Tuesday 14 July 2026 to Tuesday 21 July 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “The Handmaid’s Tale” Margaret Atwood
  Finished Tuesday 14 July 2026. I didn’t have as much left to read as I thought last week so finished that afternoon. Not much more to say, tho I’d forgotten the tonal shift for the epilogue. And that section is of course very on theme, as it’s a male academic trying to figure out what this woman’s story tells us about the men in it.
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve now finished the chapter on Food Production, the first chapter of the Economy section. The conclusions here were that how any given civilisation managed its food production was idiosyncratic and depended on the way the preceding cultures had done things and the local environmental conditions rather than on any requirements common to all early civilisations. There were some interesting non-correlations (e.g metal tools didn’t seem to have anything to do with intensity of food production). Also interesting was a note that all of the early civilisations seemed to take steps to limit population (often via long nursing periods for children, for instance the Yoruba thought a child weaned before the age of 2 was likely to die), so if a ruling elite wanted to rule more people expanding territory or capturing neighbouring populations was more effective than getting people to breed more. This is counter to the idea that sedentary farming populations want endless children to do the labour.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a bit of a retrospective on Lindsey Graham now he’s passed away (they conclude that history will judge him harshly for his support of Trump), and some discussion of how ICE have ramped back up their people-snatching behaviour but more subtly this time round
  • a big chunk about two confirmation hearings in which the people up for the positions weren’t able to categorically state that the 2020 election was fair, also some stuff about the Iran war as sadly that’s back on as a full blown war
  • Trump’s speech which attempts to undermine confidence in US elections, plus the removal of scrutiny from ICE and the resurrection of powers to deport “terrorists” which they hope to use as a quicker way of deporting people
• The Bunker
  
  • what happens when Putin dies?
  • an episode speculating on how the politics around the World Cup will go that I really should’ve listened to before as it didn’t go that way (Trump has interfered, yes, but also been a lot less visible than predicted)
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the big story was obviously the Widdecombe murder & the stuff that Reform are now saying about security for MPs
  • Start the Week, the domestic politics section obviously talked about Burnham becoming prime minister today & wondered what he might talk about, in the foreign section they talked about various Trump related things
  • an episode about Russian intelligence operations, with a guest who’s ex-CIA and has written a book about the subject
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Rory is back from his silent retreat so the first half was Alastair catching him up on the news and getting his instant reactions, second half was a more focused discussion primarily about the Ann Widdecombe murder (which he hadn’t included in the round up presumably as that would be a shitty way to break the news that someone he knew personally was murdered) and its politicisation
  • Q&A episode, covering a bit about Burnham’s imminent arrival in No. 10, some stuff on Count Binface, on how climate change is shaping up to be our biggest security threat (new members series so I won’t get to listen to that), and the most recent interview they did on Leading (which I won’t get to for a while)
• Empire
  
  • wrapping up the Amarna Period series with a look at Tutmania, again with Campbell Price
  • an epilogue to this series, with Francesca Stavrakopoulou, talking about what sort of effect the Amarna religion had on the development of the three big monotheisms of today (I think it was “nothing direct”)
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode which started with a site that tested you on your English vocab (sadly already taken down before I could take that test), but it was the last question that was most interesting to me as it was about inner monologues (and how some people don’t have them) and Hannah Fry’s description of her non-stop inner monologue was much like my own including not being precisely a monologue (tho I haven’t named the “voice” that’s arguing with, umm, not me precisely but with other bits of my thoughts, coz it doesn’t feel like a singular or separate voice it’s more that my mind is thinking via conversations), and they also branched out into aphantasia which I have but didn’t realise wasn’t just the way minds worked till about 5 years ago when I read an article about how weird it was that some people don’t have any visuals in their minds.
  • what is going on with human feet, why are they so different from other animals feet?
• The History of England
  One of his summary episodes, covering everything from the Restoration through to 1666 in a single episode
• The History of Philosophy
  Molière and his comedies which are about hypocrisy (and fit into the French Moralist tradition of philosophy)
• Oh God What Now
  
  • first half was answering listener questions with an Andy Burnham theme, and second half was on climate change and whether we’re at least beginning to discuss it more seriously in the media (not quite, but there’s some tipping towards pointing out that it can actually be too hot)
  • recorded after the first speech but before Burnham announced his cabinet so focusing on what that speech told us, then a bit about the general decline in reading
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with James Cleverley who was terribly charming but very very transactional once you got down to his opinions on things
• Talk 90s to Me
  About Select magazine, which I’m not sure I ever read tho I recognise the name (and perhaps a little self-indulgent as an episode as the host (Miranda Sawyer) worked for the guest (Andrew Harrison) on that magazine and he’s also the guy in charge of Podmasters who make this podcast)
• The History of Egypt
  The legacy of Ramesses II through ancient times (the stories Herodotus told) and into the modern day
• Origin Story
  Listening to this out of order as it’s very topical: looking back at their Keir Starmer episode and looking at how they got it wrong about him.
• Literature & History
  Kalilah and Dimnah – an early Islamic Golden Age piece of literature, a collection of short stories that are beast fables and also part of the “mirror to princes” genre.
• The History of China
  The Taiping Rebellion continues – the English come to have a look at this new power in Nanjing and decide they are not people they can do business with, and the army doesn’t stay stopped in Nanjing for all that long, instead the army moves forward again but splitting into two this time

TV

• Spain v. France 2-0
• England v. Argentina 1-2 (boo! but a semi-final isn’t too bad)
• Skeletons of the Mary Rose
  They did isotope analysis on the teeth of 8 of the skeletons from the Mary Rose plus some DNA analysis of some (all? I wasn’t sure) of those 8, to see something of where they came from & what they may’ve looked like. Of the 8 (a tiny fraction of the overall crew of a few hundred) four were not wholly English – I think it was three born elsewhere and one had non-English ancestry. The big thing the programme leaned in to was that two of those were descended from North Africans (including the chap who was born in England but had non-English ethnicity, and someone whose artifacts suggest he was in the King’s bodyguard but had links to southern Spain) because that is more diverse for an English warship in Tudor times than one might have expected.
• England v. France 6-4 (playoff for 3rd place, apparently England’s 2nd best ever World Cup position)
• World Cup Final Spain v. Argentina 1-0 in extra time (and nice to see Argentina lose, I don’t like the way they play the game)
• Greatest Guitar Riffs
  This episode was mostly the guitarist from The Police talking about how he got his sound & what inspired his riffs – blues & jazz were some of the big influences.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Still a lot of football on (see above), so less gaming time than usual. We mostly just picked off a few low hanging fruit from the Season Journey objectives.

Comments

[magid]

::wave:: from another person with aphantasia! I was astonished to learn how other folks can ’see’ movies in their minds when reading fiction (or RPG’ing), among other things. I wonder whether the parts of my brain that don’t do that are actively doing something else, or functionally closer to offline…..?

I read bits of Kalilah and Dimnah in freshman lit, but don’t remember much other than ‘animal fable genre’, unfortunately.

[mousetrappling]

Heh, yeah I remember reading in the past someone saying something like "isn't amazing how your mind translates little black marks on the page into a movie" and thinking to myself that they were stretching the metaphor a bit far … turns out they probably meant that quite literally. I wonder if it's actually a bit of brain that we don't use, or if it's that we don't fire up the existing visual bits when thinking about what things look like, if you see what I mean.

I'd never heard of Kalilah and Dimnah before, not surprisingly as because of the way the UK education system works I was specialised in the sciences from the age of 16 in terms of my formal education. He said in the podcast that it operates on two levels – fun stories about animals, but also as wisdom literature that's speaking to the relationship between rulers & courtiers.

[magid]

The only reason I ran into Kalilah and Dimnah was that my freshman year in college, everyone was required to take a fall and a spring humanities class. Each semester there were two foundational texts that every section had to include, and the rest was up to the prof. I ended up in a section with someone who’d focused on Persian texts, so we read some from Kalilah and Dimnah, and some from the Shanameh, too. I’d already run into the French animal fables (like Le Corbeau et Le Renard), so was aware that they weren’t just cute stories.