Laura Slattery

6 days ago | irishtimes.com | Laura Slattery

I was listening to the National Symphony Orchestra perform the score to a ballet about puppets with a psychopathic streak and I couldn’t help thinking about JD Vance. To be clear, I prefer not to spend Friday night thinking about JD Vance. It wasn’t the story of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, as outlined by the RTÉ Lyric FM presenter Paul Herriott, that put him in mind either.

1 week ago | irishtimes.com | Laura Slattery

The perfect first draft of a screenplay doesn’t exist. If it did, and the producers and executives who read it had no notes, writers would finally be happy and well-slept. It’s just never going to happen. “No notes” – online slang for flawless – is a screenwriter dream that can’t ever come true. At the Storyhouse screenwriting festival, at the Light House Cinema in Dublin last week, notes loomed large from opening act to end credits.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Laura Slattery

“The one thing you can never get back is your precious time,” is the first thing we hear from Whitney Wolfe Herd, guest on Meghan Markle’s new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder. The words ring in your ears throughout this 50-minute mutual love-in between Meg, aka the Duchess of Sussex, and Whit, aka “Beauty”. It will shock no one to hear that Wolfe Herd, the founder of dating app Bumble, is one of Markle’s closest friends.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Laura Slattery

It’s hosted weddings, afternoon teas and gigs by superstars from Thin Lizzy to Harry Styles, but now Slane Castle is preparing to welcome a new category of visitor: faithful fans of the reality series The Traitors. RTÉ‘s upcoming version of the television hit has been filming at the Co Meath castle over the past fortnight, and its heir Alex Conyngham, the Earl of Mount Charles, expects that the show – likely to be exported overseas – will bring in a fresh influx of tourists.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Laura Slattery

“It’s the pace of it,” says Deirdre McCarthy, RTÉ managing director of news and current affairs, and the woman in charge of Ireland’s largest newsroom. Even as stories are being tenaciously verified or debunked, fresh misinformation and disinformation – misinformation’s deliberate, more pernicious sibling – keeps rolling in. There are, as McCarthy says, “a lot of opinions online all the time”.