A dim, rainy afternoon in August. This summer was not meant to be warm. We didn’t get a chance to shake our wintered souls. We lived in a sort of trapped heat, a fishbowl that had the skin of an overcast sky, blocking any escape for humidity. Sweating in the rain underneath a puffa jacket … Read more
Yesterday, I met George. Several times before I’d seen him working on my corner, where Pontchartrain Boulevard crosses Veterans Boulevard. For our part of New Orleans, he was unique. George was black, very black, and very strong. Very strong and yet very confined to a wheelchair. From a hundred feet down the street, I’ll tell … Read more
To My Fellow-Citizens in the Supreme Court, I write this letter because I think your decision in the Angela Kerins case creates a crisis in the government of this country. It will be critical of that decision and of some decisions of your predecessors, but please do not react to it defensively, or reject it … Read more
Under normal circumstances, developing a bus network should confer great benefits on a city: it is cheap, quick to implement, and causes little disruption. Yet, remarkably, the BusConnects plan manages to achieve precisely the opposite effects. Furthermore, ever since BusConnects has been on the agenda, it has diverted public attention away from other improvements that … Read more
In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara. In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term ‘Connemara’ was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the … Read more
SINGLE. That’s what my train ticket says. It sticks out in the rain like a young tongue between the teeth of an old machine’s slot. Besotted as I am with the tingle to mingle, naturally I snatch it whispering, ‘Thanks a lot.’ Koreans claim a girl is gold till she’s old. Silver tarnishes on the … Read more
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called for more stringent Internet privacy and election laws saying, ‘We need a more active role for governments and regulators.’[i] In advocating what amounts to censorship, he seems to have at least awoken to the Promethean beast he has summoned. It opens a dangerous vista, however, and is hypocritical for … Read more
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock. Charles Lamb In 1954, when I was aged nine, my youthful uncle, aged twenty-five, returned to Ireland from … Read more
I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, … Read more
Entering the dragon’s den I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are … Read more