try and reverse the process). And Hannah brought in a bit of insulating tile off the space shuttle, which is essentially air encased in very small amounts of silica fibres so it’s solid.
  • Why do we sleep & why is it such a problem if we don’t – the problems actually seem to be (partly? I’m not sure) caused by our immune systems over-reacting to the build up of chemicals that the brain is releasing to try to get us to go to sleep.
• The Bunker
  
  • Monthly column round up from February, which was just after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
  • Monthly column round up from March (which I remembered to listen to on the day it landed), some stuff about how various columnists have handled the Iran war but also some lighter weight material.
  • Weekly wrap up – suggested reforms to political funding in the UK (crypto being the current big problem), also the Iran war.
  • An interview with the author of “Reviving Our Republic”, talking about how the US could get back on a more right track.
  • Discussion of Reform’s “lets have a UK ICE” announcement last month, in terms of both why it’s so repellent and how to best push back against normalisation of this sort of thing.
  • Start the Week – quite a bit about the Iran war, of course.
• The History of English
  He’s up to c. 1630, and in this episode talked about how the letters i & j and u & v were just becoming distinct at this point, and about the settling of New England by people who mostly came from East Anglia and how you can see that influence in their accents (tho it’s dropped off a lot more in the last century or so, so you have to go back to old recordings).
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • The Iran war, and whether Trump can get himself out of the corner he’s backed himself into, and the Assisted Dying Bill which has been killed in the Lords by a minority of the peers using technical means to force the discussions to go on so long it can’t be passed.
  • Question Time included how the UK government is cutting international aid, the Islamophobia of the right of UK politics these days, whether the vibes around Brexit are getting to the point where we’ll try & reverse it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Finishing off their episodes about the Zhuangzi by talking about how it does not believe in One True Way to do anything, that there is more than one way or one perspective, and fluidity is a key part of behaving in accordance with the Dao.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Part one of a pair of episodes on the history of duelling in England & Europe from the early modern period onwards.
• The History of England
  Continuing on the story of Charles II’s reign, with the aftermath of defeat by the Dutch and Charles looking for someone to blame. Also the story of Frances Stewart who didn’t want to be the king’s mistress (she is the model for the image of Britannia that is still on some coins today). And some material that’s also in the Shedcast I listened to just before, which seemed an odd choice (not having the two be complementary, but that some material was a direct repeat).
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • Obviously focused on the Iran war, and on the trading on the stock market & betting markets around Trump’s various pronouncements which made somebody a lot of money.
  • Another episode focused on the Iran war and how Trump has painted himself into a corner that’s going to/is hurting all of us.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • Talking about whether Trump has killed off Trumpism, are we ready for a new cost of living crisis.
  • Audio from the live Zoom they did for Patreons this week, covering the ranking of countries by happiness & what sorts of underlying reasons there might be for who ranks where. Also a Q&A session.
  • A guest episode with Sven Beckert, the author of Capitalism: A Global History. Essentially talking about how we both have too narrow a sense of capitalism (it existed before Adam Smith but was a more eccentric way of organising your economic life in the past) and too broad (it is, after all, something we made up and thus we can choose to shape it). He sees us as in a transition from one way of ordering capitalism (a neo-liberal one) to something new that we haven’t yet figured out.
• Journey Through Time
  Third episode of the series on McCarthyism is where McCarthy himself first takes centre stage – but quickly becomes the name of the phenomenon.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Gavin Newsom.
• Empire
  
  • start of a series about Mao Zedong, the first episode was about his childhood & youth in the dying days of Qing China.
  • second episode takes us through the 20s & early 30s, when first the Communists (where Mao is prominent tho not officially in charge) and the Nationalists (where Chiang Kai-shek was in charge) are working together, and then it all descends into a bloodbath and the Communists are “purged”. And through to the end of the Long March and Mao’s rise to the top of the Communist Party.
• Origin Story
  A bonus episode on the idea of introverts & extroverts, which is a Jung thing originally. Possibly the episode we’ve paused most often to talk about in the middle of it – as they were saying in the episode it feels so intuitive so we all have opinions even tho simplifying it into a binary is obviously nonsense.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode looking at the effects of the Iran war on oil supplies – laying out the reality on the ground that means the repercussions from this are only just beginning to be felt (20% of the world’s crude oil goes thorough the Strait of Hormuz, and the last bits that were already in transit before the Strait was shut are just getting to their destinations …).

TV

• The Roman Empire by Train with Alice Roberts
  The first episode was almost entirely in Pompeii with a little bit in Naples, showing us how much you can glean of everyday life from the ruins of the city.
• The Age of Uncertainty
  

  Finished off the last longer episode, which ended with the Soviet guy & Kissinger discussing various nuclear issues, and the others chipping in occasionally. Interesting what was and wasn’t the same now – worries about potential accidents for instance which heavily leant on the idea that everyone involved would be rational & thoughtful and communicative. Which wasn’t even entirely the case then (this is post Cuba but pre Able Archer), let alone in either Russia or the US today. Less worries about nuclear terrorists now, but if anything more worries about other states getting nukes.

  Overall a good series, interesting to watch. Definitely was opinionated but never pretended otherwise, and despite being nearly 50 years old there were only a couple of bits that really made me wince (the episode on colonialism which was rather more pro than is common nowadays, and some asides in other episodes which betrayed a belief that somehow one’s character was formed by one’s race).

• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Third episode continued up the coast towards Brisbane, this time visiting (among other things) Sikh banana growers, a Chinese-Australian artist and finishing up with a banoffee pie recipe (which I am unlikely to cook as it looks like the cream is an integral part of it).
• Stonehenge: Secrets of the New Stone
  A bit gee whiz, but not as shallow as the surface dressing suggested. It looked at where the “altar stone” at Stonehenge may’ve come from – ruling out Wales & bits of England, and settling on the very north of Scotland. Backing up this idea they showed that the whole of the British Isles shared some cultural connection and some interactions by looking at similarities in house layouts from near Stonehenge & Orkney, and at pottery types associated with Orkney turning up near Stonehenge.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Ticking off bits of the Rank II Season Journey. We also moved the difficulty up to Penitent which is where we need it to be for the Rank II dungeon, and went from finding it a bit tough to it being OK (mostly coz we got better gear, as well as levelled up) so that dungeon is now approachable I think.

Exhibition

• Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals
  This was an exhibition at Tate Britain, and was essentially a compare & contrast of the two artists. They were born in adjacent years (1775 & 1776) 250 years ago, and exhibited their art alongside each other and were both well known & respected in their day. The exhibition positioned them both as radical at the time they were working – for Turner that feels quite obvious, he gets more & more abstract over time and always seems to be painting feelings (and light) rather than detail. Constable was a bit of a harder sell, but I think it was both the subjects he chose (real landscapes in England not epic narratives in a fantasy place) and the detailed way he represented a particular moment in time rather than a generic “sunny day” or whatever.