How Did We Get Here? Episode 10 From 2010 to the Present Day This final episode of the series was recorded in February 2026, and it does not include the prsent Iran-US war. In Israel,Tel Aviv developed as a high-tech society, while Gaza was embedding a tunnel economy. Israel did not see Hamas as a military threat. In the West Bank was undergoing (still is) a huge expansion of settler communities. With the rise of ISIS, the pivot to China and the Arab Spring, American eyes were elsewhere. The 2016 Abraham accords ignored the Palestinians, and constituted a big prize for Israel, especially bringing Saudi Arabia on-side. There has been such polarization on both sides, that journalist Jane Corbin and Jeremy Bowen both view a two-state solution as impossible now.
Stuff Matters What a fascinating program. In this episode Ed Conway looks at airpods, or more specifically the satisfying snap when you put them back into their case. They snap shut because of neodymium magnets. Early experimentation with what we now can ‘rare’ earths started in Ytterby in Sweden in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They discovered Yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb) and erbium (Er) but there was no commercial use for them. But the discovery that Neodymium makes magnets more powerful has had huge implications for electronics and speakers (hence the airpod). Despite the name ‘rare’ earths, they are not rare but separating them out was difficult until China perfected a way of processing them so that it just took one ‘take’ to process the raw material instead of needing to process separately for each different compound. Deng Xiaoping became a champion of the process and announced that China would become a world leader in the field and he was right: China now processes 90% of the ‘critical minerals’ (a more accurate term than ‘rare earths’). In 2010 there was a conflict between China and Japan over maritime territory and China imposed an embargo on Japan, which reinforced to China just how powerful their leverage was. China used critical minerals in response to Trump’s tariffs, leading to a trade stand-off between the two countries. Western countries are happy to offshore critical mineral production and its attendant pollution to China, until there is a choke-point and then nations start clamouring for domestic production again (until the pressure is off, and then they’re happy to let China have it- and the attendant pollution again.)
The Book Club Episode 7: Frankenstein: Horror, Humanity and Hubris I must confess that I have never read Frankenstein. I didn’t realise that it was an epistolary novel, ostensibly written by Captain Walton, a young and ambitious North Pole-bound explorer, who rescued the crazed Victor Frankenstein. Dominic and Tabitha discuss Mary Shelley and the writing of the novel and the circumstances under which is written, before going on to talk about the book itself. Despite misconceptions that the monster is called ‘Frankenstein’, that is actually the name of the doctor who created him. The book itself does not depict The Creature coming to life. Dr Frankenstein thought that it would be beautiful, but instead he was repulsed by it. In the first chapters the Creature tells his story, revealing a gentle, articulate creature with a moral compass who feels that he is human. He is child-like but springs to violence. There is no physical description of Victor Frankenstein, but we see him as an ambitious, heedless man with a saviour-complex, who takes no responsibility for what he has done. Tabby gave it 7/10, tiring of the relentless self-flagellation, and characters who were representative of a philosophical stance than characters in their own right. Dominic gave it 8/10 as the foundational book of the popular canon.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 