Tuesday 10 March 2026 to Tuesday 17 March 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  Hinduism spreading into south Asia after Indian culture in a less religious sense already had a strong foothold, and both taking strong root there (Angkor Wat is the biggest Hindu temple built and is not in India) and only partially being taken up (the caste system doesn’t really make it into this new cultural arena). Then moving on to look at how mathematics spread, from deep roots in India where they are first to make the jump to treating zero like a number that you could use in mathematical operations (rather than just a placeholder to indicate a lack of something), and also come up with the concept of negative numbers. Then it spreads to the Caliphate via a particular family who are prominent under the Abbasid Caliphs but were originally part of the Buddhist community in Afghanistan with links to Buddhist scholars in India.

Podcasts

• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  More on the Iran War, including pointing out that it’s hard for Trump to declare victory by fiat coz unless both Israel & Iran stop fighting he looks silly & impotent. An older episode about cryptocurrency & the threat posed to UK politics by how it can be used to funnel money into political parties in ways that obfuscate its source.
• Journey Through Time
  More on the Chernobyl disaster, continuing the immediate & short term aftermath (and the main take home for me is that we were really very very lucky it didn’t get a lot worse; oh and apparently the USSR had plans for how you keep on fighting after the nuclear bombs go off, but no plans for how to deal with a power station going wrong, which says a lot). And the next episode was about the containment of the site – which first needed the roof cleared in a very risk operation before the sarcophagus was built (in a typical Soviet hurry with ludicrous arbitrary deadlines). And finally finishing up the series with a look at the legacy, including how it was a factor in the breakup of the Soviet Union.
• The Rest is Science
  A Q&A episode, where the Principia Mathematica was brought up which is beginning to feel like a theme of the last few months of my media consumption, and also a selection of mathematical limericks. An episode on large, finite, describable numbers (mostly with some interesting hook, like just how big 52! is, given that it’s the number of ways you can organise a pack of cards and so it feels like it ought to be within our mental grasp). Another Q&A episode, including talking a bit about zero (which I listened to just as my book got to that part too), and also talking about the evolution of the anus as part of a discussion on topology & how many holes does a human have.
• The Rest is Politics
  More on the Iran War.
• The Bunker
  Greenland again, with respect to its rare earth resources and why there is a strategic significance to them (China currently controls 95% of that market). Weekly wrap up (the latest stuff about Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, the lack of off ramp for Trump in the Iran war). US foreign policy (recorded around the time of Greenland being thing du jour) and how much is ideological and how much is the whim of Trump. An interview with the author of Fast Food Nation, talking about how things have & haven’t changed in the 25 years since he published that (the takeaway was that if anything it’s got worse). Start the Week (almost entirely about the Iran war). An episode about Wuthering Heights (the book, mostly, as this was released before the film was out).
• More Jam Tomorrow
  Decimalisation in Britain in 1971, which was fascinating to listen to as it happened a couple of years before I was born so by the time I knew what money was it was normal to everyone. Also the other planned metricisation of units which didn’t go the whole way as it got turned into a political wedge issue by the Tories.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who stood in the presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 and is now in exile in Lithuania after Lukashenko was declared victor. Interview with a former head of GCHQ.
• The History of Philosophy
  About Antoine Arnauld, who was both a Jansenist theologian (think Calvinist, but Catholic) and a Cartesian philosopher, contemporary of Pascal (who was also a Jansenist).
• The History of England Shedcasts
  The last of the Birth of Britain series, “The Age of Tyrants”, basically the bit between the Roman Empire leaving Britain & the Anglo-Saxons properly taking over.
• Oh God What Now
  More about the Iran war (from a domestic politics perspective, mostly about Farage & Badenoch saying stupid things about joining the war), the Government’s proposal to reduce the number of cases that are tried in front of a jury. And the extra bit was about nepo babies in politics. A guest episode with the author of the book “Centrists of the World Unite!” which is about how liberalism & liberal democracy is under attack from populists & argues that it’s possible to fight back. Plus a bit about Mandelson at the beginning.
• The History of England
  More of the aftermath of the Great Fire, and also the way that Charles II was once again back looking for more money to prosecute the war against the Dutch (and how that war was going).
• The History of Egypt
  A tour of Nefertari’s tomb telling us about the reliefs.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Calvin Klein, in particular the CK One advertising campaign (but also the rest of the 90s ads).
• Starship Alexandria
  About “A Sword of Bronze and Ashes” by Anna Smith Spark, which I haven’t read but the book sounds good so perhaps I should.
• The Rest is Politics US
  More about the Iran war, mostly focused on how no-one thinks it’s going well now, and how it seems to’ve been a collection of unforced errors by the US administration. And another episode on the Iran war, continuing to look at how the President is stuck and also how it’s going down with the rest of the world.
• Empire
  Starting a series on the Bronze Age Collapse with a discussion of what the world pre-1177 was like – more modern than we think, an interconnected world of superpowers & “global” trade. Next episode was looking at Homer’s epics to see what they tell us of the world of this period.
• The History of China
  The Opium War begins to actually kick off, with a vote in Parliament to go to war almost simultaneous with a battle in China where the British ships win.
• The History of Byzantium
  Q&A session for the final part of the narrative covering the fall of Constantinople.
• Origin Story
  Bonus episode on Stephen Miller, who he is and how he’s influencing the politics of the US.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  What the Zhuangzi has to say about death, which is mostly that is it just another transformation in one’s life and should be accepted as one accepts all change.

TV

• Newcastle v. Barcelona (1-1)
• The Age of Uncertainty
  We’re splitting this last episode into multiple chunks as it’s very long, only watched one part so far. The basic premise is that Galbraith got a whole bunch of senior people from politics & business and got them to talk about the issues raised in the series, ranging from Ted Heath to a Soviet chap who was an advisor on American affairs for Brezhnev to the owner of the Washington Post (Katharine Graham) to a former Thai PM. A bit of an odd mix of being very much of its time and timeless, some issues felt pertinent today but others did not, like a bit where Shirley Williams was discussing how the problem of people being given grants to go to uni then dropping out after one year was something that was going to need massive intervention to solve. Terribly condescending at various points too.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Starting in Sydney, and a lot about the Chinese-influenced food in Sydney. Two recipes, neither of which I’ll cook (I’m not keen on the idea of fish cooked purely in lime juice rather than with heat, and stir fried crab still in its shell is to neither of our tastes).
• The Great Philosophers
  Finishing here with Wittgenstein as afterwards they would be discussing living philosophers & there’s always less consensus on those. Wittgenstein had two totally incompatible ideas about language – initially he thought of words as analogous to pictures, their meanings are tied to the thing they represent, but later he decided he was wrong about that and put forward the idea that the meaning of words is tied to how they are used and it makes no sense to talk about them as if they were independent of the context they are used in. He came up with the idea of language games, not in the sense of trivial pursuits but in the sense of constructing your sentences according to an agreed set of rules, and there are different rules for different games (in this case an example would be science being a separate way to use language then religion or either different to philosophy) so the meanings of words shift depending on the game.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Start of a new season, time to find out what bugs they’ve introduced this time. I’m playing a Druid this time, and at the moment planning to head down the bear shapeshifting path. Which kinda fits with the season theme which is about turning into the Butcher. It has the shortest seasonal quest story ever, so we’ve finished that and it’s just a case of working our way through the ranks (and killing stuff as the Butcher) now.

Music

• Starlight Express