Tuesday 2 June 2026 to Tuesday 16 June

[mousetrappling]

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).