Shane Barry lives in Dublin and works as a technical writer for an international software company. Between 2004 and 2008 Shane blogged regularly for TMO under the title of The Monkey's Typewriter. Shane also conducted a number of interviews for TMO, which are also collected here.
In one of the rituals of approaching year-end, the New York Times has unveiled its 10 Best Books of the Year. So far I’ve read only one, Joshua Ferris’s rollicking satire of office life, Then We Came to an End (see here for my take on the novel and here for my high-falutin’ reflections on […]
…Angola?? Stats nerds can now download facts and figures for 80 countries from the Economist‘s The World in 2008 microsite.(Ireland’s GDP per head figures remain difficult to swallow.)
After the lightning flash of Terry Eagleton’s comparison of Martin Amis’s musings about Islam and terrorism to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” the debate rumbled through The Guardian last week. First Ronan Bennett, in an article with the fingerwagging headline “Shame on us,” argued that the apparent non-reaction to Amis’s statements allowed […]
Aside from baying in corporate boxes at their national rugger teams, the movers and shakers in the financial industry aren’t the types to manifest patriotic fervour. In this interconnected, flattened and otherwise mangled world, to tether yourself too closely to the fate of a single nation is to risk narrowing your portfolio. Those whose careers […]
Newsweek‘s latest cover story sails perilously close the rocks of “advertorial” with its coverage of the new “wireless reading device,” Amazon Kindle.(On the Amazon page for Kindle, they’ve managed to rope in Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to help flog the $400 device–although at the rate the dollar’s falling that price might not seem so steep […]
One of the most enlightening documentaries to run this year has been the six-part BBC4 series “The Genius of Photography,” which continues its run today and Thursday. It’s introduced me to a range of figures–most of whom I wasn’t familiar with–that shaped a medium I don’t know enough about. What more can you ask from […]
It sounds as though Bono has borrowed the Taoiseach’s scriptwriter:From RTE.ie: Bono has defended the decision by U2 to move part of the band’s business from Ireland to the Netherlands to reduce his tax bill and the tax bill of the other band members.Bono was speaking at University College Cork, where he attended a meeting […]
When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the United Kingdom last month, British Foreign Minister Kim Howells stated that Britain and Saudi Arabia could unite around their “shared values.”From the BBC news site: An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman […]
More than a week after being wrung out by the emotional mangle of its closing pages, I still find that in the mind’s eye Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–to borrow Philip Larkin’s words–“Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.” As a host of critics, from Adam-Mars Jones to Oprah, have already discussed this dark masterpiece, I won’t […]
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