“The flesh is the surface of the unknown.” – Victor Hugo On January 15th, The Food Safety Authority of Ireland announced the discovery of horse meat tainted beef being produced, packed, and shipped from slaughterhouses in the UK and Ireland. ABP Food Group, the company deemed responsible, suspended production in its Co. Monaghan plant. As [...]

Opportunistic (in homage to Ozymandias by Shelley) I met a president from a defunct bank Who cried: “Two smashed and roofless blocks of shops Stand in the suburbs. Near them old and dank, Half built, a parking structure squats, its frame and crumbling top and sides of cold concrete tell that its builder ill these [...]

For six weeks, now, Daniel has been keeping a close eye on them, from behind the curtain at the back room window. Several times a day he has come to check on them, to see what they are doing and how much they are advancing. There are four of them. They arrive every day at [...]

Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of [...]

“In considering who should manage the last days of the decline of an empire, we are paralysed by the thought: If not Barack Obama then Mitt Romney”. William Wall reviews Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion by AK Press

Meeting Marianne Lee is as confusing as ordering Wasabi in your dessert- sweet and interesting with an alarming kick that leaves you wondering what to make of it all for hours afterwards. You know that it’s definitely going to be a little different (one of the songs on her debut album is a homage to [...]

Amy Waldman’s debut novel The Submission rightfully earned its way onto numerous ‘books of the year’ lists at the end of 2011, and was shortlisted for The Guardian’s First Book Award. Waldman, also a succesful journalist, talks to TMO about the novel, 9/11  fiction, and the links between literature and journalism. Martin Amis noted, in his [...]

William Wall argues that election results in France and Greece puts the left/right discourse  firmly back on the map, after thirty years of right-wing hegemony. What is happening is the radicalisation of public discourse, a possibility that terrifies those who benefit most from the status quo. The Eighth of May was the Fête de la Victoire in France. [...]

In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent [...]

Stephen Kelman, Booker prize shortlisted novelist, talks to TMO about Pigeon English, his novel that went from a literary agent’s slush pile to critical and commercial success

The controversy over Galway City Council’s proposal to erect a statue to Che Guevara to commemorate his family links to the city (his mother Anna Elizabeth was a Lynch and born in the city), is indicative of a wider discourse in Irish society. There is already a controversial – and popular – Che Guevara Festival in [...]

Mike Daisey admitted to stretching the truth in his monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, but when tech journalists say that Daisey, as a monologist, had ‘no business’ telling the story in the first place, it begs the question who does, and are they telling it correctly?

A lot of people are cynical about the sexual revolution. Most acknowledge that the new set of sex and dating rules has produced ‘confusion’. Some go so far as to label it ‘anarchy’ that will ‘destroy society’. We are told that women can have sex like men if they want to – that consenting adults [...]

There’s a telling moment, during Band of Skulls soundcheck – on a bitterly cold January night, in a small venue in Bologna, Italy. The three piece from Southhampton, England have been going through song parts individually and together for the best part of an hour, but something doesn’t seem quite right, at least to them [...]

International Women’s Day is at once a problematic and worthy idea; Shoe-horning half the world’s population into a day on the UN’s calendar, along with other hard-pressed categories like migratory birds (14-15 May) and world intellectual property (26th of April) should make you more than a little uneasy, as should the fact that more than [...]

Yesterday, despite a popular outcry and serious objections raised, Ireland’s Minister of State for Research and Innovation Seán Sherlock signed into law the European Union (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2012, a statutory instrument which has been described as Ireland’s version of SOPA. The background to the statute is outlined here and here. When news [...]