For this observer there’s a sense of the 1968 US Presidential election about the forthcoming marriage referendum.

by Jill Bialosky

David Foster Wallace

Damn you, internet! Sometimes I don’t know whether what you’re giving me is real or whether it’s being dreamed up by two stoned teenagers chained to a PC in someone’s basement, wondering whether to get the Domino’s deep-dish spectacular or not...

All right, so the obvious point: great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination.

IN ‘Of One Mind’, one of the short stories in Mike McCormack’s new collection, Forensic Songs, the protagonist describes a ‘weightlessness’ that he has come to experience in his everyday life, a sense of being “at a remove, standing at arm’s length from myself.”

If the late David Foster Wallace had been interested in hurling, instead of being some class of tennis fan who preferred to write about Roger Federer, he might have found his ideal subject yesterday in Croke Park.

THE now-defunct News of the World used to boast, from its front page banner for many years: All human life is there.

Zadie Smith