Last year I listened to Power and Thrones as an audiobook. As it regaled from start to finish of the Middle Ages in a thoroughly entertaining way I couldn't help wishing that Mark Corrigan (aka David Mitchell) were narrating it. Mitchell is the perfect comedian for me, wordy, not smug, but not too much self-deprecation. The perfect combination lampooning the past while still possessing a historian's authority.

Well, when I saw he'd written Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens and that he'd also personally narrated the audiobook I felt like the simulation had come up aces. This is the exact kind of content I'd wished for during Power and Thrones, albeit for a much narrower slice. Mitchell is in top form for this book. I'm not the type of person who'll ever piss themselves laughing. The equivalent for me would be a short, audible chuckle. And by those standards I was doing the equivalent of pissing everywhere. It's the first audiobook I've needed to slow to normal speed I think ever so that I could catch everything in its rich comical, historical detail.

The only reason I considered not rating this book 5 Stars is because it coasts along through the centuries with delightful cadence, then stops abruptly after Elizabeth the First. I understand why it stops there, but I still felt disappointed. But if wanting more is what you feel after a read like this I think you can say it was a good book.

After listening to David Mitchell's voice for so much of the past couple of days he is now appearing in my dreams.

How can you understand the lifecycle of something that lives for hundreds of years? Do trees have brains? These questions and more are asked in The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, a book which I read in about three days this week.

I love trees. They're tall and stoic, so I relate to them. Like Peter, I too feel a sense of serenity and belonging when walking beneath an ancient forest canopy and that is not just because most ancient forest canopies I've walked under have been adjacent to a thriving craft beer industry. There was a day in Switzerland last month where we walked through a forest ever so briefly and it reminded me of the endorphins of hiking in the forests in the Pacific Northwest. Nearly every chapter in this book also gave me that feeling.

In Hidden Life, Wohlleben summarises the results of many studies into trees and tree "behaviour". Do trees have a sense of taste and smell? They can react in different ways to different predators. Can they remember, and count? They respond to stimulus in different ways after being conditioned, and seem to know what time of the year it is. Do they have friends and enemies among their forest neighbours?

The answers are fascinating, though simplified from what I am sure are rigorous scientific experiments. However at times I did worry that the author may love trees too much. A lot of his narrative seems to be personifying natural selection, biology and physics as thought, knowledge and memory. Surely trees don't have brains. What they have is really just chemical reactions and electrical impulses.

Which, I guess, is actually how my brain works as well...

Perhaps the real problem here is that I have personified myself too much.

We started our visit to Paris with the City of Lights walking tour, which concluded an hour before sunset.

Today was our first full day, and it was definitely filled.

Starting early, on a mostly deserted Boulevard St. Michel, we bought café crème from a takeaway store, the first hint that coffee in Paris was not going to compare to Italy.

We then ate crepes on Ile de Cité in a park that wasn't technically open.

After breakfast we needed to find a toilet, a journey that took us across the prow of Ile Saint-Lois (a 17th century planned neighbourhood), over the Seine, past the medieval architecture of Hôtel de Sens and to a small playground where a part of one of the Bastille's towers remains in a fenced off section behind an old gazebo.

No plaque, but a little bit of trash.

Between that point and our first afternoon nap in Paris we walked up the canal of Port de l'Arsenal, visited Place de la Bastille, had another average coffee among the shops of Marais, visited Place des Voges for further review of seventeenth century urban planning.

One of the first planned, public squares for recreation. Circa ~1604. Still going strong in 2023.

Then we visited one of the oldest houses in Paris (now a busy Pho place), had a kebab, and saw more of the canals.

Around dinner time we re-emerged to golden, early evening sunshine and browsed a couple of the many English second-hand Bookstores. As a book lover, these cramped spaces crammed with second hand novels, non-fiction, plays and everything else in narrow aisles and mismatched shelves stretching above my head reminded me of Portland, and were a treat just to be inside. The prices were quite high though.

After the bookstores we commenced a self-guided history tour of the nearby area, concentrated on the Latin Quarter and Île de la Cité. This took us past statues, old churches, parks and streetscapes, and highlighted the many appealing and busy restaurants between Church of Saint-Séverin and Boulevard Saint-Germain. We squeezed in to a table at La Maison de Gyros for an immense plate of chicken kebab, salad, fries and garlic sauce. More chicken in one meal than I think I ate in all of Italy.

Our tour continued after dinner, past the church into Square René Viviani to observe the oldest tree in Paris. There was a paving stone from the original Roman road somewhere around there, but I couldn't spot it before the whistles started to kick everyone out.

We crossed to the island and admired what was left of the Notre-Dame. An amazing building, and with all its scaffolding a reminder that even city staples that feel like they might last forever could one day be whittled down to a hard to find paving stone in a small garden.
Fortunately, the gargoyles withstood the flames. And we learned about the difference between gargoyles and grotesques, and added a few museums to the to do list.

After a further tour of the island, we came up to the O.G. modern Paris landmark the Pont Neuf. According to some French historians, on this bridge in the seventeenth century they invented for the first time "stopping and admiring a river in a city". And whether that's true or not, I do believe that at a time when rivers were full of mud and corpses and the many cast offs of early industry that anything that motivated city planners to take steps to clean up waterways and create walkable places to visit was a huge turning point in world history for people like me who would come to visit centuries later with my camera.

And speaking of walkable cities, we crossed Pont Neuf to the right bank, and then down to the edge of the Seine. As the sun set in front of us we walked four kilometres, never needing to cross a road once. The entire way, on both sides of the river, people sat with picnics and drinks and music. Parisians and tourists. Hustlers sold water, beer and cigarettes. Everyone was happy. A group walked behind us for a few minutes playing Titanium on their portable speaker on repeat and people sang along, which was a nice connection back to Adelaide on a Saturday night in France.

We reached the Eiffel Tower at dusk, paid a Euro for the toilet and then crossed back to a good spot in front of Trocadéro to wait for 11 PM and the light show.

During planning the Eiffel Tower didn't even earn a pin on my map of Paris, but it was worth seeing once. Not just for the spectacle, but to be a part of that huge crowd which spanned both sides of the river and all around me. Everyone was here to be in Paris. The part of my homo sapien brain that likes to conform to social norms was ecstatic. But more than that, during the sparkling that lit up the iron beams, the mood of the crowd carried the sensation that this was one of those moments in life that you look forward to, and that you don't forget. It symbolised the achievements of a species and an individual that allowed me to be born halfway across the world and to then stand here in this historic city for a few minutes. Five to be exact. Then we took the metro back to the hotel for sleep.

I read Edward J Watts book Mortal Republic last week, a recap of the Roman Republic of the centuries BC before it was overcome by autocracy and became the Empire. A book I selected as my next read purely because I was going to fly to Rome soon and it was the first search result for "Rome" that sounded interesting.

It wasn't a bad book, but I find that any time a writer tries to cram multiple centuries into 300 pages or 10 hours it does a disservice to the narratives and personalities at play and relegates fascinating history into sounding something similar to when a new person runs through their CV at the start of a Teams' meeting.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it helped me fall asleep on the flight to Doha. And I completed it yesterday on the second leg.

And boy, if I thought cramming centuries of Roman history into my ears for ten hours straight was tough, that was before I tried doing it with my feet.

Rome, the vibe I'm getting, is that before we invented the internet everyone was either killing each other or carving things out of stone.

The history of Japan after World war two, as described here in John W Dower's Embracing Defeat, reads as a microcosm of human behaviour. War. Money. Fucking while starving. Propaganda photos. Steering committees and subcommittees. Using peoples' culture against them (plans to preserve and repurpose emperor). Cultural appropriating (both ways). Inventing "Joe Nip" and enjoying traditional duck hunting in the same breath. Ego. Hypocrisy. Drafting new constitutions in the restroom. Communism and black markets. Short memories. Ideals of peace sacrificed less than a decade later for more war. No clear line on when the past ended and the future began. No clear narrative or direction, just millions of humans doing what they think is best.

Emperor Hirohito, the same monarch who had led Japan into the war, penned a poem to commemorate the last day of post-defeat Occupation in 1952.

The winds soften, winter recedes
Long awaited
Spring has come
With its double-blossomed cherries

I found this irony particularly palpable. The allegory of a changing season underlying an even more appropriate metaphor for the cyclical nature of life itself, stretching both ways into perpetuity. And the tendency for humans to talk about the weather, also into perpetuity.

Shoshana Zuboff must be an incredibly intelligent person. I know that starting a review of a book with a sentence like that could sound sarcastic when read on the internet, but I mean it. Throughout this book and its broad range of topics it is evident that the author has a comprehensive understanding of - among many things - economics, business, psychology, history, philosophy, and of course technology. I'm potentially as qualified as her to talk about just one of those subjects.

Does that mean I shouldn't review this book? Probably. But because I aim to reflect on the non-fiction that I read in order to absorb it better I shall review it, but with the caveat that the author is a lot smarter than me, and that my opinions are not authoritative.

Why does that matter? Well, a good chunk of the opening section of this book is dedicated to trying to explain that just because you think you're smart enough that tech companies and their disrespect for your privacy won't influence your spending habits/life, you can't know that for sure. No one can, because the pervasiveness of big tech companies is doing something to human civilization that no one has ever seen through to the end before. Not even Napoleon.

That concept was my attitude. I've never really bought anything on impulse because of an aptly timed buy button appearing. I block ads and trackers. I do all my web searches in private browsing mode. Everything on my Facebook is locked down.

If you're like me in those regards, you're not going to learn anything shocking while reading this book. Instead what you'll get is a thorough summary of how Google and then Facebook and the rest adapted their business and operating models to use a huge (gigantic) amount of computing resources to be able to track and classify every person on the planet, primarily for the sake of competitive advantage and revenue from ad sales. And if you think you're exempt from tracking and predictions based on your personality you better hope you've never appeared in the background of a photograph, had a Street View car drive past your Wi-Fi network, or had your Wi-Fi/Bluetooth on in your phone while walking around in a public place.

So if Google, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of the internet is now an orgy of cyber surveillance and pushy marketing that affects most people but definitely not me, what's the big deal? Just because something is unregulated does that mean it's bad?

Probably. The key takeaways for me were:
Governments and society cannot keep up with technological evolutions, or hope to regulate them. This is exacerbated by the fact that both governments and corporations are essentially just people, and quite often they are people with motives of making money. And sometimes (often) there is overlap between people in big tech and people regulating big tech.

This is bad for humanity in general because of the opportunity costs for building a better world.

The book describes a learning and teaching divide, where public advancement of machine learning, AI and data mining is held back because established companies hire the best people and patent their ideas for the sake of competitive advantage, i.e. to charge more for ads for things. If some of those resources were turned towards other endeavors like combating climate change, poverty, exploring space, etc. humanity might be able to advance further in my lifetime.

Instead this type of capitalism is fuelling overconsumption. If society could buy a little less impulsively, in lower quantities, there are a lot of material benefits. Less consumerism equals less pollution and carbon, reduced spending meaning reduced earning requirements. Ramping down consumerism might be what gives us that four day work week and a healthier planet to enjoy it on.

Finally, the impact of this kind of technological immersion combined with poker machine logic JavaScript functions has never been measured in the youth. The book refers to many peer reviewed studies that describe the negative implications for the psychology of young people. And it doesn't sound like a good idea that we sacrifice the minds of Gen Z and future generations to the "machine zone" for the sake of increased profits.

These threats appear to be material, but I didn't like how Zuboff uses strawman arguments to paint the evils of future technology against dumb policies that can't stop it. After bestowing so much credit to artificial intelligence, I don't see evidence that "humanity" can't be programmed into the governing processes and software policies.

The stanzas of sonnets that open each chapter give some contrasting artistic imagery to scientific subjects of economics and computer science, but in Part 3 in particular I feel the argument gets too poetic. After all, do Zuckerburg or the Google board really want to be the heads of a totalitarian government? Or just make a lot of money? Or are their motives irrelevant? There's no doubt these companies possess incredible, possibly unregulatable power over markets and people. As the book points out, the power to make power means even if not evil now, they may already be on an unstoppable path.
Does this mean we will never be able to "live free in a human future"? I don't know. I'm not that intelligent.

In a conversation with Vanessa one sunset in late summer we were discussing how there had been no women in power in western history until recently. The exception to this that came to mind was Cleopatra. I didn't know much about her, beyond whatever tropes I'd seen in cartoons as a kid and a university student, but I was suddenly intrigued. Who was Cleopatra? And how come she got to have a fanny and be in charge of Egypt? To answer this specific question I employed Joyce Tyldesley's book Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, which was excellent. I placed a hold at the library and the library service shipped it to Adelaide for me to pick up at my convenience which was also super handy. That has nothing to do with Cleopatra or Napoleon but I just wanted to shout that out.

Writing a biography on a historical figure from classical antiquity is a bit of a trip. It's like being a private detective trying to solve a murder but all the suspects and witnesses are also dead and the police and the detectives are also dead. The crime scene has been defaced several times and then a hundred years ago was dismantled to be used as raw materials for a sugarcane factory. Is that torn piece of parchment used to wrap a mummy in a tomb 50 years after Cleopatra died that has her name on it evidence she was ruling and signing decrees? Maybe it is, maybe it was one of the other six Cleopatras. Maybe it was one of six million mummified Ibises.

Cleopatra's story was very interesting. Almost definitely because the majority of its primary sources were Roman writers who had vested interests in using her for propaganda and entertainment. I can only imagine what contemporary history would be rewritten as if all that the historians of the year 4023 have is access to a smattering of archived Tik Toks. Most of the artwork and records of Egypt were destroyed or lost between 33 BC and the invention of the paperback.

There was one piece of evidence of Cleopatra's reign that nearly survived to modern times. A temple depicted Cleopatra and her family on a stone wall. The stone wall was knocked down in the 19th century, but that was after Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt during which a member of his Armée took down a drawing that survived to this day. There's something phenomenal about the idea of Napoleon and Cleopatra having this kind of tenuous connection over so much time.

Anyway, the answer to the question to how Cleopatra VII got to rule Egypt for quite a long time was due to 1) Her father (the king) dying young 2) Her brothers being too young to rule and then (cough) dying before they could be old enough 3) Cleopatra having a son that was too young to rule 4) Probably being a descendant of Alexander the Great 5) Being on very good terms with two of the most powerful Romans of the time.

This was not exactly an inspirational tale, but it was more inspiring than the history of Ptolemy VIII.

On Sunday I finished reading Metronome by Lorànt Deutsch which was about the history of Paris over the past twenty-one centuries. It wasn't a heavy book in any sense of the word, but I did feel lightheaded at the conclusion of the final chapter. I could feel the spirit of like a billion people living and dying, ebbing and flowing through history on the same island in the same river adjacent to the same marshes, cathedrals, and Roman ruins. Life took on a surreal vibe where fortresses were now cobblestones and chapels were found five layers of a parking garage below ground.

The inebriation of history that washed over me was definitely not because I've been at Flinders University lately, ebbing and flowing all over the same campus I lived and died on two decades ago. The weird feelings that being back there triggers in me are solely narcissistic.

I do think that appreciating history gives you a viewpoint on your own existence that differs from the average person. I took my shirt off in the Flinders' car park yesterday afternoon so I could don a more lightweight outfit for the drive through peak hour traffic to home. I don't think my self consciousness would have let me do that in 2003, but as a student of history I now think to myself, "What would a Middle Ages Parisian being slaughtered by a Viking care about seeing my nipples in public in 2023 right now?" And if they conceivably wouldn't give a fuck then I don't either. I presume they'll forgive any implications I'm a heathen because they are too busy dealing with plague or famine or civil unrest.

I mean ironically I was a student of history in 2003 at that actual university, but that was in the humanities building and not the car park. Maybe it's not my perspective on life that has changed since then, it's my perspective of my nipples.