All music festivals need a tent where you can sit quietly and read.

Politics is now a choice between people offering real solutions to imaginary problems, or people offering imaginary solutions to real problems.

Research 2025. Have had to order a second hand book because the moment anything from Before The Internet becomes part of a controversy From Internet Days, you can no longer find any other information about it online by searching. The now floods the past completely. History gets buried.

Repost for Irish Film Classifications by Damien Owens, because it's just come up in FB memories and it's still *brilliant*.

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

If your novel is set in the recent, pre-cellphone past and your plot depends on a dilemma that would now be resolved with a simple phone call, make sure the reader understands that by having a character say, "Too bad cellphones don't exist yet."

I interviewed the brilliant Brenda Fricker about her harrowing new memoir. Very glad to have met her www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

The right were always the best at cancel culture. It was never really even a competition. Amazing yet predictable how quickly they've jettisoned the free speech grift in order to simply repress their enemies.

A doctor who spoke with The New York Times last week was among those killed when a missile hit a mosque on Friday, as paramilitaries stepped up their brutal siege of the city of El Fasher, reports @declanwalsh.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/w...

I interviewed the brilliant Brenda Fricker about her harrowing new memoir. Very glad to have met her www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

I wrote about Stranded on Honeymoon Island which is a television program and possibly a state of mind www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

Lovely mural up on the North Strand today. There's a few people about the place who like to think it belongs to them and them alone, but it belongs to us all. Thanks to @dwmalone.bsky.social for the pic!

I wrote about Stranded on Honeymoon Island which is a television program and possibly a state of mind www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

What is a scroad? A scroad is a member of a far-right online hate group. They split off from the groinks in 2017 after the Glunt War, which took place on fapchan. One of their members is a U.S. senator

I don’t blame it theconversation.com/the-moon-is-...

Visit from Sky TV repairman this morning along with his BSL interpreter. Was - as you'd expect - as easy as anything. And he fixed the connection problem. More of this as an everyday thing, please.

💯!! @thedublinreview.bsky.social is celebrating its 100th issue🎉 Join @dublinbookfest.bsky.social for a special live broadcast of Arena on November 5th with the journal's editor, Brendan Barrington, plus @patrickfreyne.bsky.social, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, @mrkocnnll.bsky.social, and Cathy Sweeney

In today's column I wrote about the evolution of the teen drama www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

I interviewed Leo Varadkar www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

I wrote this in January, about the issues we face when responsibility for covering the irony-poisoned and extremely-online trolls of the far right, falls to journalists who can't rotate a PDF. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

I interviewed Leo Varadkar www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

The real achievement of Alien: Earth is to finally make Dan O’Bannon’s Dark Star beach ball alien properly scary, by making it much smaller and live in your face.

Nowadays this classic bit of internet nonsense would be done as underwhelming AI slop but there's so much joy in the original human made version www.youtube.com/watch?v=UngE... (also this was pretty much made subsequently as Noah Hawley's Legion)

We need to treat social media as humanity's demented id - which is pretty much what it is - and stop feeling like everything on here is a thought out policy position that requires a response. Everyone on the internet is basically mad & drunk & has a real job/family somewhere they're neglecting.

Amid everything else, I just found out that Westlife is marking their 25th anniversary & the Irish postal service is releasing a commemorative stamp. So it's also time to reshare this article & my campaign for them to tour Africa: www.irishtimes.com/culture/musi...

This book by legendary photography Steve Pyke is out next month. There will be an accompanying exhibition opening at Photo Museum Ireland in Dublin on October 9th, featuring portraits of Irish writers (honoured to be one of them). @lilliputpress.bsky.social www.lilliputpress.ie/products/scr...

An update today on this story: The Irish government today saying that 185 of these Syrian refugees have still not been brought to Ireland from Lebanon. "Further arrivals are scheduled for September & October. These follow the arrival in June of a group of 26." www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024...

I was about to take my first bite of breakfast. Stopped myself just in time. I have no idea if sardines are woke or not and in this climate one must be sure.

I realise this is like trying to argue with the tide but I genuinely think we should just move on and talk about something else at least until we know more, timeline has been tying itself in knots all morning when we could just be talking about.....anything else instead

In today's column I wrote about the evolution of the teen drama www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

Alien Earth is basically those Haribo adverts but with Xenomorphs.

I can't believe I need to have an AI policy! I made it pretty short though: Using AI is cheating, yourself mostly. In addition to the environmental blight created by AI, it makes no sense to use it in your intellectual and creative work. Why would you outsource your innate intelligence?

Three years ago some people were paying £50,000 for a picture of a cartoon monkey

Good writing advice from Marilynne Robinson.

I have reviewed Nick Clegg's book 'How To Save The Internet' and Tim Berners-Lee's book 'This Is For Everyone' for The Observer. I, er, really really did not like Nick Clegg's book: observer.co.uk/culture/book...

This brilliant supernatural, romcom directed and cowritten by my brother David is debuting tonight at the Toronto Film Festival tiff.net/films/eternity

There are conservative positions where folk have a specific take on change & fairness & then there's the weirdly mean-spirited, self-destructively nihilistic & willfully stupid stuff you now see regularly online. It's not conservative at all. It's radical shittiness. It's a pathology.

Remembering the time I was almost lured into joining a lamb cult.

please enjoy watching a adorable little dog named Trip Hazard perform dance choreography that I, a human in my 30s, would absolutely be incapable of executing

I just saw this recent piece from @danielfalcone.bsky.social on 'My Fourth Time, We Drowned'. Thank you to him for engaging so deeply with the book. Hopefully it encourages others to read it too. www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/a... @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social

I’ve been radicalised by Michael D www.irishtimes.com/culture/2025...

I consider Siobhan McSweeney's role in our nation's psychodrama www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

Seriously though it is SO shallow. It’s interesting to listen to them after listening their New York Times colleague Ezra Klein who - wherever you might stand on his politics - really thinks about stuff and asks hard and interesting questions

Those chortling chaps on the New York Times tech podcast somehow remind me of David St Hubbins saying “I believe EVERYTHING I read and I think that’s what makes me a more selective person”

This excellent film Eternity debuts at the Toronto Film Festival this weekend by some guy called “David Freyne” who I may be related to tiff.net/films/eternity

I am a hypermasculine and extremely powerful alpha male. As such my greatest fears are seed oils, rainbows, people who don't look like me being on TV, and preventative medicine. I cannot explain any of these fears and consider that to be your fault.

Fourth secret of Fatima just dropped

I hate this so much