Mark O’Connell @mrkocnnll Twitter profile

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Mark O’Connell

1 year

A Thread of Violence is available to preorder here (UK/Irl): And here (US):

A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell: 9780385547628 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A NEW YORK TIMES AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the award-winning author comes the gripping tale of one of the most scandalous murderers in modern Irish history, at...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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Last Seen Profiles

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

Unimprovably funny way of disagreeing with the original point here

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

Warren Ellis clears up the vexed question of whether it’s okay to punch nazis in the face

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I met a woman earlier and her two dogs who were the uncle and nephew of each other, and I just think that’s the funniest possible relationship for two dogs who live together to have

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

Jeff Bezos is worth $100 billion

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Every nine months or so an American magazine will publish an article called “The Kids are Alt-Right” or similar about how cool people in their twenties are now right wing, and it’ll invariably be just some nerds

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

I ❤️Harper’s

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

“Latte socialist” is such a sick burn, it really nails the hypocrisy of people who want both coffee with steamed milk and a fairer society

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

I was out earlier with my two kids, one in a buggy, when it started raining really heavily. A silver SUV stopped. A guy in a tracksuit jumped out, left the engine running. He opened the boot, took out a gigantic golf umbrella, handed it me silently, got back in the SUV, drove off

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

"When Steve Bannon was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind" reads, in all fairness, like a very solid opening sentence to a short story

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

One side effect of the last few days is we’re getting a lurid insight into mind of the crypto guy: a lot of these people are just really, really thick

Watcher.Guru

@WatcherGuru

2 years

@elonmusk

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

Great, cryptic death threats from the Economist now

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

There’s a strong case to be made here for literally any other phrase at all

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

The Poorly Translated Shirts account having an absolute nightmare here

Poorly Translated Shirts

@translatedtees

2 years

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

I wrote an essay about The Banshees of Inisherin, and Martin McDonagh’s whole deal

The Banshees of Inisherin’s Writer-Director Has Made a Career of “Irishness.” It’s All a Load of...

Does Martin McDonagh understand Ireland at all?

slate.com

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

Hmmm

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

I was only in Galway for a couple of hours today, but long enough to see a man sitting on a low wall playing a tin whistle, and a passing man lean into his ear to say “Who the fuck would want to listen to that shite,” and then the first man leap off the wall to embrace the second

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

Very one sided reporting, totally ignores the great kayaking

Dublin ranked the worst city in the world to move to for housing

Revealed: Best and worst cities to live and work in 2020

www.irishtimes.com

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

One of my favourite things to do online is continue as guest

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

One real benefit of Musk-era twitter is that you don’t have to waste loads of time scrolling down to see the most truly moronic responses to viral tweets, because they appear in roughly descending order of stupidity

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

Bono looks like if Samuel Beckett owned a bunch of strip clubs

Irish Independent Business

@IndoBusiness

5 years

#Davos latest: Capitalism has taken more people out of poverty than any other political philosophy - Bono

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

This really feels like the most chaotic moment yet of the pandemic. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on, everything is in flux, we’re sliding across black ice, who knows what we’re gonna hit. And yet still? Somehow? Very boring

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

A bunch of seven or eight young construction workers are sitting at a table near me in a cafe. After ordering, they all go quiet for a second. Then one of them says: “It’s fuckin’ lovely that we’re all here together.”

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Extremely commensurate with their whole vibe that these guys imagine being funny is like casting a spell in Dungeons and Dragons or whatever

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

I’m not usually prey to easy sentiment, but damnit if I don’t find myself choking back tears at this every time I fly into Dublin airport

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

I love how this essay totally goes for the Nabokovian jugular at the end by revealing that the source of the oblivious narrator’s trouble is not that he’s a marginalized straight white male but that he is, in fact, just not a good writer. The unreliable narrator is back baby!

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

8 years

Please pay my country the 13 billion you owe us in taxes, we need proper hospitals

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

Editors: I would like to read a soft focus profile of the guy who punched Richard Spencer in the face

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

California Über Alles is the greatest protest song of all time precisely because it’s so petty, overblown, and unclear as to what its actual issue is

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

This sort of thing is just insanely belittling. As though one of the most ingenious novels ever written arose out of some trivial proto-mansplaining sitcom scenario. The line is blurring all the time between what people say for numbers and what they are sadly reduced to believing

Rob Palk

@robpalkwriter

2 years

Oh my god shut the fuck up

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

A remake of Misery but it’s about a very successful and famous author who kidnaps and imprisons a reader who has a low opinion of their books and tortures them until they finally post kindly about their books online

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

Can’t help reading this Mr Men book to my son in the voice of Adam Curtis

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I'm sorry but this is wildly funny. God bless England, and all who sail in her

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

There is no most unimprovably Irish explanation for the badness of a thing than “somebody lost the run of themselves”

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

The Suez Canal is unfortunately now blocked by 8000 long-form journalists and podcasters on improvised rafts

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Journalists really need to get better at knowing nerds when they see them

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

My local supermarket doesn’t have saffron, but it does keep a stock of dick and balls pasta

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

Hello and welcome to the stage of neoliberalism where Britney Spears steps in to fill the role vacated by the state

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

This is the most "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" thing I have ever fucking seen

The Wall Street Journal

@WSJ

7 years

Analysts are trying to work out what happens to markets in the event of an all-out nuclear war

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

The use of social justice language to justify Ayn Rand-level individualism is the real horseshoe theory isn’t it

Rob Palk

@robpalkwriter

2 years

I love this mad website

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

They should make more movies with terrible Irish accents. It is impossible for Irish people to be unhappy when there’s a bad movie with bad Irish accents happening. It’s like the whole country just got given an ice cream.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I can’t tell you how charmed I was by this bicycle lane on Molesworth Street that begins and ends within about 8 feet. A lovely, unexpectedly whimsical touch from Dublin City Council.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Who the hell is pretending to have read The Alchemist??

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 months

I wrote about Werner Herzog’s memoir for the new @nybooks , which was probably more fun than I’ve ever had writing a piece

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

I’m repeatedly struck by how routinely, in American tv shows and films, likeable and relatable characters end a fun night out by getting in their cars and driving home totally shitfaced

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Kevin Birmingham’s “The Most Dangerous Book”, about the insane struggle to publish Ulysses, ends with the most perfect possible sentence

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

*mumbling between mouthfuls of piping hot shark fin soup* There is no ethical consumption under capitalism

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Hard agree. This sort of imperious hauteur is absolutely not the sort of vibe we’re looking for the King of England to be laying down

Aaron Bastani

@AaronBastani

2 years

We all have bad days, & this is a high pressure situation for the King, but he’s under new levels of scrutiny now and people won’t associate this with public service.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I’m sorry to burst anyone’s bubble here, or offend any of my beloved friends and peers, but being published in the New Yorker does not make you cool by any reasonable standard of coolness

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 month

Never before have so many profoundly boring men been thought of by other boring men as visionaries

Sam Altman

@sama

1 month

movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

I didn’t even get a proper look at the guy, cos I trying to wind up a phone call at the time. All I could say was that he was wearing a tracksuit. It was one of the most purely charming things I’ve ever seen anyone do.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Weird how Bloomsday, a celebration of this genuinely filthy and anarchic book that was banned before it even published, is this comically genteel stations of the cross setup, while St Patrick’s Day, a celebration of Ireland’s conversion to Christianity, is pure fucking debauchery

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

Jordan Peterson has had an amazingly successful career as a self-help guru for a guy who breaks down crying in public so much

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

A real “god bless America” moment for me, this exchange

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 months

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

18 days

I haven’t heard the Taylor Swift album, because I’m not interested enough to listen to it. But I am interested in the critical writing around it, and I’m struck by how much of it seems to express a desire for her to become better at music, so we can have better Taylor Swift songs

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

This seems genuinely, authentically fascist, this insistence on a kind of mystical connection between the sovereign leader and the masses

The Telegraph

@Telegraph

4 years

"The health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself" | writes @allisonpearson #Covid19 #coronavirus #Covid19UK

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

This visual of a development for Temple Bar Square reminded me of a great line about Dublin in Emilie Pine and Dead Centre’s play Good Sex: “We live in the imagination of some very boring men”

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I am continually struck by the startlingly low standards new york media people seem to have for what constitutes a “buzzy scene”

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 years

I stopped drinking flat whites a couple of years back, because I just couldn’t reconcile it with wanting wealthy people to pay more tax

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

10 months

Very proud to announce that my book has been named one of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud's Summer Reads. I share the concerns around Saudi Arabia's human rights record, but ultimately MBS's Summer Reads gets books into people's hands, and that can only be a good thing

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I've probably said this before, but these people have a lot in common with, for e.g., the most committed antisemites, in that their understanding of the world is so structured around a single obsessive hatred that absolutely everything can be made to connect to it.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

Just saw a guy in traffic with his very elegant dog in the passenger seat. The dog and the guy looked at each other very briefly and then each looked out their respective side windows in a gesture of terminal boredom and sadness. The dog was wearing a seatbelt.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

“It’s not endearing me to their cause,” I say, as the seawater seeps inexorably into my house and dampens the ends of my bootcut jeans

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 months

Saying Israel must do more to protect civilians in Gaza has, at this point, a kind of “the Zodiac Killer must do more to protect young couples in the Bay Area” feel to it

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

@willystaley While you and your crew were talking Wife ROI, me and the boys were seeing year-on-year yields in terms of sons and daughters

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

Writing tip: if a transition between sections doesn't quite work, have the first letter of the first word of the new paragraph be one of those massive ornate letters, and that will smooth over the cracks

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

7 days

I don’t know if the whole speech was like this, but in terms of worst wedding speeches ever, this has got to be in the mix

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

Ireland has its problems, but by god do we know how to use a vicious insult to negotiate the difficulty of expressing affection

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

1 year

You know what’s a terrible way to write? Anticipating every inane misreading people might come up with, and addressing t it in the text just in case. That is just pure death for any kind of serious writing, critical or otherwise

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

8 years

This furniture catalogue is full of photos of Mads Mikkelsen looking absolutely miserable around futniture

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 months

Germany remains, in many ways, the most profoundly bizarre country on earth

James Jackson

@derJamesJackson

6 months

"Antifa" radical leftists in Leipzig protest in solidarity with Israel

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I will recommend one book by a woman every five minutes until my demands are met

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

I wrote this about your man Joffrey Bizznos there a while back

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 months

Honestly can’t remember a time when I’ve had so much straightforward admiration for an artist as I have for Jonathan Glazer. And, presumably by accident, he’s exposed in spectacular fashion the moral and intellectual degradation of his critics

Hari Kunzru

@harikunzru

2 months

If you had any doubt about what’s going on here. This is incitement

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

Western Civilization is an old English historian saying horrible racist stuff on a YouTube show called Reasoned, whose host is a small boy sitting in a gaming chair

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 years

My son, who is increasingly fascinated by religion and mythology, woke me up this morning demanding to know whether “Zeus is the Taoiseach of heaven”.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

5 months

The spectacle of the reject modernity guys embracing the Stephen's Green Shopping Centre is so beautiful to me I could cry

Culture Critic

@Culture_Crit

5 months

Arrest these people. Current: Proposed "improvement":

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

New Irish flag

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 months

There has never been more electric cars on Irish roads than ever before

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

“Made my boys a 92p omelette to post on twitter as an argument for letting poor children go hungry”—A Good Father, and a Decent Man

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

That video of those English people dancing a conga line on a rope is pure folk horror

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

You branch out into tote bags, thinking what’s the worst that can happen. Nightmare scenario

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

10 months

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that I always found so moving about Sinéad O’Connor, as an artist and a person, and I think it has something to do with her extraordinary combination of vulnerability and strength, and the sense that they were one indivisible quality

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

This feels like kind of a weird way of putting it

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

My son is talking to his friend who lives across the street on a walkie talkie her dad left on our doorstop yesterday. I can hear him roaring from downstairs. "DO YOU MISS YOUR FRIENDS? OVER!"

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

The irony is this person is 100% right. The umbrella significantly worsened my situation, not least because a bitter argument then followed between my son and me over who would hold the umbrella—it was twice the size of him, and I couldn’t handle it with the buggy. Still though.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

A long essay I wrote about turning 40, my anxious relationship with time, and sitting alone in a forest and not moving for 24 hours

Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours

The long read: My life seemed to be getting busier, faster: I felt constantly short of time – so I stepped outside it for a day and a night and did nothing

www.theguardian.com

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

The entire United Kingdom is about to be visited by Paul Gascogine in a dressing gown carrying a couple of fishing rods and a chickn

Damir Rafi

@d_rafi1

4 years

The scene from Westminster bridge #ClapForCarers

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

Graham Linehan retreating to Mumsnet like Bin Laden in the cave complexes of Tora Bora

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

My daughter was really upset and crying earlier, and her brother very sweetly handed her the puppy to cheer her up, and she blew her nose in the puppy

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

Steve Bannon, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Steve Bannon.

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

I don’t care how Dutch you are, you can’t just be called Jizz Horncamp

Forest attempting to sign Jizz Hornkamp from Willem II

Nottingham Forest are trying to sign Dutch striker Jizz Hornkamp as part of their extensive recruitment programme for their return to the Premier League. Hornkamp, a 24-year-old forward at Willem II,...

theathletic.com

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

3 years

There’s a lot of old famous people out there with the power to surprise you by still being alive. For me though? The absolute king of still being alive? Jürgen Habermas

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

8 years

I refuse to believe that this is the latest news

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

6 years

I went to New Zealand to write about the collapse of civilisation, an exhibition by @dennnnnnnnny , a cycling tour around Peter Thiel's apocalypse property with @AnthonyByrt , and a 1997 extremist libertarian manifesto that maybe connects it all

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

2 years

It’s like these people have a huge crater in the centre of their minds, made by the impact of transphobia, so that any subject that enters their minds rolls around for a while until it eventually falls into the transphobia crater

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Mark O’Connell

@mrkocnnll

4 years

I was walking down Manor Street just now, and this woman motioned for me to stop. “Look,” she said, pointing at the sky. “Look at the rainbow.” I stood there for a few seconds and we just looked at it, and I thanked her for pointing it out. She was so happy about the rainbow.

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@mrkocnnll

2 years

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4 years

My son is wrapping up a FaceTime call with his friend, age 6, who just asked him if he has “any questions before I go”

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