Articles by Mark O'Connell
December 16, 2011
Remembering Hitch 4
It took a particularly potent kind of charisma to allow a person to engage in such concentrated namedropping, urinating all the while, and still manage to come across as utterly charming. Hitchens had that kind of charisma.
December 11, 2011
A Year in Reading: Mark O’Connell 7
His compassion and clarity are such that I often found myself thinking that if God existed and had sat down to write a novel, this is what it would look like.
November 30, 2011
The Saddest Story I Have Ever Heard: An Agnostic Appreciation of The Book of Genesis 6
When I think of poor Adam and Eve and their hapless abdication of paradise in return for some new knowledge, I can’t help thinking of my own incremental sense of impending banishment with each new rumor overheard, as a child, from across the border of Adulthood.
November 17, 2011
The Truth About ‘The Truth About Marie’ 0
There’s a lesson in this that might be too awful for us to want to learn, which is that death takes from us not just our lives, but also our right to insist upon a particular version of those lives.
October 20, 2011
Not Foster Wallace 0
It was, in retrospect, only a matter of time until someone spotted the gap in the market and set up a blog dedicated exclusively to images of guys who sort of look like (but crucially are not) David Foster Wallace. A tip of the bandana to Matt Bucher for highlighting this via Twitter.
October 10, 2011
Bad Bookshops: An Appreciation 12
As great as it is to be able to choose whatever you want on Amazon, sometimes what you really want is to have no choice at all.