Patrick Freyne

Her own foray into the zine world is also very cool

Gen-Zine: Meet the young people ditching digital for DIY publications and community DIY works, covering a wide breath of topics, historically provided space for marginalised voices and are surging in popularity again

Great piece here from @jadewilson.bsky.social on the return of zines

www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

lede to an irish times article about Harry and Meghan by Patrick Freyne.

A reminder that in 2021, @patrickfreyne.bsky.social wrote the best explanatory lede regarding colonialism and monarchy that I have ever seen. www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

At the Strangers‘ Gate - his memoir of the 80s in New York

“Wherever you were going, the power of sentences lay in their simple additive observations.” Just read that in an Adam Gopnik book and it’s a pretty solid description of good writing

WHEREVER - jesus

There totally is

Few and Far Between by @jancarsonwrites.bsky.social is fantastic, a very moving, strange alternative history, fantasy novel about burying/drowning the past. It’s out in april.

Cillian Murphy: ‘It was one of the greatest weeks of my life. I haven’t talked about it much’ The star of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has been heavily involved in its soundtrack – as music has always been the actor’s most profound inspiration

I interviewed Cillian Murphy and composer Antony Genn about the Peaky Blinders soundtrack

www.irishtimes.com/culture/film...

Cillian Murphy: ‘It was one of the greatest weeks of my life. I haven’t talked about it much’ The star of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has been heavily involved in its soundtrack – as music has always been the actor’s most profound inspiration

I interviewed Cillian Murphy and composer Antony Genn about the Peaky Blinders soundtrack

www.irishtimes.com/culture/film...

Ray D’Arcy: ‘I’ve lost my job and my mother. What’s going to happen next?’ The broadcaster says he thought ‘the sky would fall in’ if he left RTÉ, but his departure has been an ‘enforced liberation’

I interviewed Ray D’Arcy

www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Are we falling out of love with nonfiction? In the early 2020s, readers flocked to books to explain political turbulence. But is the world now too grim to read about – and are podcasters taking the place of authors?

my view on this is that publishers should stop it with the 80k wordcount obsession, so many contemporary non-fic books are obviously 40-50k pieces of work stretched to the extent that they become very boring to read - just let people write cheaper, shorter books! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

I usually prefer shorter books, fiction and non fiction, for this reason - they’re usually the right length and a many longer books just haven’t been edited properly (#notalllongerbooks)

Thanks Eamonn - high praise :)

My column this week www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

We are at Dr Strangelove levels of parodic reality. Republican congressfolk doing their best to avoid the word "war" while Hegseth and Trump run around saying "You know what I love? This WAR we're having that we started and is definitely a WAR!"

My column this week www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

you are the antithesis of a leftwing party if you conflate how much someone earns with how much they contribute. This should be a hard line for every union that still links to Labour.

Patrick Freyne: Britain has had enough of experts and royals. It’s now a celebritocracy On some level I feel like maybe it’s okay if Danny Dyer runs everything. Looking at the world right now, there are definitely worse political systems

I wrote about Danny Dyer's Caravan Park (Britain) www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

I learned all this from being in bands :)

Some very kind people also seem like prickly disagreeable people

I think most of them sounded like they loved it. There were a few who were totally thrown by him

I think it makes it hard for them to distinguish "kindness" - which is important and was in short supply in the past - from "agreeableness" which is often actually problematic and can lead to stuff that's pretty unkind.

I think Hugo is spot on - it's an on-the-fly editing job and it's so expert in it's focus I don't mind. Do academics even have feelings? I know journalists don't

I'm genuinely not sure anyone who didn't live through WWII could actually do it.

One of my favourite things on radio is the sound of Bragg bullying four fully grown academics into coherence. The PACE of that show. It's less "this is improving" and more "fucking hell I need to get my shit together or Melvyn Bragg will mess me up"

Very well done, Wendy

Glenn was one of the soundest, most talented people in Irish music. The kind of person who makes music scenes kinder and more fun and who properly knew how to be in a band. I met him first when he was a teenager in Palomine and we all played in the Funnel bar. He was so good.

Seeing people in the news industry say that articles should be AI-generated is absolutely bonkers and the antithesis of why so many of us became journalists in the first place—because we aspired to the art of reporting AND writing. I will never release AI slop under my byline.

I know I say this fairly often: people are right to complain concerts are too expensive, but they got that way because a lot of artists started to make almost no money out of their actual records. We have to look really hard at how we pay for music.