[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

“It is often said that many nonfiction books should really have been magazine articles; this one feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages.” —Mark O’Connell on Palantir’s founder’s first book

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

Terrible book, terrible guy, great magazine

Yes, in the same way your thermostat suffers from the pain of burning

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Instagram ads have gotten exponentially worse recently, right? Just an endlessly encroaching tide of slop and cheap scams

The NYT talked to @jenniferwalshe.bsky.social and me about MARS, which opens tonight at Galway Arts Festival

This is such a terrific piece of criticism

Hell yeah! Let’s fuckin DO THIS!!!

Oo remembers lying awake after dinner at Combray for maman to give you a goodnight kiss?

LMFAO

The outcome of the last ten years or so of culture is governments doing cancel culture on behalf of a military death machine

The IDF killed three British aid workers last year. The UK refuses to investigate Israel for killing its citizens but will investigate British people for cursing the IDF www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Don’t tell me about a thing being “downstream of” another thing. I don’t want to hear it, and I won’t listen to it!

This is an X screenshot I can get behind. No more J.K. Rowling screengrabs, just Bryan Johnson being delusional about how well his age reversal project is going

Patrick Collison here, illustrating a mindset that is, in many ways, a simple misunderstanding of life itself

For those of you who were simply too lazy to read my essay about MrBeast and the attention economy yourselves, here's me reading it for you www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2...

thinking again about this 2018 cover

Seems a little drastic, he could just shut them down in the normal way

"noice" bsky.app/profile/zack...

(sliding out from under The Gyre on a mechanic's creeper, covered in grease) okay, bad news

This is on Thursday, and my last gig until after the Summer. @urchinette.bsky.social @mrkocnnll.bsky.social and @prasifcat.bsky.social Tickets went in a couple of days but as there are frequently cancellations, @booksupstairs.bsky.social keep a wait list: booksupstairs.ie/all-events/w...

‘Postliberalism’ is mainly books with titles like ‘The Fate of Civilisation and the Death of God at the End of the West’ by men with backgrounds as investment analysts

I worked in a hotel during a golf tournament when I was 18, and brought room service to Tiger Woods, who was sitting on a couch in his underwear watching himself play golf on tv

This essay is the best description of Mr Beast I have ever read: His oeuvre is “a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all,” and he “may not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve.” via @mrkocnnll.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

every year there is a new pr blitz about a hardcore band whose gimmick is Not Being a Hardcore Band

This is basically like Christmas morning for me, the guy who goes around posting "and this surprises you how?" under people's political tweets

This is just deeply, deeply sad

Sweet Christmas, this is a good piece on somebody that I don't really enjoy. These fragments from @mrkocnnll.bsky.social really speak to the primacy of MrBeast and how he may be the perfect emblem of Where We Are Now. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

Buying the second most venerable newspaper in American just to turn it into the Huffington Post is absolutely incredible. Only a true genius could have come up with this

A problem with The Mountainhead is that it’s kind of a stretch to believe billionaire tech founders coming out with the kind of viciously witty lines Jesse Armstrong writes, in a way that it somehow wasn’t with the Murdoch-style old media bastards in Succession

One of the great editors. Not only did David countenance 5,500 words of MrBeast exegesis, he suggested the idea and made the piece the best version of itself it could have been. He also let me be just a shade more pretentious than he was comfortable with, for which I'm also grateful

I did not wake up this morning looking for profound insight into MrBeast’s whole deal but @mrkocnnll.bsky.social has provided it

If you woke up this morning longing to read an essay about MrBeast that quotes Walter Benjamin, you're in luck. @mrkocnnll.bsky.social on the Junklord of Misrule is depressing, hilarious, bang-on: www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

Definitely closing off the ticket list for this later today as we're pretty much full as it is. Last call to come see me have fun with @prasifcat.bsky.social, @mrkocnnll.bsky.social and @urchinette.bsky.social...

You know the way you've always wanted to read a 5,500 word critical close-reading of the oeuvre of MrBeast? Well I have written exactly that www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

In a racist society, it is not enough for roundabouts to not be racist, roundabouts must be anti-racist

🔥 WRITEHAWKS at Books Upstairs 🔥 Thurs 19 June @rickoshea.bsky.social with another wonderful panel of writers: @urchinette.bsky.social @mrkocnnll.bsky.social & @prasifcat.bsky.social to wax lyrical about some of their favourite books, booking essential : booksupstairs.ie/all-events/writehawks4/

My column this week is about the Trump administration’s farcical attempt to accuse South Africa of a “white genocide”

very cool that for ten years people at the heights of political commentary insisted to the point of rage that the paramount threat to free speech was “censorious” college students

My column this week is about Louis Theroux’s The Settlers www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

The American right is simply going to have to try harder if it’s going to produce a counterculture

i love how insane everyone is becomeing

I wrote about Gaza, and about writing about Gaza www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Want to come to the Royal Irish Academy and hear @mrkocnnll.bsky.social Brian Rossney & myself discuss AI & creativity? Sold out but a few returns now available for tonight www.ria.ie/events/disco...

I wrote about the government’s quiet capitulation to the anti-immigrant right’s tactic of violence and intimidation www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...