Tuesday 7 July 2026 to Tuesday 14 July 2026

[mousetrappling]

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).