Tuesday 29 September 2026 to Tuesday 6 October 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the chapter on Cult. One of the key take homes of this chapter is that a major feature of the religions of all these early civilisations is the use of sacrifice to nourish the gods as part of an explicitly reciprocal arrangement. Most of the civilisations thought the gods would die if humanity didn’t return energy/power to them via sacrifice, and those that didn’t go that far thought that bad things would happen if they weren’t fed. Sacrifice was generally animals, but all the civilisations also sacrificed humans at some point but to varying degrees (e.g. Egypt & Mesopotamia stopped doing that fairly early, but the Aztecs sacrificed large numbers of humans throughout). This idea of sacrifice is different to the cultures before them (where energy mostly passed into the human realm) and the transcendent deities we’re more familiar with now (who don’t need fed). In all case the rulers act as intermediaries between gods & humans, and this provides a justification for why so much needs to be given to the ruler & why he must keep his people prosperous (so he can provide the gods with what they need) and a culturally safe avenue by which the ruler can be criticised (the accusations are couched as not upholding his duties to the gods).

Podcasts

• The History of Egypt
  The rest of Siptah’s reign – the possibility that the king isn’t very healthy and that’s why power isn’t really wielded by him, and the chancellor Bay’s seeming inexorable rise until suddenly he is executed.
• The Bunker
  
  • an episode with Alexis Conran about whether your phone is listening to you (yes if you have your assistant switched to use voice) and how that isn’t the problem for why it serves up ads that seem a bit too uncannily targeted (all the apps on it are tracking every other thing about you and building a profile that knows you better than you do, and knows where you go & who you meet)
  • an episode about spiders, the myths & folklore
  • an episode about misperceptions of crime, where it’s actually necessary to hold two things in one’s mind at once – crime is down overall, in particular major crimes like murder, but some crime is up significantly, for instance shoplifting which is much more obvious on an everyday basis
  • Monthly Hot Takes, the main story this month was the Andy Burnham speech and the right wing reaction to it, the non-serious one that caught my attention most was a column about parents tracking university age children which is a phenomenon that appals me
  • Weekly Wrap Up, the big story was Andy Burnham’s speech as that really has energised the left (and sent the right wing commentariat into a flap)
  • an episode about relations between Britain & Germany beginning in the 18th Century when obviously it was very good, and going through to now via the 20th Century when it was very bad
  • an episode about far right parties in Europe and the various ways they are & aren’t being kept from power
  • Start the Week, covering the Conservative conference that’s coming up & Kemi Badenoch’s pamphlet that’s basically a manifesto, the Greens conference that just ended and how the membership voting in a frankly anti-semitic policy (Zionism = racisim, the desired outcome is a single Palestinian state) is both a disgraceful thing to do in general and also isn’t going to play well in the by-election this week where Zack Polanski is standing as a candidate
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with a man from Trinidad & Tobago who has worked in the field of drug demand reduction both in Trinidad & Tobago and in the UK, but has run into problems with new UK immigration rules
• Oh God What Now
  
  • bonus episode covering Andy Burnham’s conference speech, which set out a hopeful & radical vision of where he would like to take the country
  • main subject of discussion was obviously the Labour conference and a more in depth look at Burnham’s speech – they are generally in favour and pleased to see someone articulating a vision for where to go and also pleased to see him treating the electorate like grown-ups who should get to have an informed discussion, also talked a bit about the Fairford affair which is seeming more & more bizarre (not only are all the men out on bail quite quickly but one of them actually rang 999 about it himself)
  • covered both the Conservative & Green conferences – Badenoch’s manifesto (which they found a bit thin despite this pretence of having lots of heavy weight political policy in it), and that awful new anti-semitic Green policy. Also talked about the Man City business, which is turning political in a foreign policy way as the Abu Dhabi owners are making threatening noises about stopping investment in the UK if they are punished for breaking the football spending rules for the last decade.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • an entire episode discussing Burnham’s speech which both were taken with, in terms of both vibe & content
  • Q&A episode, amongst other things covering Xi’s visit to the US, the Orange Order march that’s trying to happen in NI and threatening the peace there, the breakdown into civil war in Ethiopia
• Empire
  
  • moving on in the story of Stalin to The Great Terror
  • the battle for Stalingrad, which is a pivot point in the Second World War where Hitler starts losing
  • looking at Putin’s obsession with Stalin and how he’s using this part of Russia’s history to bolster his current war, with Fiona Hill as their expert
  • starting a new series about the Norman conquests (not just the 1066 one), starting off with the Norman origin story and looking at how Viking they actually were
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Q&A episode where for show & tell Hannah geeks out about fountain pens (prompting me to wonder if mine is still functional, but to be honest it’s like with tea – other people geeking out sounds so neat but I always turn out not to have that level of appreciation (tho it beats Michael geeking out about pencils, coz that didn’t inspire any desire to copy cat it))
  • an episode about fire, both what it is and a discussion of why we like sitting looking at a fire (particularly with other people) which morphed into a discussion more generally about soft fascination and how that’s a useful part of one’s life
  • Q&A episode where the show & tell thing was a Japanese skill game like ball & cup (so didn’t work audio only), the questions included could you go right through Jupiter but the answer is not really as the gas in the centre is a pretty sluggish liquid (even if not quite solid)
  • an episode about witch hunts and why we accuse innocent people of things they haven’t done, and how confirmation bias means that’s so hard to defend against (I think Hannah is in the current series of Celebrity Traitors)
• The History of China
  
  • The end of the Second Opium War, which includes the deliberate destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing by the English & French – as a response to the Emperor’s atrocities committed on the people he was supposed to be negotiating peace with. At the end the British are keen to prop up the Qing as they now owe the British a lot of money.
  • Back to the Taiping Rebellion which is still ongoing and still regards the Europeans as potentially friendly despite the changed situation (which they don’t yet know about), and that costs the Rebellion a victory as they wait in order not to inconvenience the British.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • two main parts, one on Hegseth’s speech where he uses pretty bigoted language to talk about how he’s remaking the military into a testosterone-fuelled “Christian” organisation, and the other on the Republican senator who made a tit of himself thinking he had a gotcha that “proved” the guy involved in investigating Trump’s involvement in Jan 6 was corrupt (the gotcha relied on some sports game the guy hadn’t been at)
• The History of Philosophy
  
  • to mark the 500th episode of the main sequence he’s doing some special episodes of interviews with experts filling in some of the gaps he left (as with all projects it’s expanded in scope as he’s gone along), this one was about Sappho
  • an episode about Herodotus & Thucydides and how the history they were doing is not quite the same thing conceptually as what we do (for instance they were much more explicitly interested in the recent past or even current affairs)
  • an episode about St Paul, and situating his philosophy as a development of the Stoic tradition
• The History of England
  James II & VII thinks everything is going swimmingly, he’s pushed through his reforms to let Catholics hold government office again and now he has a newborn son who’ll grow up Catholic and keep England Catholic forever. His (Protestant) subjects and (Protestant) daughters are much less pleased with this state of affairs.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  A second interview with Mustafa Suleyman (just Rory, not Alastair), which … well, I don’t have the same worldview surrounding AI so it’s pretty toothgrinding even tho it started off promisingly (Anthropic are idiots who think they have made god in a box, on which we agree, but the “harm” is not that this anthropomorphism will unleash dangerous god-like AIs, but more that people’s brains are being fried by their departure from any basis in factual reality). I may’ve ranted to J about this episode for quite some time while we were having dinner.
• Talk 90s to Me
  An interview about Andrew Weatherall, a dj who remixed a lot of iconic songs of the 90s.
• In Our Time: The Garamantes
  The Garamantes were a large, sophisticated, urbanised, agricultural society that existed at oases in the Sahara Desert from roughly 1000 BCE through to 600 CE. Despite Roman & Greek dismissiveness they were a key part of trade across the Sahara linking Egypt to West Africa & the Mediterranean Coast to sub-Saharan Africa. I was particularly struck by how even as the Romans got better knowledge of the Garamantes they started to refer to them as nomadic hunters in texts – so people had been there but the received wisdom was less accurate than Herodotus had been centuries earlier when he was working from hearsay.
• Your Time Your Way
  How to get back on track if your system falls to pieces and you seem to have too much to do all at once – stop, figure out the one most important thing to work on next and explicitly renegotiate other commitments so that you have the time to complete the most important one.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  First part of a series on the biography of Aphra Benn, a Restoration playwright, in this episode focusing on what little is known of her early life plus her time as a Royalist spy
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An overview of Han ideas of cosmology.

TV

• England v. Czechia (2-0)
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  Episode 4 looked at the development of more sophisticated instruments, using the guitar (older than you think) and the piano (younger than you think) as case studies. It also talked about recorded music (focused quite heavily on vinyl) and programmed music (starting the latter with those pianos that could play music from a roll of paper with holes in).
• Paris to Rome with Bettany Hughes
  Episode 2 took us to Venice and then Bologna and slightly further into Italy, still very shallow but a bit less “bumping into” old friends
• Wilderness with Simon Reeve
  Season 2 of this, and I looked back at my notes for season 1 which mostly boiled down to “… and this is why I’m a city girl”. This season is no different! First episode in a rain forest in Papua New Guinea hunting for a particularly rare sort of tree kangaroo (these animals occupy the monkey niche) to film it for science. They did find the tree kangaroos, but they also found a lot of very big insects which left me doing that whole startle at dark splodges on things for a while afterwards.
• England v. Croatia (7-0)
• Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
  Third episode was looking at how the Athenian democracy grew out of a very violent period of Greek history, in the wars against Persia and the war between Athens & Sparta. And at how the system only worked because there were many slaves to do the actual work.

Games

• Diablo IV
  We’ve continued to make a lot of progress, zipping up the Season Ranks quicker than usual this season as we’re up to Rank V already and the capstone for Rank VI feels in reach.

Talks

• “Revisiting North Saqqara: From Archives to Soundscapes” Sergio Alarcón Robledo
  The talk was in three sections. The first half was his use of modern photography & GIS techniques to identify sites within the North Saqqara necropolis that are only documented in assorted plans & photographs from archives and limited publications. He’s had a lot of success where he’s actually got archival data to work from. The second half broke into two. The first part was looking at the use of the structures over their lifetimes. Normally we think of a tomb’s lifecycle as construction → burial → post-mortem cult. However there’s evidence that there were earlier phases of ritual use before the burial, and that the structures were remodelled in order for the burial to take place. He drew parallels with the funerary enclosures at Abydos, where the kings had both a tomb and nearby enclosure, he suggests that these were the same idea but occupying the same space at different times (and at a much smaller scale). The second part was how he’s investigating the architecture of the tombs. He’s beginning with audio, and looking at how the walls affect what you can hear when people speak in different places within or outwith the building.