Tuesday 13 October 2026 to Tuesday 20 October 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the chapter on Priests, Festivals and the Politics of the Supernatural (and am taking a break for a bit of lighter reading). All these civilisations had public rituals as well as the hidden but more routine cult practices, and these both provided societal cohesion & reinforced the idea of the upper class as the mediators of interaction with the supernatural. Fear of witchcraft was common and had been common in the societies that preceded these civilisation – the focus of the fear had changed tho. Previously it was a way to keep wealthier individuals generous & humble, now it was used by the upper classes to target the lower classes.
• “Spiderlight” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Monday 19 October 2026. Felt like quite a short book, tho I was also quite sucked in to it so perhaps read it quicker. It’s very much a Dungeons & Dragons set up, you can pin point the class of each character in the party except for one and the quest feels pretty straightforward too – tick off the boxes on the prophecy check list & you’ll defeat the Dark Lord. But it’s much more interesting than that sounds – it’s got a lot to say about consent, and coercion, and assumptions (particularly those based on appearances), and what being good means anyway. Quite a few “are we the Baddies?” moments for the characters (and even more time when I was thinking that even if they weren’t). But I still genuinely wasn’t expecting the ending, even tho in retrospect I can see how it’s set up.
• “Green City Wars” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  I’ve really only just started this so nothing to say yet.

Podcasts

• Talk 90s to Me
  An interview with Melissa Auf der Maur, who has recently published a memoir on her 1990s.
• The History of Egypt
  Dominic Perry (the host) being interviewed by Ask Historians podcast.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • main part looking at the last week in public statements from Trump’s administration and how it’s all stuff that would’ve seemed nuts prior to Trump 2, also commenting on their Andy Burnham interview, the situation between the Saudis & the Houthis, the situation in India currently, and what people (and they themselves) thought of Michael Gove as Rory’s replacement
  • the Q&A episode was with Alan Milburn talking about the report he’s about to publish about what’s going wrong such that 1 million young people are not in work, training or education, and how to fix it. Obviously short on detail for proposed policies, but his diagnosis is that there’s two systemic issues. One is that the health-related benefits system in particular gets you trapped on benefits because the system gives no support towards finding a job that you can do & in fact if you try to get a job but it doesn’t work out then you may lose some or all of your benefits in the process. The other is that employers simply aren’t employing young people, a lot of people who want to work are applying for hundreds of jobs & not getting even a form rejection back, and that’s creating a generation who disengage because they’ve been shown that there is no point engaging.
  • start of a mini-series (the rest will be for subscribers) about Alastair’s new book, Persiviliance. Which is about people who overcome the negatives in their life by turning them into positives, being resiliant & persevering. This episode is an interview with Alastair mostly about the bad points in his own life and how he handled them
• The Bunker
  • an episode about a book recording what people were dreaming about in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, as collected by a Jewish woman who escaped to the US in 1939 with her notes, the totalitarian nightmare of life definitely filtered into people’s dreams and in pretty explicit ways rather than via abstract symbols
  • an interview with Margaret Hodge, who has just published her memoir, I’d heard of her as a Labour politician across a long period of time but didn’t know much about her
  • Weekly Wrap Up, mostly concentrating on the war in Ukraine & how Trump is betraying the Ukrainians
  • an interview with a Russian-American journalist who’s just published a book about being locked up in Russia as a suspected spy (he’s not) so he could be exchanged in a prisoner swap
  • Start the Week, amongst other things talking about the riots in France and what might happen in the future election-wise there, what’s going on with the Brazilian elections, Trump going all in with Russia probably out of desperation over high petrol prices
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  
  • an interview with Luke Harding, who’s written a book about Trump & Putin (which he can’t publish in the US as no-one will take it on), there were a round of other interviews with him a few weeks ago iirc
• The Rest is History
  
  • an episode about James Bond, the books & the films (which came out round about the time of the last Daniel Craig Bond film)
  • an episode about all the German chancellors from after the Second World War up to Angela Merkel (who was stepping down at the point this was released)
  • an episode about the Norse Sagas
  • an episode about Macbeth, both the real king and the Shakespeare play
  • an episode with Mary Beard about the way Western civilisation looks back to Rome & Greece and how the subject of Classics interrogates those civilisations
  • first episode of a two parter on Watergate
• Empire
  
  • the Norman conquests of the Celtic bits of the British Isles which happens in the decades after England is conquered
  • the Normans in Sicily, their guest is Peter Frankopan who was definitely keen to pop the bubble of “but they were so tolerant and magnificent”, better to imagine them as the mafia or as characters in Peaky Blinders, and to think of the Capella Palatina (which I rather liked when we visited) as a rather naff piece of nouveau riche bling (think tech bro not aristocrat)
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, where one of the questions got a discussion of doubt and how it’s important to science, and another a discussion of how a lack of curiosity and a lack of doubt can be why people do terrible things
  • an episode about the Navier-Stokes equations, about half of it about the actual equations which are descriptive of how fluids move & is what Hannah Fry worked on a particular application of in her PhD, and about half on the Open AI proof that these fail under certain circumstances (which was one of the great unanswered questions of maths), Hannah made the point that not only was the answer not the actual point of the question it was the figuring out, but also she doesn’t think the solution is an inherently interesting one (there’s a term f for external forces, and they set that to some particular set of terms and then it breaks which still doesn’t tell you a more general answer). They’d recorded the episode before the second dump of 700 or so AI generated proofs of other mathematical questions, so had to insert an extra bit at the beginning to say they were just covering that first paper.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • the main subject was the way that politics now seems to be trollitics – the right in particular competing to wang on about policies whose entire purpose seems to be to upset other people (live streaming executions for instance, but also having the Navy shoot people in small boats, or switching off the asylum system entirely)
  • the main subject followed on from the previous episode – this time about the normalisation of violence & violent rhetoric in society, in particular the masked thugs out on the south coast
• Literature & History
  An introduction to the subject of Season 8 – early Medieval literature of the north western part of Europe. He’s going to be covering Irish, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, and Germanic literature over the next 25 or so episodes, and this episode gave a bit of the historical & geographical context.
• In Our Time: The Evolution of Trees
  Trees are specific sort of plant life which are free-standing tall (over 3m) plants with a trunk and a canopy. They are not a group of plants, and tree-ness has evolved multiple times over the course of evolutionary time. Trees & forests create new ecosystems because of the way they alter the environment (cooling, shade, trapping moisture, providing different levels for other flora & fauna to live in).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Han metaphysics, in particular the five phases and how they underpin the whole structure of the world
• Your Time Your Way
  Building resilience into your system
• The History of England
  A cross over with British Food History podcast, about traditional British foods (and otherwise) – I was surprised to learn that crumbles don’t appear till the middle of the 20th Century and are quite possible American
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump

TV

• Wilderness with Simon Reeve
  The Yukon this time, icy & very remote. Part of it was with some First Nations people, who are still hunting for part of their food supply, an odd mix of traditional methods and modern tech. And then some time up near the Arctic Circle where there should be loads of salmon & thus grizzly bears, but fishing further down the river system means that even tho that bit is protected the wildlife is still suffering.
• Ancient Greece: The Dark Chronicles
  This episode covered the Peloponnesian War (Athens v. Sparta, Athens lose), the subsequent events including the rise of Thebes, and got us right up to the threshold of Alexander the Great.
• For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music
  Tracing the development of jazz from the cross pollination of the music of the Africans brought to the US as slaves with European music & the music of Indigenous people, and pointing out that jazz & the blues underpin most of modern Western music.
• Later … with Jools Holland
  I begin to wonder if there’ll ever be much to our tastes! Royal Blood were not bad, but given we own an album that neither of us listen to it’s not a long lasting like. Shygirl did a track that felt quite Prodigy influenced, but as J said it sounded like the Prodigy on tranquillisers, it was really quite polite.

Games

• Diablo IV
  I think we may’ve got to the point where there aren’t really any big gains to come, just the grind of upgrading glyphs & finding gear that’s a bit better. We’ve just done the Rank VIII capstone, furthest we’ve got I think and are playing on Torment VIII as well. I do think we’ll get quite a bit further tho, just it’ll be slower progress.

Comments

[magid]

I think that aspens are usually considered trees, yet the individual trunk/canopy is apparently usually part of a larger clone system: https://www.nationalforests.org/article/tree-profile-aspen-so-much-more-than-a-tree/

My cousins' other grandmother, who was English, decades ago gave me a copy of The Magpie History of Food, which described foods in different eras of English history, including recipes at the end of each chapter ("that you can make today!"), which had such exciting mysteries to my USian self as "gas mark 3" and "golden syrup". I still have my copy :-)