Recent Articles
New Year, Same You
It’s a new year! Somehow, it feels more honest to just acknowledge that fact without adding the customary ‘Happy New Year’. So far, ‘happy’ isn’t an adjective I’d associate with the first two weeks of 2022.
The best of 2021
Before the calendar flips over to another year, I wanted to share a few of my favourite things from 2021. In general, I have consumed less this year. My life has been full and I’ve been deeply focused on my own work which left less time for consuming other people's work. But there has been some great #content (hate that word!) in 2021 and I wanted to take a moment to collate it.
My year in writing (2021)
2021 has been a strangely shaped year. It was our second pandemic year, the year when living through all of this became somewhat normal. When I look back on the life I had in December 2020, I’m struck by how much has changed. It hasn’t been an easy year, but I am very grateful for the fresh joy that has arrived in my life over the last 12 months. Before the calendar flips over to another year, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my writing year.
A poem + some recs
No newsletter this week. Just like everyone else, I’m scrambling to get everything done by the end of the year. I’m also working on two longer pieces that will be published before the end of the year: a round up of my favourite things from 2021 (tv, movies, podcasts, random things) and an essay about the books I’ve read this year.
Living without the internet
For almost a month, I have been living an internet-less life at home. That’s not fully true - I still have data on my phone so I can check the news, emails etc. But the kind of mindless internet clicking around has been (mostly) absent from my life and I gotta say, it’s been great.
“This is never going to end, is it?”
I was sitting down to dinner with my girlfriend as news of the new Omicron variant broke. As we took the lids of the tupperware and smelled the steaming curry, my heart sank.
Revisiting Obama’s ‘A Promised Land’
"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
That's maybe the best line from Barack Obama's infamous 2008 "Yes, We Can" speech.
The one that Will.I.Am set to music, with a host of celebrities in black and white earnestly reading the lines with their eyes locked on the camera. Reading the speech again now, it seems naive at best. At worst, it betrays the kind of delusional optimism that came to define the former President's time in public life.
Wintering
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but it crucible.”
Is there a better way to write about the climate crisis?
I’ve been trying to formulate a way to write something about the climate crisis that doesn’t descend into fatalistic despair and to be honest, I’m not sure there’s an honest way to do that.
“He took her life, stole her future”
I’m not sure what more there is to say about Sarah Everard’s murder. I’m hesitant to say anything besides offering condolences to the people that loved her, that continue to love her. I can only imagine what it must be like to see the face of a person you love in the paper under a headline with the words ‘rape’ and ‘murder’ in it.
What’s missing from mainstream media coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic
In Ireland, there are probably less than a hundred people in newsrooms across the country who get to decide what’s important, what gets covered and how. Those people are mostly white, male and middle class and the media they produce reflects those biases.
Will it ever end?
Like everyone else, I found out that the grueling level 5 lockdown is likely to be extended to early May (9 long weeks from now) via a newspaper interview. Or, more accurately, via twitter where people were rightly critical that the Taoiseach didn't have either the courtesy or the common sense to share such a significant piece of news in a more carefully managed way.
The Covid 19 pandemic will lead to a loneliness pandemic
As Ireland responds to the Covid 19 crisis, the policy responses and media narrative has focused on families, older people and the economy. But another vulnerable group has been mostly ignored: people who live alone.
The best things I've read/watched/listened to (so far) on the Covid 19 pandemic
I found some comfort and understanding in the following.
From my bunker to yours
Wow, what a weird time. I hadn’t planned to send a note but given how monumentally strange the world has become, I felt the urge to put my thoughts down on paper and send them out into the world. I am well. I am home, cocooning myself away from the risk of contracting a pandemic. If you told me 3 months ago that I’d be writing that sentence, I’d have laughed and then cried.
The best of 2019
I’m sure you’re drowning in ‘best of’ lists, but I wanted to share a few favourites before 2019 ticks over into 2020.
Recommendations (October 2019)
Please enjoy a bumper list of recommendations while I’m getting back to ‘normal’ life.
Recommendations (July 2019)
Summer is not my favourite season. The tight humidity and impenetrable bright-ness usually leave me feeling frayed and over-extended. This year has been no different though I am grateful that it hasn’t been too, too hot.
Should I shave my head?
(coz I kinda already did)
Who should the democrats nominate?
Last weekend, Michael McDowell argued that the democratic party must select a “manifestly mainstream” candidate to face Trump in 2020. I was horrified (though not surprised) to see such a prominent commentator calling for people of colour to stand aside and keep quiet in the interest of the party.
