Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1979, author and journalist Mark O’Connell studied English at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed a PhD on John Banville. His first nonfiction book, To Be a Machine, a study of transhumanism, won the 2018 Wellcome prize and the 2019 Rooney prize. Notes from an Apocalypse, exploring the end of civilisation, was published in April 2020. His third book, the Writers’ prize-shortlisted A Thread of Violence (Granta, £9.99), about the double murders committed by Malcolm MacArthur in Dublin in 1982, is out now in paperback. O’Connell lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
1. YouTube
Conner O’Malley’s comedy is probably an acquired taste. I personally think he’s a generational talent. (I sat through all of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which was bad, just because I knew he had a small role at the end, which was good.) Stand Up Solutions is sort of a meta-standup special. O’Malley plays a character called Richard Eagleton, whose startup, called Stand Up Solutions, uses AI to create “standup solutions” for corporations. It’s a parody of Silicon Valley, but it’s also a surreal, ruthless, hilarious excavation of American masculinity and internet culture.
2. Album
God, this album is so good. ML Buch is a Danish singer/composer. I’ve liked her stuff for a while – her last album, Skinned, was great, kind of weird and unsettling and vaporwavey, and seemed to owe a lot to people like James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin. This album is less electronic, and it feels like a quantum leap into something amazing. It’s really dreamy, but also totally exhilarating and surprising. I love it so much, and I keep discovering new things in it.
3. Book
Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach
For a while there, it felt like every second person I met was trying to press a Helen Garner book into my hands, either literally or figuratively. Usually there is no better way of ensuring I don’t read a writer than pressing a book by them into my hands. But with Helen Garner, eventually I cracked. And this book is incredible. It’s very short, but also intricate. It’s strange and beautiful and constantly surprising. There’s nothing else quite like it. I won’t press it into your hands, for fear that it will prevent you from reading it. But you should.
4. Restaurant
I really love this place. The area of Dublin that it’s in is one I often find myself in at lunchtime, and there are strangely few good places to eat lunch, given how many people work around there. But Tiller + Grain is a real gift. There is usually one meat option and one fish – often barbecued and always delicious – and otherwise the focus is on seasonal salads. Everything is incredibly tasty. The atmosphere is great, too. It gets pretty busy, and the tables are small and few, so I usually get there slightly early.
5. Activity
My wife bought me this thing ages ago and I used it for a while, then stopped. But I started again recently and I’ve been amazed by how great it is. It’s basically a bed of nails. You roll it out, lie down on it, and all these tiny little spikes press into your back. At first it’s quite uncomfortable, and borderline painful, but after five minutes or so it’s mysteriously relaxing. I always sleep really well after using it, which is reason enough to submit to the initial discomfort, but it’s also a very relaxing experience.
6. Film
Perfect Days (dir Wim Wenders, 2024)
This is such a beautiful film. I took my 11-year-old son to see it, on a whim, despite his preference for movies with explosions in them, and he loved it. It’s about a very quiet, thoughtful, very Zen guy in his 60s who cleans toilets in Tokyo. He travels around the city, not saying very much, and takes a lot of quiet pleasure in small everyday phenomena of urban life. The original title of the film, I read somewhere, was “Komorebi”, a Japanese word for “sunlight leaking through trees”, which captures the film’s mood beautifully.
