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Mark O&x27Connell

Mark O&x27Connell

The Irish Times

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Government has sent a clear message to the far right: arson and violence work

23.03.2025 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

St Patrick’s Day is a celebration of the bits of our culture that are not worth celebrating

09.03.2025 6

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

How ‘non-player character’ became a potent insult for the digital age

02.03.2025 7

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

If mirrors in the sky are our best hope of saving the planet, we’re in trouble

23.02.2025 6

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Washington DC feels like a city benignly anticipating its own ruin

16.02.2025 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

It’s degrading to have to take anything Elon Musk says seriously, but he’s right about one thing

25.01.2025 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Peter Thiel, big tech’s chief conspiracy theorist, says the state is keeping big secrets from us. And he should know

18.01.2025 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

If you find music on Spotify increasingly bland, it might be the ghosts

12.01.2025 30

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

There’s nothing magical or airy about artificial intelligence, it’s a machine of exploitation

“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” wrote the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C Clarke, “is indistinguishable from magic”. This...

04.01.2025 20

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

There is something delusional about your frantic trips to the recycling bin

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...

28.12.2024 6

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

The mystery is not why we Irish have responded to Israel’s barbarism. It’s why others have not

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the historian Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi, who recently retired as professor of Modern Arab Studies in Columbia...

21.12.2024 2

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

This woman went viral. You won’t believe what happened next – except, of course, you will

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...

14.12.2024 5

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Why is an obscure PhD on the politics of smell causing outrage online?

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...

08.12.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

We are up to our necks in a rising tide of AI-generated slop

Earlier this month the journal Scientific Reports published a peer-reviewed paper examining whether ordinary readers could distinguish between...

30.11.2024 4

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

I’m not across all the conspiracy lore around Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, but the gist is that he’s a CIA asset

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...

24.11.2024 5

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Michael O’Leary wouldn’t employ teachers. I wouldn’t hire him to campaign for me

Like many people who watched the now-infamous recording, shared by the Westmeath Examiner, of Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary disparaging...

15.11.2024 3

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Matthew Miller has the most despicable job in the US but it seems like he is enjoying it

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...

08.11.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

I’ll take my praise where I find it, even if I have to generate it myself

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,...

25.10.2024 2

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Glitch, glitch. Watching Trump dance for 40 minutes was like watching an empire buffer

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...

18.10.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Elon Musk makes being a billionaire plutocrat look profoundly uncool

As a writer with an interest in observing the lurid symptoms of terminal-stage capitalism, I feel strangely grateful for the omnipresence of Elon...

12.10.2024 30

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Can AI ever replicate human art? Maybe that’s the wrong question

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,...

06.10.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

The illusion that the language of human rights carries any moral weight is over

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...

28.09.2024 8

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

I’ve spent time with a would-be presidential assassin, but Ryan Routh is an enigma

The most recent apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump raises a series of absurd questions. How many more assassination attempts on Trump...

21.09.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

When I found my book on Blinkist I wasn’t sure how affronted to be

Whenever I pass through the Smart Thinking section of a bookshop, I invariably think of the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. Calasso,...

14.09.2024 5

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

I salute Oasis as the comrades they have lately become

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...

07.09.2024 4

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

Ireland’s far-right activists don’t want what they say they want

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...

31.08.2024 3

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell

We are prioritising all the wrong kinds of weirdos

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....

25.08.2024 10

The Irish Times

Mark O&x27Connell