Margaret

Books

• “Eyes of the Void” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Wednesday 15 April 2026. Continues on from “Shards of Earth”, and is still very much reminding me of The Expanse in that there is a vast external threat, so everyone is bickering amongst themselves and ignoring the threat. In fact going so far as to kick off actual wars rather than focus on said threat. There’s a lot in this about ownership, particularly ownership of people (in the broad sense of people), and about how sometimes the deal you make in desperation can have costs that you might find worse than the situation it got you out of. And about consent and agency more generally, can you really consent if your culture puts huge weight on doing what society needs of you regardless of personal preference? What about if you don’t know the costs going in, what then? I don’t know where the next book in the series is going, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be what seems inevitable at this point (genocide would be very thematically at odds with the rest of the series so far).
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Chapter 3 looks at the question of what counts as an “early civilisation”. Trigger goes through some other definitional attempts, in order to point out that providing a checklist doesn’t work – for instance some previous definitions rule out the ancient Egyptians which would seem ridiculous. Trigger’s preferred framework is that the key point is that an early civilisation has replaced social organisation on the basis of kinship with social organisation on the basis of class. That doesn’t mean kinship has gone away, nor does it mean that there were no classes before, but the primary organising criteria has changed – my brother has an in with the king might get you a better elite job, but you’ll still be part of the ruling elite even if your family isn’t best buddies with the royals. I’m partway through the bit where he’s talking about what separates an early civilisation from a later pre-industrial civilisation. He’s talked about money of some sort becoming the way you measure wealth, and also talked about even more complexity in social organisation. And about a switch from the early civilisation where the nature/society/supernatural realms are all one thing conceptually (which lets the king be a divine intermediary with divinities that are part of nature, whilst still being a man), to a later separation of that conglomerate into three separate spheres (so the king is now clearly a man, but might be divinely anointed or protected, and the divinity that does this is not a part of nature).

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • The blockading of the strait (which the guest standing in for Katty Kay approved of as a way of putting economic pressure on Iran, whilst disapproving of the entire rest of the war & the way it has been conducted), plus Trump taking on the Pope & pissing off millions of voters.
  • The way the US economy is looking good if you’re an investor and utterly terrible if you are not, and what that means about the way the markets are responding to Trump’s Iran war (after all, volatility means you get more chances to buy low & sell high). And just how out of touch Trump & his administration are, and how little they care.
  • The Iran war is all that there is to talk about … the subject mostly about how to get out and whether the Trump administration is capable of getting out. And they did actually talk about other things namely the way the people in the top jobs of Trump’s administration are incompetent, in light of recent allegations about the head of the FBI routinely getting so drunk that his security detail bring along equipment to force entry into his room in case they can’t wake him.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Leonardo DiCaprio.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Much boggling over the idea that negotiations might only take 21 hours (which isn’t long enough to finish the initial throat clearings) and quite a bit of chat about the Zelensky interview that I haven’t got to listening to yet.
  • Question time talked about the Hungarian election as its main topic.
  • A brief extra on the new revelations of the Mandelson affair, it’s been revealed he failed his security vetting before being made ambassador to the US, but that was over-ruled. Neither Rory nor Alastair were impressed by the idea that Starmer didn’t know till this week (either he’s lying when he says that or isn’t competent, was the gist of it).
• Empire
  
  • a break in their Mao series to return to talking about Iran, an overview of the now three Supreme Leaders and talk about what the outbreak of war would mean for Iran (this was recorded around a month ago).
  • an episode about Lebanon, Hezbollah & Israel, where the guest is a woman who lives in Beirut near where the Israelis were striking initially (but she’d moved out to an airbnb elsewhere as her dog is scared of the bombing).
  • an episode about the Iran conflict with a guest who is part of the Iranian diaspora, having left in her late teens after the revolution.
• The History of Egypt
  Retelling a story about Khaemwaset that we have from a Ptolemaic text, which is a fairytale about him finding a book with knowledge from the gods and this nearly bringing ruin to him until he comes to his senses and returns the book to where he found it. The film The Mummy had this as part of its inspiration.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Cognitive ghosts, all the weird ways our minds demonstrate they don’t work the way we think they do, like deja vu, or the way it can feel like you’re going to jump off if you’re high up near an edge (your brain notes you’re scared and confabulates a reason why you’re so scared when it’s not that scary), or how there are people who have brain damage that means that they are blind but still process vision then act on it unconsciously (then confabulate stories for why they did whatever).
  • a Q&A episode, also with some of Michael’s favourite science books. Included a discussion of the optimal way to open the windows in a car to blow air through while you’re driving (front driver’s side a little bit & the one diagonally opposite).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • Their guest was Peter Chappell who has just published a book that games out what might happen if Reform wins (based on what they say they’ll do, and what he predicts would be the results of this).
  • quite a bit on the Mandelson scandal (essentially whilst it’s perfect believable that Starmer didn’t know Mandelson had failed his vetting that says nothing good about Starmer’s operation), plus their guest was the author of a book about the completely fictitious Report from Iron Mountain which is now underpinning the rightwing US conspiracy theories of today.
• The Bunker
  • An episode about the history of (not using) the atomic bomb.
  • Weekly Wrap Up, a bit about the local election campaigning where Labour are leaning in to Reform’s poor track record on “women’s issues”, but also some on Trump v. the Pope & on the Iran war.
  • an episode about Muskism, with the authors of a book on that subject – essentially he seems to think that everything in society, politics etc is downstream of the computer, so controlling the computer means you can shape everything else.
  • an interview with the author of a new history of Europe, his key thing is treating Europe as a cohesive whole even if it’s been politically fragmented, there is a sense of shared values across the whole continent over the last few hundred years & there’ve been multiple attempts to create some sort of unified Europe.
  • Start the Week, the Mandelson scandal again, plus a bit more on the Iran war.
• The History of Byzantium
  The legends that grew up around the death of the last Roman Emperor – Arthur-ish tales of how he would come back and restore Constantinople.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Another episode where Crowther talks to friends about objects that are quintessentially English (different friends to the one on the main podcast feed, different objects too).
• More Jam Tomorrow
  British Guyana, and the way it gained independence (less violence here than other similar stories but a lot of rigged elections after the first guy elected had strong communist sympathies).
• The History of China
  The Opium War moving into a new phase where the British man in charge is much more enthusiastic about the war than his predecessor, and is also encouraged to hurry it up as Britain as a whole is distracted by the disaster in Afghanistan. The treaty that is eventually signed makes no mention of opium despite that being the trigger point, and the two sides have drastically different views of what was actually agreed.
• Origin Story
  The story of the General Strike of 1926, which I had heard of but it turned out I knew very little about it – not actually successful unlike what I’d assumed (the TUC called it off and capitulated before it fell apart but it wasn’t clear to everyone it would fall apart), and actually seemed to energise the fascists in Britain at that time.
• The History of Philosophy
  Malebranche’s occasionalism, which is the idea that the things we think are causal (fire causes burning) are just occasional causes and it’s actually God that causes everything, which has previously been discussed in the episodes on Islamic Golden Age philosophy as it was a core part of some of their ideas too.
• Journey Through Time
  Wrapping up their series on McCarthyism and looking at how there is a direct link to the politics of today – Roy Cohn worked with McCarthy during the Red Scare, and worked for & mentored Trump who very much operates by Cohn’s playbook.

TV

• Art’s Most Horrific
  From gory bible stories, to mindfulness aides involving depictions of rotting corpses, to the brutal imagery of the First World War, to images of hell.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Back to the coast, and back therefore to seafood and we won’t be trying the recipes from this one as they were either shellfish or whole fish. Quite a bit about sustainability & the difficulties of climate change.
• Easter Island Origins
  Took us through the standard story (silly natives cut down all the trees to move their great statues then had infertile soil so population collapsed and now we have remnants of a lost civilisation) pointing out how it doesn’t match the evidence on the ground. Rehabilitated Thor Heyerdahl a bit, in that the genetics do show some influence from Columbia pre-arrival of the Europeans as well as the expected Polynesian ancestry, and also they demonstrated that the statues could in fact be walked upright from where they were you just needed to have the base shaped at the correct angle (like the ones found halfway to their destination). The deforestation is chalked up to the rats they brought with them – if you do slash & burn agriculture and then the rats eat the new growth then the forest doesn’t regenerate so eventually you run out of forest, but I wasn’t quite clear why this happened here but not wherever they brought their agriculture & rats from, perhaps it was just the difference in climate that tipped the balance.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Had a longer break than intended, and likely won’t get the pet this season (there’s about a week left at time of posting). But we did blat through the capstone dungeon for Rank III, a bunch of Pits (up to Tier 22, could do 25 and open Torment II I reckon (J is more pessimistic)).

Exhibitions

• Ramses and the Pharaoh’s Gold
  Exhibition of items from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (mostly, some had accession numbers from there but were from Sharm el Sheikh or Saqqara museums). Ramesses II was the king they used as their narrative thread, but the exhibition also included a lot of Middle Kingdom jewellery and a lot of later coffins too. Plus some of the newly discovered animal mummies from Saqqara which felt a little shoehorned in but were neat to see (they include a lion cub and scarab beetles tho they only had boxes those were found in). Highlights for me included the falcon headed coffins of Sheshonq II (one silver, one which had been gold on cartonnage but the cartonnage had (mostly?) rotted so the gold leaf was reconstructed on a modern backing). Also they had the sarcophagus lid of Merenptah which was usurped by Psusennes I, which was rather well displayed with a mirror below it so you could see the image of Nut. There was also a rather fun ostraca with a drawing of a cat herding geese. Overall it was a well displayed exhibition, and when we went it wasn’t that busy so we could spend time looking closely at things. The labels were a bit on the brief side tho. We did the “VR experience” afterwards, which was kinda cheesy but also neat to see two places we’ve been (Abu Simbel & Nefertari’s tomb).

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Got to the end of chapter 2, where I’m taking a break. This was about comparative studies and how he’s used them in this work – for modern cultures you can do statistical analyses of factors across a decent sample size. So you can say things like cultures who feed themselves with a hunter/gatherer method don’t have hereditary monarchies with some degree of statistical significance. For early civilisations there aren’t many you can use so he can’t do as much stats. But he argues that if he can categorise his seven examples into a small number of types then the sample is probably large enough (but if they are all different then it definitely isn’t). Also discussed how he’s picking his examples, which are: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Shang Dynasty China, Classic Maya, Late Aztec, Inca, Yoruba/Benin. Basically there have to be both archaeology and historical records available as you can’t tell everything you need from only one source. So for some this means there’s a narrow window between Europeans starting to write about them & Europeans changing their cultures, but for others they wrote themselves so there’s a wider timespan. This requirement meant he hasn’t got a civilisation from the Indian subcontinent (which he’d like to have) because we can’t read the language of the people who lived in the Indus Valley. He’s also picked civilisations where he can argue that the culture has evolved in place with little outside influence.
• “Eyes of the Void” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Sequel to “Shards of Earth”, and picks up pretty much where that one ends and is still reminding me a lot of The Expanse books in flavour.

Podcasts

• The History of China
  The Opium War continues to escalate from the initial skirmishes – first the Chinese bring in reinforcements but they get defeated, then the English reinforcements turn up and are much more effective.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode about the Iran war from about a month ago (I guess I didn’t notice the topic when it came up in the list). The take home then from the guest was that the thing that’s not been particularly noticed is that it’s already spreading regionally, and even tho that is noticed we’re still not talking really about what’s going on in Lebanon.
  • An episode about the actual currently existing AI harms that we should be worried about, using the then recent Grok creating illegal content fiasco as a jumping off point to think about the sorts of things that are already harmful.
  • Weekly Wrap Up. Which obviously covered the Iran war & the cease fire situation, but also covered Kanye West being kept out of the UK.
  • Start the Week – including the Orban defeat, but also more on the Iran war as well as some domestic politics.
• Empire
  
  • episode 4 of the series about Mao, covering the first decade or so post the Communists taking over China right up to just before the Great Leap Forward.
  • an episode I’d missed putting on my playlist a little while ago – covering the historicity of Homer & talking about what we can & cannot glean from it.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Rory Stewart replaced by Dominic Sandbrook this week, so a bit more leaning on history as that’s his thing. All about the Iran war, and recorded after Trump threatened genocide but before the ceasefire. Included some chat about Trump’s mental state, about if he’s fascist or not (Sandbrook still says no but does think other parts of the Trump regime are, like Miller).
  • Q&A, still with Dominic Sandbrook, talked about NATO, the World Cup, amongst other thing.
  • a short extra bit reacting to the news that Orban lost.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a livestream recorded just after the ceasefire was announced, so all about that.
  • More on the Iran war, talking about how fragile the cease fire seems, but suggesting it will hold so long as the Chinese want it to. Also talking about how the Democrats have done well in recent special elections, but mostly because the swing voters who hate everyone are more anti-Republican at the moment as the Republicans are in charge.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • A bit on the Iran war, some on the rise of the Greens and some on the Kanye West fiasco.
  • Mostly covered the Orban defeat, talking about what it means for Hungary but also to Europe & to the far right groups who saw Orban as the leader to imitate.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, but also a bit of a chance for Hannah to plug the series she’s just made for the BBC that we’re actually watching right now (so being a month out of date on these made it dovetail nicely), so a decent chunk of the episode discussing AI psychosis and how we’re all susceptible to at least a mild form of it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An interview with an expert on the Zhuangzi to round off those episodes. Mostly a compare & contrast with Confucianism but also at the end a note on the similarities with Legalism.
• Literature & History
  An episode covering the Hadiths.
• History of England Shedcasts
  Part two of the history of duels, this one covered duels during their heyday and the slow dribbling out of the custom. I hadn’t realised the final death knell was really the First World War, so much death that courting it by duelling people seemed ridiculous.
• The History of England
  An episode tying in with some nationwide project about objects that are quintessentially English, so Crowther & a friend talked about the 10 they’d pick (which included everything from Cadbury’s chocolate to the Putney Debates).
• Journey Through Time
  The downfall of McCarthy, in large part precipitated by the fact he wasn’t good in the new age of TV – his ability to manipulate how the print press reported on him didn’t help when the hearings began to be televised.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Spain.

TV

• Hunt for the Oldest DNA
  A programme about a project that eventually sequenced DNA fragments from a soil/sediment sample that was over 2 million years old and provided an vision of what the ecosystem was at the time. A story of breakthroughs (first this guy had shown that you could get DNA from dirt at all, then subsequently pushed it back beyond the 1 million year old mark), but also it sounded like his insistence on chasing this had driven several PhD students out of science as they’d been assigned the project then failed to get anywhere with it.
• AI Confidential with Hannah Fry
  
  • This episode had a couple of examples of the ways that driverless cars have gone wrong – a crash where a self driving Uber killed a pedestrian whilst it was being tested, and a crash where a Tesla failed to stop at a stop sign, failed to turn a corner and drove straight off the road into a parked car killing one of the occupants. Fry made the point that developing new tech comes with mistakes, but that this class of mistake was avoidable and the companies should bear a significant amount of responsibility for the accidents – in the Uber case the car hadn’t been trained to recognise pedestrians who weren’t on pavements or crosswalks and also didn’t track or take evasive action when it didn’t know what an object was, so how was that remotely ready for real roads. And in the Tesla case it just didn’t do the sorts of things that the advertising said it would, so the logs show it recognised all the things it needed to recognise but didn’t do anything (and the driver was distracted looking for his phone that he’d dropped coz he thought the car capable of driving itself).
  • The final episode used the killing of the United Healthcare CEO as the jumping off point to talk about the use of AI algorithms in healthcare (but with nods to the wider use). The specific one that seems to’ve triggered the murder (or at least that everyone talks about as the thing the United Healthcare do wrong) is there’s an algorithm that United Healthcare use to determine when people get discharged from hospital – and there’s little to no flexibility so if you’re not well enough you get kicked out not well enough (and it’s systematically recommending discharge dates earlier than the patient is well enough). Fry also talked to someone with a startup that lets you select among IVF embryos for the “best” ones by sequencing the whole genome of the embryo then using AI to predict things like disease risks, but also eye colour, height, IQ. He was unconvincingly anti eugenics.
• Art’s Most …
  A series on art presented by Waldemar Januszczak, each episode of which is Art’s Most something, and this first one was Art’s Most Erotic. Covered a pretty wide-ranging selection of explicit art from prehistory through Pompeii, India, Japan, France & England. Some of which was spiritual or about love, some of which was very much not.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Episode 5 was another inland one, in an area between two rivers so nice & fertile for farming – settled mostly by Italians (at least in the places he visited). Most entertaining section wasn’t Italians, it was on an emu farm, where the emu chicks were a bit over-friendly. Nice sounding beef ragu recipe to try.
• The Roman Empire by Train
  This episode covered some of northern Italy (Parma, Turin) and Nimes in France. We’ve been to Turin, about 13 years ago, so it was kinda neat to see bits of the place that we recognised (as well as a bunch of stuff we didn’t as we were there to see the Egyptian Museum).

Music

• “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus” Roxette
• “Scissor Sisters” Scissor Sisters

Talks

• “Coffins as Magical Machines: Visualizing Ancient Egyptian Funerary Texts in 3D” Rita Lucarelli
  This wasn’t quite what I expected – more about the way she’s using 3D models & VR to bring the study of the texts to life, than about the texts themselves. This is in part a pedagogical exercise – involving students in creating the models, so they photograph & measure the object, and add the annotations to the model or translate the texts. All of which makes them engage with the object & all the knowledge we have about it. It’s also a way of bringing all this information to a wider audience (there’s a website https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bookofthedead/ ). And it’s a way of investigating how the texts worked in practice rather than analysing them solely based on looking at the text in isolation.