Tuesday 11 August 2026 to Tuesday 18 August 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve finished the chapter on trade & craft specialisation now – craft specialisation is also split on city/territorial state lines, in a territorial state the fanciest stuff is made at the behest of and under the control of the state, but in a city state as well as providing goods to the state crafts people also sell all sorts of qualities of goods on the open market and buy their materials via traders themselves. Another interesting note was that in all cultures crafts are gender coded, and even when both men & women do a particular craft they’ll do different parts of the process. However the gender coding differs between civilisations. So it’s arbitrary but consistently feels important to society that the right gender do whatever.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a bit about how the US economy is doing very poorly and the administration actively don’t care, also on the lefter wing side of the Democrats which the podcast is getting a bit tedious about as they basically seem to think that as it’s an unusual position to take in US politics then you just shouldn’t ever bother, better to pretend to be right wing than to have principles
  • started by juxtaposing the White House Press Secretary who’s just stepped down as she’s had a second kid and wants to do more Mom and less work, and AOC who has publicised that she’s having her eggs frozen so she can put off having kids (which may suggest she’s thinking of running for President in 2028), which says a lot about the left & the right’s attitude to family & motherhood
• The History of Egypt
  
  • A short bit about the Griffith Institute as they are trying to raise funds at the moment
  • a very brief review of Odyssey movie, which he’s not that impressed by
• The History of England
  We’re at the start of James II of Great Britain’s reign, so this episode covered the historiography of him & of the Glorious Revolution plus his accession to the throne
• Starship Alexandria
  About “Do You Dream of terra-Two” by Temi Oh
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • talking about the new world order that is beginning to emerge, where Turkey, Pakistan & Saudi Arabia make their own NATO like pact and where little countries with drones can hold off big countries with expensive missile systems
  • Q&A episode, a lot of what they talked about was how the centre right seems to’ve imploded here with Badenoch chasing the hard right, also US politics, in particular the Democrat candidate for the Michigan election where people are handwringing because he’s to the left of Genghis Khan (I exaggerate but from the UK perspective it’s mindboggling that this counts as too far left for mainstream politics)
  • episode with Caroline Lucas talking about the climate crisis (she’s been doing a members only series for them about it), which was a bit toothgrinding as Rory thinks the “existential” problem of no data centres (maybe we have a shittier economy) is a bigger issue than the existential problem of the climate crisis (maybe the whole of civilisation as we know it collapses and most of us die).
• The History of Philosophy
  
  • Quietism, and how it contrasted with other French philosophy of the time in thinking that hypocrisy wasn’t inevitable but nonetheless felt that replacing love of self with love of God was the only way to live.
  • Pierre Bayle’s Historical & Critical Dictionary of philosophy, which in part posits that scepticism is the only philosophy compatible with faith as the things that faith requires us to believe aren’t inferrable from reason alone, which may be read as undermining faith
• The Rest is Science
  
  • an episode about friendship, the various types of interactions/relationships with people in general, and also why it’s true that statistically speaking your friends have more friends that you do (which is basically because using the mean can produce counter-intuitive results, or to put it another way Friendships Georg who has 10,000 friends is an outlier and should not have been counted)
  • a Q&A episode which included Hannah’s show & tell item which was a taxidermied tiger that her former mother-in-law has (the tiger was a maneater, and killed in the 1940s in India) which they used as a jumping off point to talk about how we deal with predators like lions & tigers today (not just killing them any more unless critically necessary)
  • an episode about curiosity, how it works, our history with it (which is that for a long time in the Western world we called it a vice), and how it is why the infinite scroll thing hooks us all in
  • a Q&A episode, which included a bit on how dogs are colour blind (only see blues & yellows) compared to humans but mantis shrimps see many more colours than we do. I was rather disappointed that in answer to one question (about encoding data into DNA) Hannah consistently said “amino acid” when she meant “nucleotide”.
• Empire
  
  • the third episode on the Algerian Revolution, where the revolt actually begins – and there are atrocities on both sides, with the French atrocities driving the Algerians who’d originally intended to stay neutral into the arms of the revolution
  • the Battle of Algiers itself, where the French behave appallingly, with a general in charge who believes the way forward is brutal violence & torture
  • the period immediately after Algeria won its independence where there are very much two faces to the country – the rather brutal authoritarian regime the people lived under (which had a vibe of same shit different day) juxtaposed with the rather cosmopolitan world of Algiers where this poster child nation for the very idea of throwing of your colonial oppressors attracted all sorts of other groups, like the Black Panthers, the PLO, etc to come and learn how it was done
  • the last of their Algerian series, which discusses how it shapes French politics down to today as Le Pen senior was involved in the Battle of Algiers and is also very anti the Algerian community that is now in France
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • interview with Stephen Street, who was producer for some of The Smiths, Morissey solo, The Cranberries and Blur albums
  • an episode about skateboarding in the late 80s & 90s in Britain
• The History of China
  
  • the Taiping Rebellion manages to rally & defeat the only general who’d been able to fight back on behalf of the Qing, in part because said general was ostracised by the bureaucracy for essentially being uppity & not knowing his place
  • the army that was successful in the west (the subject of the previous episode) comes back to Nanjing and defeats the armies besieging it which leads to internal fracturing of the Taiping Rebellion now there isn’t an outside threat concentrating their mind
• Oh God What Now
  
  • what happens after the Clacton by-election for Farage, including the tidbit that apparently it’s an offence to draw anyone’s attention to a recall petition if such a thing is open (corrected in a later episode, it’s not legal to publicise the current numbers, but you are permitted to campaign to get people to sign)
  • an extra episode after the by-election results, obviously Farage won but managed to be petulant about that, most of the conversation was about if he’s actually damaged his standing in the rest of the country by making himself look ridiculous. And about what does it say that in the Reformiest Reform seat ever there are still 27% of those who voted who would rather have Binface than Farage.
  • first half on Jason Arday which is a story in which no-one at all comes out well with tragic consequences for Arday, with an interesting note that if matters had been dealt with when originally raised within Cambridge University or in a TES investigation which was spiked because of Arday’s lawyers then much of what happened could’ve been avoided, plus second half on disinformation campaigns on social media which have sort of shifted from state backed to grifter backed over the last few years
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about the history of star ratings and how they’ve taken over the world, and whether that’s a good thing (not really)
  • an episode about money in UK politics
  • Weekly Wrap Up, recorded before the Clacton by-election result so not much about that, the main story was the early prisoner release scheme which is now in doubt but nonetheless still the least worst solution to the problem, plus of course the story about Trump being shuffled off a plane in a catering truck
  • an episode about Palantir
  • Start the Week, the now tragic story of Jason Arday, the climate crisis, and if Reform’s latest announcements about cutting benefits are just to distract from that £5million gift
  • an episode about Farage’s (and Reform’s) anti-establishment rhetoric and how it works despite their being part of the elite
  • an episode about the French far right & and its history, including the Le Pens (both father & daughter)
  • a review of the Odyssey, which they really liked (and one of the people in the conversation was a classicist, she was much more interested in themes than costume design and also wasn’t precious about an adaptation matching the source beat for beat)
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode about the Ukraine war, talking mostly about the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and how this asymmetric warfare favours the users of small & cheap drones over large expensive missiles (this is about 1 month old, so coincidence that I listened to it in the same week as the Rest is Politics episode that touched on the same thing)
• Literature & History
  An episode about Bashshar ibn Burd, a founding figure of Classical Arabic Poetry, including quite a bit of contextualising him in being a Persian working not-quite-within the older pre-Islamic poetry context, also a lot of callbacks to Ovid and other Roman poets in the discussion
• More Jam Tomorrow
  An episode about old age, retirement and our changing attitudes to it over the post-war period till now.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  The texts that survive from the Han dynasty and how they were collated & curated – and how knowing this casts a different light on what we know of the Warring States Period philosophy, as it’s the Han scholars who create the categorisations of the schools of philosophy from the texts they had accessible
• Origin Story
  The last one of season 9, about the Luddites. Both the history of the actual movement and how we use the word today. I knew the vague shape of the story (including that there was politics to it rather than just technophobia) but I wasn’t aware that the government had basically outlawed all other ways of expressing discontent in the face of the textile workers suggesting compromises (for instance that those put out of work by the machines should be supported to retrain for other work). I also hadn’t realised it was the same period as when Spencer Perceval (the Prime Minister of the time) was murdered (actually unconnected but at first everyone thought it was the Luddites).

TV

• Evolution
  This time he looked at the evolution of the brain via the dolphin (this story also included the evolution of the eye).
• A House Through Time (season 5)
  The normal conceit for this series is to look at one house across around 150 years of history to tell the story of a given city, this season is different as they’re looking at two apartment buildings, one in London & one in Berlin, over a much narrower range of time focusing on the Second World War. This episode was the 1920s & 30s, so we’re seeing the aftermath of the First World War and the effects of the Great Depression. They’ve so far done a nice job of finding people who sort of match, two damaged veterans, some Jewish families in both places, people involved in the cinema.
• Athens: The Birth of Democracy
  A French documentary (dubbed into English) covering the history & form of democracy in Athens, included archaeological evidence that backs up the textual evidence of the violent period it came out of. Also a bit of experimental archaeology demonstrating how the random lottery machines worked to choose the various officials
• Bettany Hughes' Lost Worlds: Dawn of Civilisations
  Second episode covered some much older sites – started off with Karahan Tepe & Goblecki Tepe, which are roughly 12,000 years old, and are thought to’ve been settled before farming & before pottery, did then move forward to the first known swords (c. 5,000 years ago) made of arsenical copper, and then on to places mentioned in Greek myth/history like the place where Midas washed the touch of gold off.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Working our way up the Pits trying to get Torment VI open to us, also ticking off things from previous Season Ranks that we hadn’t got to yet. We also discovered War Plans stay active across sessions, so that’s good. Both of us spent a bit of time sorting gear out and managed to get quite significantly more powered up, so we’re romping through Torment IV and have just switched up to Torment V.

Talks

• short talks after Friends of the Petrie Museum AGM
  Two people who’d been given grants gave an update on their project: John Lambert who is cataloguing the Petrie Museum’s archive of documents, and Antonio Reis who is doing 3D mapping of Naqada.