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![]() Mark O&x27ConnellThe Irish Times |
“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” wrote the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C Clarke, “is indistinguishable from magic”. This...
Around this time of year, in the throes of the great high feast of our consumerist faith, I often find myself thinking of compulsive hoarders, and...
A few weeks ago, I interviewed the historian Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi, who recently retired as professor of Modern Arab Studies in Columbia...
The ongoing trajectory of Haliey Welch’s fame seems to offer, in its very triviality, the prospect of a deep insight into our present culture. You...
If you want to understand the monopoly position that X now occupies within the booming grievance economy of the online right, you would do well to...
Earlier this month the journal Scientific Reports published a peer-reviewed paper examining whether ordinary readers could distinguish between...
Of all the many aspects of our culture that have been degraded in recent years by the internet, and by social media in particular, there’s a case...
Like many people who watched the now-infamous recording, shared by the Westmeath Examiner, of Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary disparaging...
There are not, as far as I’m aware, any silver linings to the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president. In the few moments of...
The other day, I listened to a short and very interesting podcast. Its hosts, a chipper American male/female duo whose names I didn’t catch,...
There’s an idea known as the simulation hypothesis, popular in recent years among Silicon Valley types, which proposes that what we think of as...
As a writer with an interest in observing the lurid symptoms of terminal-stage capitalism, I feel strangely grateful for the omnipresence of Elon...
Toward the end of a visit to Barcelona last week, I found myself with some free time before my flight home, and so I decided to visit Casa Batlló,...
For almost a year now, as Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter and destruction in Palestine has continued, I have had almost daily cause to think of...
The most recent apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump raises a series of absurd questions. How many more assassination attempts on Trump...
Whenever I pass through the Smart Thinking section of a bookshop, I invariably think of the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Calasso,...
I was never much of an Oasis fan. I was 15 by the time their debut album Definitely Maybe came out, and was by then well on my way to becoming the...
The other day, I came across a video on social media of a scene that had recently played out on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal, at Mount Street...
In the later years of his life, the American designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller often told a story about a painful period in his early 30s....