Tuesday 25 August 2026 to Tuesday 1 September 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the part of the book that looks at the economies of these early civilisations. There’s a lot of variation between the civilisations, some of which was unexpected (there was a received wisdom that civilisations initially develop in arid areas where you need irrigation and that just isn’t the case). Precise forms of agriculture seem to be historical accidents of what existed in the societies that these civilisations developed out of. Rates of population increase weren’t as great as has been assumed, as all these civilisations had customs that tended to limit the number of children a woman had (so lower class families and upper class women had relatively few children, but upper class men had more “wives” so many more children). Population density also appears to be historical accident. Landownership doesn’t seem to have an obvious development path or correlation with city/territorial state, but institutional landownership is one way that agricultural surplus ends up with the state as well as taxes. Craft production always exists in a range from people making what they themselves need, people making stuff to sell to other people, people making stuff for the elite/state. In territorial states the higher quality craftsmen & goods are organised & employed full time by the state, in city states they are just a part of the market. Conspicuous consumption exists in all these civilisations and is perhaps an inevitable response to the change of incentives when you live in a large complex society where being wealthy is inextricably linked to your political power as compared to one where everyone knows you & can disapprove of your selfishness
• “On the Calculation of Volume IV” Solvej Balle
  It’s really hard to say anything about this without spoilers (and I know J’s a couple of books behind me so I’m trying to avoid them as he’s very spoilerphobic), when I started reading the series I thought I knew the shape of where the story was going but now I really don’t. It’s an enjoyable and quite meditative read.

Podcasts

• The History of China
  
  • The military part of the Taiping Rebellion manage to pull themselves together in a coherent enough fashion to inflict a catastrophic defeat on the Qing forces and save Nanjing from having the northern supply lines cut off, but the central administration is still AWOL and concerned with the minutiae of palace life
  • The British investigate what’s going on with the Taiping Rebellion but don’t get involved, and also the story of the cousin of the Heavenly Emperor who after 7 years finally makes it back to the Taiping and gets promoted to King in large part because his cousin feels he can only trust his own family after the blood bath of the recent past but he as he’s spent time in the British colony on Hong Kong he does actually have some ideas on how to run a state that are closer to functional (he’s also spent time with actual Christians so tries to steer the Taiping faith closer to that)
• The History of England
  The influx of Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution in France because of their Protestantism, during James II’s reign. Also the first signs of cracks in the facade of James being OK despite being Catholic.
• Starship Alexandria
  About “Soldier in the Mist” by Gene Wolfe, which I own as part of an omnibus edition of it & the first sequel but bounced off it hard. I think this discussion has put me off ever going back to it (unless perhaps I was to make a project of trying to make sense of it rather than read it like normal fiction)
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • quite a bit of talk about Ukraine both in terms of what it means that this was Burnham’s first foreign visit and also in terms of the corruption allegations (part of which they seem to say is that even with an overall story of corruption getting less the people running things are still the same people so are tainted by past corruption even when they’ve cleaned their act up), also discussed Germany & the frankly horrifying prospect of the AfD getting power in parts of the country which morphed into a broader discussion of how part of what’s going wrong in general is that the rule of law is breaking down
  • the breakdown of trade talks between the US & Canada & what that says about Trump’s persistence with his obsessions, plus potential elections in Palestine
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a discussion of how you could create the illusion that the sun is wearing sunglasses, which segued into a bit of rant about the idiots who’ve got approval to put mirrors in the sky to create daylight during night time
  • Q&A episode where Hannah’s show & tell item was a vial of water from under the north pole, which they used as a jumping off point to talk about the freshwater lake that exists under the ice at the north pole (yes, that’s a lake in the ocean) and how this is involved in the warm water currents that keep Europe mild in the winter but climate change is maybe about to ruin that within the next 50 or so years
• Empire
  
  • continuing their pagan religions series by looking at St Patrick, which kinda doesn’t fit neatly into the series but is related because Irish medieval Christian literature is one of our sources for earlier pagan practices
  • next up is the Picts who we know a lot more about now than we did in even the more recent past as there is a lot more archaeology than first suspected
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • Interview with Johnny Mercer
  • interview with Maoz Inon & Aziz Abu Sarah (who are an Israeli & a Palestinian who’ve both lost close family members in the conflict, who are activists working towards peace)
• Talk 90s to Me
  Interview with Tim Booth of James
• Oh God What Now
  
  • freebies for MPs and if all of them are all that bad (obviously things that might buy favour aren’t good, but they made a good case for not removing all the perks from a job that also involves regular credible death threats), plus how whatever people say about the news they are interested in the truth is that people do click on the royal stuff
  • an interview with Luke Harding about his latest book, about how the world of geopolitics is undergoing an upheaval
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about languages dying, via an interview with the author of a book called “How to Kill a Language”
  • an episode about al-Qaeda and what’s happened to the group since 9/11 (mostly the core group has withered & the affiliates are not quite the same thing)
  • Weekly Wrap Up, Dolly Parton’s death, Andy Burnham’s Ukraine visit, and what on earth is going on with the CIA visiting Russia
  • an episode about the hacking of Hugging Face’s computer systems by Open AI’s supposedly sandboxed new AI agent (neither journalist in the discussion had the background knowledge to understand what was going on let alone explain it to the general public, so the discussion was mostly on the level of “and he seems a nice guy so I believe him” with the occasional science fiction reference as an analogy, which was a shame as The Bunker is normally a lot less shallow)
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • what on earth is going on with the CIA visiting Russia, Dolly Parton’s death
  • leaks about how none of the generals like the way the Iran war is going, the situation with Canada and how Carney has the upper hand here
• Origin Story
  Second post season Q&A, things like how do they find time to do the reading (partly that it’s a chunk of their actual jobs, partly that you don’t necessarily read everything thoroughly), or to talk about horror films (given the paranormal investigations episode touched on the genre as part of the milieu in which the investigations take place)
• Your Time Your Way
  Why you need to do the maths on your day to see you’re over-committed and some ideas of how to fix that (pre-supposes you have a traditional job but still useful).
• The History of England Shedcasts
  An episode on Pevsner and his books on the architecture of Britain.
• Literature & History
  The history of early Sufism, the penultimate episode of this season on early Islamic literature & history. Leaning in to a bit of a compare & contrast with the Gnostics who ended up written out of Christianity, but the Sufis were actually pretty orthodox in theology if rather flamboyant in style.
• The History of Philosophy
  A bonus episode where the host is interviewing his twin brother about his new book “A Century of Tomorrows” which looks at futurology over the 20th Century as a way of looking at how people in the 20th Century thought about their own present

TV

• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  The second episode talked quite a bit about the mathematics of music, mostly of Western music tho there was an interesting note that every culture with only one known exception bases their scales around the octave. Also learnt how we ended up with the 12 notes we have (including that it was a piece of Pythagorean maths that doesn’t actually work out so we fudge it). Some of the stuff about the neuroscience of it and the evolution of why we respond to music felt a bit airy-fairy tho.
• KGB – The Sword and the Shield
  A history of the KGB under all its various names, starting with its beginnings under Lenin and in the first episode going through to just after World War II finished. Predictably grim viewing, tho they are lightening the mood by interspersing a modern comedian telling old Soviet jokes (“In Russia there are three sorts of people. Prisoners, past prisoners … and future prisoners”) which are generally pretty black humour but the delivery makes all of them funny (and it’s odd that that works, she’s speaking Russian and we’re reading English subtitles, but the delivery still comes across).
• Hippos: Africa’s River Giants
  Trying to show the more sensitive side of hippos in the Okavango delta, which they did sort of manage but equally there were bits where we wondered how come so many hippos make it to adulthood if introducing young ones to their family is so fraught!
• Seven Wonders of the World with Bettany Hughes
  A series from last year where Bettany Hughes is visiting the original seven wonders of the world, I think there’s a book too and we listened to a Zoom talk by her about them a couple of years ago as well. This episode covered the Egyptian ones, the Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse.
• A House Through Time
  The last couple of years of the war, where I think we found out why these two particular buildings were picked – the London one was used as the SOE headquarters towards the end of the war and one of the inhabitants of the Berlin one was related to someone involved in the plot to kill Hitler. As with the previous episode, pretty grim viewing, but they did find a bit of an upbeat note to finish on where two of the Jews who’d been living in the building before the war and who failed to escape before it did actually survive right through all the horrors and they could show us a photo of a member of the next generation getting married in the 1980s with mother & grandmother in attendance.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Working on getting our Glyphs levelled up at the moment and we’ve got them all to Legendary level, also found a way to farm Royal gems so we’ve upgraded our gems (but it’ll take a lot of farming to get Grand gems everywhere). We’ve also unlocked Torment VIII but have yet to try playing it. We’re in the dying days of the season so really just seeing what little bits & pieces we can pick off before it finishes.