Countries visited: Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland (UK)
IRISH STORIES
- Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody (h/t Padraig) - A gorgeous, earnest, and culturally evocative memoir of what it was like to grow up as an intellectual woman in Catholic Ireland, with the nationalist movement happening in the background. This had such a strong sense of place and time that I often felt transported.
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney - Okay so technically I read this a few months ago, but only on this trip did I realize it was by an Irish author! This book read like a literary version of HBO’s Girls - a take on millennial female friendships through university and your early 20s, complete with intellectual posturing, conversations overripe with imbued meaning, and age-inappropriate relationships. Basically, you spend most of the book being like, Oh god don’t do that, but of course because they’re in their early 20s, they do it anyway. I loved it.
Local theatre geekery:
- Sharon at the Bewley Cafe Theatre - An earnest, sweet version of the female “searching for self in your 20s” theme. Not breaking any new ground, but had excellent dialogue and talented actors. I imagine it’ll do the European Fringe circuits.
- Ulysses at the Abbey Theatre - Confession time: I have never read Ulysses nor do I have any pressing to do so. I figured watching it as a play would be like a shortcut. WRONG. Apparently Ulysses is mad complicated, though an intermission Sparknotes skim did help sort me out. My main layman’s takeaways: 1) Whoa that was pretty raunchy and I totally get why the Catholic Church hated it, and 2) Theatres in the Round are both so cool and also quite impractical.
Also: So many popular contemporary authors are Irish! For example, did you know David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue are both Irish?
STORIES FROM “HOME”
- Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist (NYT Magazine) - When ecological science and politics collide. Best sentence: “A wolf, in this debate, is always much bigger than a wolf. ‘Wolves are Democrats,’ I was told more than once; they symbolize Big Government and regulation and all the ways that distant bureaucrats and coastal elites want to destroy the cherished rural ranching culture of the West.”
- The Lifespan of a Lie (Medium) - On the media maneuverings of Prof Zimbardo, to spread the alluring (but false) “lessons” of the Stanford Prison Experiment, potentially paving the way for an American prison system focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation.
- Vice Media was Built on a Bluff (NY Mag) - All I can say is: Holy shit. And also: 100% that this will become a Hollywood movie someday.