Mark O’Connell
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mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Mark O’Connell
@mrkocnnll.bsky.social
3.3K followers 400 following 71 posts
Writer and so forth
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
tomusher.bsky.social
Polanski: I think there should be boycott of Israel
Peston: A boycott of a democracy? How dare you
Polanski: Well actually Israel just tortured a load of international civilians which is a war crime
Peston: Wow would you look at the time
implausibleblog.bsky.social Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 24d
Robert Peston, "Where are you on the banning of Maccabi fans?"

Zack Polanski, "I'm Jewish, I take antisemitism really seriously"

"I don't think banning Maccabi fans is antisemitic at all"
October 21, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
rickoshea.bsky.social
We'll be doing a live Arena show at @dublinbookfest.bsky.social celebrating 100 issues of @thedublinreview.bsky.social.

We'll have editor Brendan Barrington, contributors Sara Baume, @patrickfreyne.bsky.social, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and @mrkocnnll.bsky.social.

Do come, it's going to be special...
The Dublin Review at 100 - Dublin Book Festival
The Dublin Review, Ireland’s quarterly magazine of essays, memoir, reportage and fiction, is celebrating its 100th issue. Join us for a special live broadcast of RTÉ Arena on Radio 1 in conversation w...
dublinbookfestival.com
October 20, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
edmorrish.bsky.social
[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that
September 16, 2025 at 7:25 AM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
nybooks.com
“It is often said that many nonfiction books should really have been magazine articles; this one feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages.” —Mark O’Connell on Palantir’s founder’s first book
The War App | Mark O’Connell
Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data
buff.ly
September 13, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
jasonkirk.fyi
Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13
internethippo.bsky.social Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · Nov 10
The problem with every post-Millennial generation is they got to go straight to high speed internet. Of course you'll get computer madness that way. Make them start with those old screeching modems and work their way up
September 12, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
johnmerrick.bsky.social
Yeah man, keep being patronising snobs, that’ll get liberalism back on the road
September 13, 2025 at 8:19 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Terrible book, terrible guy, great magazine
September 11, 2025 at 3:03 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Yes, in the same way your thermostat suffers from the pain of burning
August 26, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
meredithmeredith.bsky.social
Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...
What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.
February 19, 2025 at 4:42 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Instagram ads have gotten exponentially worse recently, right? Just an endlessly encroaching tide of slop and cheap scams
July 31, 2025 at 6:03 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
The NYT talked to @jenniferwalshe.bsky.social and me about MARS, which opens tonight at Galway Arts Festival
An Opera Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space
www.nytimes.com
July 25, 2025 at 11:19 AM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
This is such a terrific piece of criticism
July 24, 2025 at 8:47 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Hell yeah! Let’s fuckin DO THIS!!!
July 19, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
robpalk.bsky.social
Oo remembers lying awake after dinner at Combray for maman to give you a goodnight kiss?
July 7, 2025 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
jamellebouie.net
LMFAO
brunojnavarro.bsky.social Bruno J. Navarro @brunojnavarro.bsky.social · Jul 2
One former national security official said they were struck by how often they’d run into Vice President JD Vance standing outside the Oval Office near the Keurig coffee maker, drinking a cup or eating one of the cookies on offer.
Fox News, MAGA hats and cookies: Inside Trump's West Wing
Trump likes to see whom he wants and call whom he chooses, and in the new term, he presides over a White House that mirrors the man, current and former aides say.
www.nbcnews.com
July 2, 2025 at 5:36 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
The outcome of the last ten years or so of culture is governments doing cancel culture on behalf of a military death machine
June 30, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
tonybirdlondon.bsky.social
The IDF killed three British aid workers last year.
The UK refuses to investigate Israel for killing its citizens but will investigate British people for cursing the IDF
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
British aid workers 'died from blast wounds' in Gaza - inquest
James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman were killed in an air strike on 1 April.
www.bbc.co.uk
June 30, 2025 at 2:58 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Don’t tell me about a thing being “downstream of” another thing. I don’t want to hear it, and I won’t listen to it!
June 30, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
shamimmalekmian.bsky.social
This is an X screenshot I can get behind. No more J.K. Rowling screengrabs, just Bryan Johnson being delusional about how well his age reversal project is going
X post by Bryan Johnson: I'm 18 years old and have a 19 year old kid. Pretty wild.
June 28, 2025 at 9:53 AM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Patrick Collison here, illustrating a mindset that is, in many ways, a simple misunderstanding of life itself
drewharwell.com Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · Jun 27
Really a sad way to go through life www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/b...
On how A.I. can transform media consumption: Reading the A.I. summary — I think it can be useful. I think it has a powerfully inoculating effect. Like, I think long-form, lots-of-episodes TV is a waste of time. But it’s very tempting, right? You watch an episode and you’re like, “Oh, geez, I really want to know what happens here.” And so I discovered a couple of years ago, obviously, that the solution is you immediately go to Wikipedia and read the entire summary of the season, and then you’re cured of the desire to watch any more episodes. So there is a therapeutic benefit to A.I. summaries.
June 27, 2025 at 2:37 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
For those of you who were simply too lazy to read my essay about MrBeast and the attention economy yourselves, here's me reading it for you www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2...
‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star – podcast
He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde ge...
www.theguardian.com
June 27, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
sarahjeong.bsky.social
thinking again about this 2018 cover
June 18, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
leyawn.bsky.social
achewood comic panel ray smuckles saying “daamn! that answer could use some work!”
June 20, 2025 at 4:21 PM
mrkocnnll.bsky.social
Seems a little drastic, he could just shut them down in the normal way
June 18, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Mark O’Connell
jjvincent.bsky.social
"noice" bsky.app/profile/zack...
zackwhittaker.com Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker.com · Jun 18
Notwithstanding the (many) terrible things associated with Ring cameras and the surveillance they enable, it's interesting to see Ring users sharing footage and locations to foil ICE raids.

“Just trying to keep everyone safe,” wrote one user.

from @thomasbrewster.bsky.social:
LA Residents Foil ICE Raids Using Amazon Ring’s Neighborhood Watch App
Concerned citizens have turned to the Neighbors app, once used largely to look for lost deliveries, to make public service announcements about ICE raids in their communities.
www.forbes.com
June 18, 2025 at 2:54 PM