During a recent birthday trip to County Mayo, I spent an afternoon in McDonnell’s. The locals know it as ‘The Lobster Pot’, given the difficulties some face in leaving once inside. Newcomers are shaken by the hand and welcomed to Belmullet by Padraig, the affable owner, and the regulars ensure no-one stays a stranger for long. Like any honest boozer, there is no food menu. But there is food. At the end of the all-Ireland Gaelic football final,[1] fresh sandwiches

The world of economics and finance runs on equations, models, statistics, backtests and predictive analytics. It seeks out objective causal relationships that can be quantified and verified. The mantra “correlation does not imply causation” has been drilled into my head from an early stage. One of my first memories from undergraduate studies is learning about spurious correlations, like the relationship between stock returns and sunny days. [1] No prizes for guessing I was at a British university. Yet over time,

I recently went back to my hometown in Norway on holiday. Growing up in a country which is relatively cold, you’re not guaranteed warm weather for any length of time, so you need some other focus for the summer. For me and for most of my friends back home, the definition of summer is: strawberry season. For about two months of the year, Norwegian strawberries are sold at markets and stores all over the country. For these two months, it’s

The weather was great when I was last home and we enjoyed a couple of lovely family barbecues. You won’t know this, of course, but my dad considers himself quite the expert at the barbecue — as all dads do! That’s why he’s incredibly fussy about allowing his steaks a decent amount of time to marinade. Anything short of four hours and he’ll complain that the taste will be ruined. On the other hand, if my brother is in charge,

If, like me, you follow coverage of the war in Ukraine closely but aren’t an expert on Sino-Russian relations or a historian, you probably think Russia and China are best friends. After all, the bromance between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping has ‘no limits’, or so we are led to believe. I’ve grown to accept this narrative, although with a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that this isn’t as accurate a description as the narrative intends. So,

The past seven months have been busy for me on a personal level. My partner and I finally got married at the end of last year, and having just completed the purchase of our first home we are imminently expecting our first child. Within this frenzy, I celebrated my 37th birthday, which naturally was overshadowed by the above developments, although I did manage to blow out a few candles with the help of my two-year-old niece. Indeed, this year my

I'm on the brink of a move to the US, prompting some reflections amidst the packing. I've made a number of moves before — the first as a child from the North of England to Ireland, the place I now firmly call home. Relocations can be motivated by lifestyle preferences, career objectives, family life and, very sadly for some, by the search for safety from conflict or persecution. Moving satisfies those needs, but there is also something lost in the

In Stephen Leacock’s short story 'Q: a psychic pstory of the psupernatural', a character called Annerly reports that an acquaintance he refers to as ‘Q’ experienced the following manifestation of his dog: “Well, then, the projection, or phanogram, of the dog passed in front of them so plainly that Miss M swore that she could have believed that it was the dog himself. Opposite the house the phantasm stopped for a moment and wagged its tail. Then it passed on,

How wealthy is Elon Musk? ‘Very’ would usually suffice, but to be more precise his net worth is somewhere around an eyewatering $200 billion. We can all agree that this is a lot, and probably don’t feel we need to waste an unnecessary amount of time trying to grasp its true magnitude. But put it this way: someone earning the median UK salary of roughly £33,000 would have to work for nearly 4.4 million years, without spending a single penny,

I have not worked a five-day week since April. Yes, really! Between a few days of annual leave and the alarming number of public holidays that we had last month, it’s been a while. But could this amount of leisure soon be the new normal? Writing in 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously hypothesised that we could be working 15-hour weeks one hundred years hence. I think he may have got the timing wrong, but we are certainly moving in that