Tuesday 22 September 2026 to Tuesday 29 September 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the chapter on Cosmology & Cosmogony. Whilst there was broad agreement on cosmology (mostly as all the civilisations involved consist of bipedal apes living in the same world), there’s little agreement on cosmogony & it doesn’t seem to map to anything in particular about the civilisations. What existed before the universe, how it was brought into being and how & when it will end vary across the civilisations.

Podcasts

• Empire
  
  • start of a new series about Stalin, covering this time his childhood and getting us up to the point of the Revolution
  • next episode takes us from the Revolution through to Lenin’s death, during which time Stalin doesn’t seem like he will inherit the leadership until he does
  • Trotsky, and his relationship with Stalin and his murder by Stalin
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • interview with Sanna Marin, the former Prime Minister of Finland
  • interview with Gordon Brown about his new book about what’s going wrong in the country & how to fix it – part of his diagnosis is that we don’t just have a breakdown of the global rules based order but we also have a breakdown in civil society where people are no longer participating as much in groups in their communities and so the communities are faltering
• Talk 90’s to Me
  
  • interview with the woman who was editor of The Face magazine in the early 90s
  • an episode about Kylie (not an interview with her, instead the guest has written a book about her)
• The History of Egypt
  The end of Seti II’s short reign and the start of the reign of Siptah, who is an odd successor – a young lad with no obvious link to Seti II, taken very much under the wing of Tausret (wife of Seti II) and Bay (chancellor of Egypt at this point)
• The Rest is Politics
  • covered the UN meeting that’s going on at the moment with some chat about Burnham’s meeting with Trump but more broadly wondering if the UN is functional any more, also covered the current fuss over a book by Charles Spencer which accuses the King of having been “giddily elated” by the death of Diana and a rather more serious look at the King’s AI conference
  • Q&A covered things ranging from the recent election in Germany to the Lib Dem conference
• Oh God What Now
  
  • a bonus episode looking at Burnham’s meeting with Trump, which they seem to think went as well as could be hoped tho nothing particularly good or bad about it
  • a more in depth chat about Burnham’s meeting with Trump and his UN speech, in particular the bit about combating disinformation, also some despair about how the government is(n’t) handling the actual balaclava wearing thugs on the streets (tho that got edited as the ringleader of that has since been arrested so laws around not prejudicing trials apply) and a bit more on the donations to Reform
  • mostly focused on the Labour conference and whether or not Burnham can actually do anything as they seem to be intent on sticking to the manifesto from 2024
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about AOC in the light of speculation about her running for President in 2028
  • an interview with the author (Jill Lepore) of “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State”, which is essentially looking at the history of the idea of taking the state out of control of people and turning it over to machines (like AI now, but the idea starts earlier than that)
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the two big stories were the Burnham meeting with Trump and the Trump meeting with Xi
  • an interview with Ben McIntyre about the subject of his latest book “Redwood”, which was the code name for a Russian spy in the 1980s who became a double agent working for the British because he had an erectile disfunction problem and hoped that the wonders of Western medicine could help him, not something that could actually be cured then but to MI6’s credit they did try their best to help, in the process the intelligence he gave averted a potential nuclear war as if the Soviet planned coup against the new Islamic Republic of Iran had gone ahead the US plan was to use nukes
  • Start the Week, opened with the story about the men who were prevented from committing terrorism at an airbase, but more time spent covering the Labour conference as the main domestic story
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode where the show & tell was a book of code words to use when sending telegrams (where you paid by the word) which sparked a discussion about how this closer to instantaneous form of communication changed the world and not always for the better
  • an episode that was a bit of a collection of things with links between them rather than a single subject, so we went from the story of the first (and so far only) people to die in space (3 Russian cosmonauts who lived in space for 3 weeks but it all went horribly wrong on departure) to how much water is thrown away in plastic bottles every year (so it stays in the plastic) to whether or not π is “normal” (which would mean that it eventually contains every possible string of numbers within its infinite sequence, this is proved up to 11 digit strings but no-one’s quite sure how to prove it for the general possibility)
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a bit about the possibility of a blue wave in the midterms, and also discussion of the Trump/Xi meeting
  • first half on the way that Trump’s regime is exerting quite a bit of control over businesses (including buying stakes in ones it likes), and how this is not very capitalist, second half on ICE and how there’s been conflicting messaging about what they will & will not do going forward
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  A conversation with Iona Craig, who’s a journalist who specialises in Yemen, about the Houthis gaining control of the Red Sea routes
• Origin Story
  The life & ideas of John Rawls, a 20th Century political philosopher. His key idea was to start with the thought experiment of what if you were to somehow know nothing about yourself (e.g. race, gender, religion, class etc etc) and were then tasked with designing the society in which you would live out the whole of your life. Under this “veil of ignorance” what sort of society would you design? From this he goes to the idea of maximising the minimum rather than the mean – if you can’t tell where in society you’d end up you should logically and for self-interested reasons make sure that the worst off in society have tolerable lives. He also proposes that inequality would still exist but would exist in such a way that it improves the lot of the worst off – rewards for working hard but not to the extent that those rewards degrade someone else’s life.
• Your Time Your Way
  5 questions to ask yourself across October & November in order to be able to come up with some concrete plans for next year in December
• The History of China
  Rewinding a bit to go back 1856 and the start of the Arrow War (also known as the Second Opium War), which starts for pretty spurious reasons but escalates briskly until the British & French are at war with the Qing (whilst side-swiping the Taiping every now & then).
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Charles II probably contributed to his own rather unpleasant death – he likely got away with the “King’s Drops” that he manufactured as medicine, but the mercury vapour he inhaled while doing alchemical experiments probably did damage him (his kidneys in particular).
• The History of Philosophy in China Interview with an archaeologist who works on Han Dynasty China, to look at how the textual evidence & physical evidence match or don’t match.

TV

• Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
  
  • Telling the story of the Greeks but through a lens of “they were not as nice as you think they were”. This first episode covered the Minoans & the Myceneans, while also (briefly) retelling some of the myths and legends (e.g. the Minotaur, Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey), combined modern archaeology with also talking about the 19th Century archaeologists who basically invented stuff to fit their preconceptions (in particular Arthur Evans on Crete).
  • Second episode covered the Archaic Period, how the landscape helped create their societal organisation, how there was fierce competition between the city states (with an epic bit of burn on that term: “which researchers persist in calling city states despite them being primarily agricultural”), and the Olympics presented as the rather brutal winner takes all competition that they were
• Paris to Rome with Bettany Hughes
  Perhaps the shallowest series we’ve seen from Bettany Hughes, often her programmes feel sponsored by the tourist board of whichever country but generally there’s a bit more meat under the fluff than this one. The premise overall is that she’s travelling from Paris to Rome looking for the good things in life – in this one she goes from Paris to Nice to Provenance and sees some culture, eats some food, drinks some wine & gushes over old friends who she “happens” to meet along the way (like Christian Louboutin of shoes fame).
• England v. Spain (2-3), UEFA Nations League

Games

• Diablo IV
  Making fast progress this season – up to Rank IV, Pit Tier 22 and Paragon 60ish already in just a week (we have played quite a lot this week). I’m playing a Sorceror & J’s playing a Paladin.

Music

• Marillion supported by Haunt the Woods
  I always struggle with what to say about gigs, other than that I enjoyed it (which I did). We’ve seen Marillion something like 80 times and they never disappoint, Haunt the Woods have supported them before and are also enjoyable.