Tuesday 27 January 2026 to Tuesday 3 February 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  Finished today. It’s about consciousness and what it is, and I enjoyed reading it. His central argument is that consciousness, our sense of “I”, is an emergent property of the brain and is essentially an illusion, a stable pattern of perception that arises from how our minds work but doesn’t “really exist”. It’s a product of a particular perspective – the one we usually use when thinking about ourselves and other people (and the world in general), where we engage only on the level of concepts and symbols. But underneath those concepts and symbols of the mind are the firings of neurons and when you describe a brain at that level the “I” vanishes. He totally rejects dualism, the idea that there’s something “extra” that’s non-physical and makes a conscious being conscious. Instead he’s saying that as a mind develops into a more and more complex system that models its perceptions of the world with more & more rich & sophisticated concepts then one of the things it models is also itself and its workings. And this feedback loop of self-modelling is what generates a stable pattern that feels like it is the self.
• “His Face is the Sun” Michelle Jabès Corpora
  A bit of a change of pace. YA secondary world fantasy in an analogue of ancient Egypt (New Kingdom in feel thus far). I’ve barely read any of it, but I did like that I recognised which myth the prologue was a retelling of, and I’m a bit unnecessarily narked that the map on the endpapers turns Upper Egypt into Low Khetara and Lower Egypt into High Khetara.

Podcasts

• The History of English
  The nautical terms that entered the general English language during the 1620s (plus the history of England in that decade).
• Empire
  The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneering artistic photographer of the 19th Century. The start of a series on the First Indian War of Independence (also known as the Indian Mutiny), setting up the context of 1857 and the triggering event of sepoys forced to bite bullets coated in grease that was rumoured to be pork & beef fat.
• Journey Through Time
  The last of the series on A Christmas Carol, on how it changed the world and brought Christmas back into fashion. Start of a series on the Spanish Civil War and how it was an important prelude to the Second World War, this episode covered in high level terms the political situation in Spain in the run up, and the political situation in Europe in the run up.
• The Rest is Politics
  Mark Carney’s speech at Davos as a jumping off point for talking about the state of the world, Starmer preventing Burnhum from standing for election. Minnesota, Suella Braverman’s defection, the new centre right movement Prosper, the problem of technology enabled child sex abuse & what could be done about it.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with Samir Puri, talking about how the world is changing from a unipolar world focused on the Transatlantic region to a multipolar world focused on the Indopacific region (with minimal reference to Trump because he is not the only reason things are changing).
• The Rest is Science
  Modelling crowds using fluid dynamics, non-standard dice & non-standard shapes of standard dice (suffered a bit for me only listening rather than watching, first episode where that’s really been the case). Magnetism, what is it, how the Earth is a magnet, how robins seem to see the magnetic field (as an actual visual thing).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Animal stories in the Zhuangzi and how they look at the world through other perspectives (and a compare & contrast with the Confucian dismissal of everything not human as not important).
• The Rest is Politics US
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Norway about Nato, Greenland, Trump. The further release of the Epstein files, what the outlook for the 2026 midterms is.
• Oh God What Now
  The Burnhum debacle, the Braverman defection, how media censorship works in our modern age, the middle class spending squeeze. A single issue guest episode about what’s going wrong with UK universities.
• The History of England
  1665-1666, the plague and the continuing war with the Dutch.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
• Talk ’90s to Me
  Pulp Fiction.
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode for after their season on Socialism.
• The Bunker
  A look at how UK domestic politics sit and what Labour needs to do to turn things around (catching up, in world political terms this was post Venezuela but before the height of the Greenland stuff around Davos), Weekly Wrap Up, Start the Week, What Will Elon Musk Ruin Next? (which is actually about the AI hype cycle)
• The History of Byzantium
  This podcast has finished the chronological run, and now the episodes are sort of wrap up/overview episodes – this one covers 5 people who were influential in the East Roman Empire who didn’t come up as much in the political historical narrative.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  This episode was a bit of an odd historical artifact – a look at the Cold War from the perspective of someone still inside it, first aired in 1977 and containing a lot of his reminiscences of being involved in the US administration. His analysis was that the Cold War had moved from a religious moral crusade to a pair of bureaucracies whose status & prestige were entirely down to reacting to the perceived threats from each other and creating ever more weapons. A trap that kept the military capability ratcheting up as each reacted to what it thought the other was doing (and often creating the thing they thought they were reacting to).
• PSG v. Newcastle (1-1, so they’re in the playoffs for the Champions League rather than going straight through to the next phase)
• Digging for Britain Season 13
  Scotland & the North West of England, the archaeology of Glen Coe (digging up the houses where the massacre occurred), Roman burials near Penrith (rescue archaeology before the M6 is improved), Roman bathhouse & temple in Carlisle, Somali “village” in Bradford (c. 1904, pretty appalling, these people were an exhibit essentially like they were in a zoo), and a 1970s skate park in Scotland somewhere I’ve forgotten (that was weird to see archaeology being done on something younger than me (it opened in 1978) and I’m also not sure why it was being done).
• Liverpool v. Newcastle (3-1)
• The Great Philosophers
  This episode was unexpectedly entertaining (the others have been informative rather than entertaining), as Bryan Magee started off in his introduction by explaining that he himself had written the best recent book on Schopenhauer, but he could hardly interview himself so he had invited Frederick Copleston who had written one of the other books. Which set the tone for the rest of it, it was quite a spiky conversation and they clearly had significant disagreements on how to interpret Schopenhauer and his ideas.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Up to a Tier 65 Pit but we failed that, plus ticked off all the Andariels and all the Azmodans. Did not do so well with an Infernal Horde on Torment IV, but did have a good run around in a Helltide.

Talks

• “Looking up! Uncovering histories of Egyptology on a journey through Paris” Angela Stienne
  A trot through various bits of Paris that have Egyptological connections, some obvious (the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre) and some less so (a house where the first director of the Louvre lived etc). She’s got a book out (in French) that covers more of this.
• “Animal cult in Tuna el Gebel: the animal necropolis and the priest settlements in Ptolemaic times” Mélanie Flossmann-Schütze
  A look at the development over time of the animal necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, linking the various phases of building/burials with the phases of building at nearby Hermopolis Magna. And a discussion of the settlements nearby where the priests & other cult workers lived in 5 storey tower houses.