Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.
Alexander Obolonsky writes: Russia has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times.
Andy Storey writes: the old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris.
Stephen O’Neill writes: What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated?
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: The fiasco marring this year’s Berlin Film Festival shows once again that the most vital art does not emerge from approval but thrives on the margins. A lesson the BFF needs to (re)learn.
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date, Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish.
Michael Laver writes: While ‘The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t’ by Didi Kuo adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature, are we to believe that this decline is part of a global pattern or more specific to the US?
Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage.
Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.
Thomas McCarthy writes: A poet and former director of Poetry Ireland, Theo Dorgan has already written a number of successful prose works, including ‘Voyage Home’, his marvellous logbook of an ocean voyage from Antigua to Kinsale on the seventy-foot schooner ‘Spirit of Crosshaven’.