In a society so comfortable with discretion bordering on secrecy it may be difficult to grasp the full extent of how the minutiae of our lives can be trawled by the algorithms driving social media and so much more of today’s communications technologies.

In a film about John Hume’s pivotal role in ending terrorism on this island, launched last week, Bill Clinton describes Hume as “Northern Ireland’s Martin Luther King”. 

The Weinstein scandal has unleashed a tsunami of allegations about his, and many others, predatory sexual behaviour.

IN the shorthand of our time, an art form all but perfected by our American cousins, country music is described as “three chords and the truth”.

THE eviction of more than 20 families in Cork to facilitate refurbishment of apartments epitomises one strand of the unequal relationships at the root of our housing crisis.

SOMETIMES, it’s wise to forget or at least to pretend to forget so that age-old divisions might be resolved.

SPEAKING before his death almost exactly 11 years ago, Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia from 1964 to 1979 and a controversial figure by any standards, said that he would happily walk down any street in Harare — Salisbury in his time — but that his successor Robert Mugabe dare not.

BEAUTY, or at least your version of it, may be priceless but the New York sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, a long-lost painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII more than 500 years ago, for $450m suggests that even our highest ideals can be, and are being, commodified. In reality, it was ever thus.

GARDAÍ have, in recent months, endured more criticism — most of it entirely justified — than is healthy in a democracy so it is important to recognise and celebrate the kind of achievement that cannot be realised without commitment and no little courage.

Ireland as a nation suffered three significant setbacks in the past two days, at least one of them self-inflicted. Our soccer team succumbed to the Danes on Tuesday night, and yesterday we lost out to France to host the Rugby World Cup.