Anger seems to drive our world. People were understandably and rightly angry when they were left without power or water for weeks after recent storms. However, much more toxic anger is weaponised to generate profit for cynical operators. It has been known for a long time that engagement with online content and therefore online advertising…
Jen Hogan writes a regular feature for The Irish Times, in which people in the public eye are asked the same series of questions. They range from “How agreeable are you?” to the much more serious “What do you expect to happen when you die?” I have been trying to figure out why the majority…
Recently, I was sent a video of Donald Trump tenderly cutting Kamala Harris’ hair. It was obviously a fake but good enough to cause a quick giggle. Reading last August that a private school in London had instituted the first fully AI classroom was not quite so funny. David Game College charges 20 young people…
I love the time after Christmas Day. The preparations that take up most of December are over. It’s a time to relax with family and a good book or six. The quieter days of the Christmas season lend themselves to reflection. For our family, it has been a momentous year. In August, our elder daughter,…
Sometimes, political spouses change history. Annabel Malinauskas, wife of the premier of the small state of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. She then turned to her husband and said, ‘You had better effing do something about…
It’s the time of the Feast of Christ the King, which marks my annual one-woman Advent restoration campaign. In CS Lewis’ book, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe the reign of the White Witch in Narnia means that it is always winter and never Christmas. In our culture, we suffer from a similar problem, except…
I have lovely neighbours of whom I am very fond. However, I am not fond of their Hallowe’en display, which consists of two ugly witch-like figures sitting somewhat incongruously on deck chairs. A motion-activated sensor sets off vicious cackling and screaming while the figures bob up and down as though possessed, including in the middle…
If you listened to Democratic campaigners in the US Presidential elections, late-term abortions do not happen in America, or they happen so rarely that they are not worth mentioning, or they only happen in cases of life-limiting conditions and threats to the life of the mother. Lyman Stone is a Lutheran demographer who works for…
Surrogacy in Ireland was legalised in June with virtually no critical media scrutiny. Even when the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission’s (IHREC) Third Annual Report on Human Trafficking strongly criticised part of the legislation, serious and concerning issues remain quietly buried. IHREC Commissioner, Ms Noeline Blackwell, explained on a recent Morning Ireland programme that the…
Vanity Fair recently published an article by Kathryn Joyce with a headline designed to stir controversy: ‘Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity Conversion Industrial Complex.’ A bit like Kamala Harris, the article is all about the vibes and is short on details. Or rather, it is drowning in details but it does not add up to…
