Tuesday 18 August 2026 to Tuesday 25 August 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve finished the chapter on Wealth Appropriation now. Basically all the early civilisation have some mechanism(s) for getting the commoners to hand over all their surplus wealth (which is mostly agricultural surplus) to the ruling elite. The ways that people are taxed varies across the civilisations but corvée labour is always part of the mix. City states also acquire wealth by making weaker city states pay tribute, which is wealth appropriation at the level of one elite giving to another. Next chapter is summing up the chapters on the economies of these states.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • used the idea that the Mayans predicted the end of the world to be in 2012 as a jumping off point to talk about how our world in the West really did change around about then – that’s the point where more people had smartphones than didn’t, where more people used social media then didn’t, where more people watched streaming than broadcast TV (not quite the same time but close)
  • Q&A episode, where Hannah’s show & tell object was something from the giftshop at the Korean DMZ (so unexpectedly topical given this was from a month ago) which she used as a jumping off point for how quickly nature takes back over our abandoned places (even most of the ones with radioactive contamination)
  • an episode about how lithium batteries aren’t really that great (entertainingly they were invented by a man with the surname Goodenough)
  • Q&A episode, where the show & tell object from Michael was a whole collection of crayons sparking a discussion both of why we have an artistic colour wheel from a linear electromagnetic spectrum (our brains basically invent the colour purple for the experience of the longest wave lengths & shortest hitting our eyes together with nothing in the middle) and a discussion of colours our cameras don’t see (some of the crayons are neons that just don’t photograph the way they look to the eye)
• Empire
  
  • starting a new short series on the big tech giants, looking at their origins and explicitly drawing parallels with the East India Company
  • interview with Karen Hao, talking about her thesis that the AI companies are the new empires, and talking about how the myth they are selling us about the tech is just that, a myth and knowingly so
  • starting a new series on the pagan religions/practices of Britain & Ireland up to Viking times – this episode had Ronald Hutton telling us about the pre-Roman period, which we don’t have much actual evidence for so it’s all quite “maybe, perhaps”
  • second episode of the pagan religions series, focusing on the ways we can see the local pagan deities show up in the Roman archaeological evidence in Britain
• The History of China
  
  • The Taiping Rebellion begins to tear itself apart in a spectacularly bloody fashion leaving thousands dead including several of the leaders
  • Once the bloodletting ends the war between the Taiping & the Qing continues but neither side has its best commanders in charge (the Taiping one is still alive but no longer co-operative, the Qing one is the chap who’s being thwarted by the bureaucracy at all turns because he’s not official recognised so when he had the opportunity to depart he took it)
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • Interview with Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream
  • Interview with Shirley Manson from Garbage
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • first half was about Afghanistan on the 5th anniversary of the withdrawal of US & allies (which included Rory’s wife Shoshana’s take as she still runs a charity there), second half included Russia & the banning of an anti-war party from the election, as well as Trump’s getting cranky with South Korea in favour of a relationship with North Korea, and a section on Jason Arday
  • Q&A episode which started with a long section on Andy Burnham’s communication style & strategy (Alastair approves overall), but also covered the Settlers in the West Bank
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • is Trump really going to bomb Oman or nuke Iran? They’re not as reassuring about either of those as I would like but do seem to think the answer is no because other people around him have lines they won’t cross. They also discussed the walking back from the US alliance with South Korea.
  • first half was on the breakdown of trade agreement talks with Canada and how it’s showing that no-one believes the US administration any more, and the second half was about the Iran war & how desperate the administration seems to get out of the quagmire it walked into
• The History of Egypt
  
  • First episode on Merenptah as king, campaigning in Canaan and other diplomatic relationships to Egypt’s northeast
  • the next episode covers an incursion by Libyans & some Sea Peoples, who are not just coming to fight but are coming to settle, which is the first harbinger in Egypt of the Bronze Age Collapse
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode with a guest who spent 16 years in prison after killing someone in fight but turned his life around and now writes & speaks about how to reform the prison system to produce more outcomes like his (employ more better trained staff, be tougher on people selling drugs inside, encourage prisoners to take responsibility for their own lives)
  • an interview with Annie Jacobsen about her new book “Biological War: A Scenario”
  • Weekly Wrap Up, main serious section was the Trump & the Koreas story, also covered some of the Ukrainian domestic politics (including why elections seem improbable – too difficult during the war even if they changed their constitution to allow it)
  • an episode about what might happen to Russia if it loses the Ukraine war (which isn’t as unlikely as we all thought at the start of the war), potentially breaking up into its constituent parts, potentially in as unpleasant fashion as Yugoslavia did in the 90s.
  • Start the Week, looking a bit at what Andy Burnham has going on this week (visit to Ukraine, prisoner release stuff), plus more international stuff including the breakdown in trade relations between the US & Canada, and the attempts by Russia to get us to stop supporting Ukraine (which aren’t working, see the first bit)
  • episode about Donald Trump Jr’s involvement in an investment company and how he’s leveraging his connections to the administration to both make money & fund things he (and his father’s Republican Party) are ideologically in favour of
  • interview with Hannah Lucinda Smith who’s written a book called “Hinterlands” about the various places that are neither quite in one country nor another, places like northern Cyprus
  • an episode about how there’s beginning to be a trend of TV shows in the US where the realities of being middle class are on show – money worries rather than those enormous houses that no-one with the jobs the characters are supposed to have could afford
• The History of England
  
  • the early years of James II’s reign, which actually goes quite well for him, he’s promised to uphold the Anglican Church, he has the Tories onside and sees off a rebellion lead by his half brother the Duke of Monmouth
• Oh God What Now
  
  • the big topic this episode was the climate crisis, and in particular the National Emergency Briefing movement which is trying to get us to a point where the government provides regular briefings from experts like we had during the first months of Covid (presumably at a lesser frequency) that don’t just tell us it’s all shit but tell us what the government is doing and what we can do as well
  • their guest was Paul Mason who is just about to publish a book about the history of Communism, from the perspective of a self-described radial social democrat trying to show how when Communism has been put into practice it’s always failed into an authoritarian state & could young people who seem to be flirting with the idea just not
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Histories written in the Han period, mostly concentrating on the one by Sima Qian which shapes a lot of how we think today about the preceding period and also invents the idea of China as a cohesive thing
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Another questions episode, quite a varied selection but the ones that have stuck in my mind include the Prime Minister during the time of the US War of Independence (Lord North) as the second worst Prime Minister (prior to the modern batch) with Anthony Eden as the worst, also the way that English place names often have pronunciations at odds with their spelling (which doesn’t really have a general answer but is always entertaining to discuss in specific cases)
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode after the end of last season, including amongst other things a rather depressing discussion of whether the theme of things tending towards the griftiest version of themselves (epitomised by the Evangelicals, paranormal investigations & think tanks episodes) is the fault of the US, capitalism or just people – it’s just people really, there’s always some people who see a way of getting status & attention and exploit it to a point where it warps the original thing
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode about the new technology of war & how that’s affecting the way wars are fought (but also about how the changing posture of the US is affecting what technologies their increasingly disaffected allies are pursuing)

TV

• Evolution
  The final episode used the horse as the jumping off point to talk about the evolution of movement, muscles, the heart and the hoof.
• A House Through Time (Season 5)
  
  • The second episode covered roughly the second half of the 1930s, so up through the start of the war. More & more of the Berlin building’s inhabitants are joining the Nazi party, while in London the only people really affected by the war are those who aren’t English – an Italian man who was head waiter at the Savoy is rounded up & deported as an “enemy alien” but dies when the boat he is on is torpedoed.
  • the third episode was a trifle grim, the British segment focused on the Blitz while the German segment inevitably covered the deportation and mass murder of Jews
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  This is on youtube but I’m counting it as TV as it’s a long form documentary series filmed in a way you might expect on TV (tho a little more youth coded in style). First episode covers what sound is, how hearing works, and has a pretty good stab at (inconclusively) defining music and discussing (also inconclusively) whether it’s a solely human thing.

Film

• The Odyssey
  Really enjoyed it, liked the psychological reality of it alongside the ambiguity of whether any of the mythological stuff was real, didn’t feel like it was 3 hours long, either. Of the reviews I listened to beforehand The History of Egypt felt way off the mark (I’m assuming he likes the linear films I find too obvious) and The Bunker one was much more aligned with my view. Also appreciated selenak’s review, which I read afterwards.
• The Terminator
  Our DVD of this had deteriorated so we picked up a 4k Bluray version in the sale at HMV and I watched it with J (I hadn’t been going to last week but given we’d ended up talking about it while discussing replacing it I changed my mind). The guy in the shop when we bought it referred to it as horror which I’d not really thought of before but certainly fits. It holds up pretty well, tho a few of the special effects look very clunky. It used to be what I said was my favourite film but I think my tastes have changed a bit (despite the time loop it’s a pretty straightforward film and everything is well telegraphed, with dialogue to explain the loop in case you missed it).

Games

• Diablo IV
  I got my 5-charm set that I’d been looking for & it seems to’ve made me much more powerful, and J managed to get his sorted out the day after. We’ve opened up Torment VI as well, and followed that up by quite swiftly doing the Capstone to finish off Rank VI and get our pet. We’re now trying to knock off as many of the season journey objectives as possible – we might be able to do the Rank VII capstone but it feels less plausible than the previous ones.