Patrick Freyne

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

It’s a measure of the confusion caused by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to international aid that, when initially asked, the World Food Programme (WFP) in Chad believed it was not affected. A day later it confirmed to The Irish Times that the new cuts would, in fact, lead to a reduction in the humanitarian air service UNHAS which provides emergency support for aid agencies in the region. All cuts affect the whole aid system.

4 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

In the olden days everyone had different jobs – woodcutter, chimney sweep, blacksmith, regional sales executive for an electronics conglomerate, clown, hangman, technical writer, lutist. (I think that’s all of the jobs.) But nowadays everyone has the same job – computering. We all sit at a computer computering away for the computerboss (Mark Zuckerberg? Jesus? Megatron? I can’t remember) for reasons that are usually too abstract and beyond our pay grade to fully understand.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

What if we could predict your politics with some brain scans? The political neuroscientist Dr Leor Zmigrod, the author of a compelling book called The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds, contends that it can be done. Zmigrod has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

“Hello, my youthful contemporaries, it’s your groovy pal Netflix here with news of some cool young-people things we have here on our hip and happening streaming ‘platform’. *Cough* What? This thing? This is just my raspberry vape. No, I’ve always smoked a vape. I never smoked a pipe. And, yes, I am wearing a backwards baseball cap and not a stovepipe hat. What of it? That’s just how I roll as a fellow young person no different from yourself or Madonna. Yes, I am also wearing backwards shoes.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Patrick Freyne

Kieran Cuddihy and I are chatting in Taste cafe near the Newstalk studio. We talk briefly about how I’m neurotically using two different audio recorders. He can relate. “I was interviewing Domhnall Gleeson recently and I forgot to turn the recorder on,” he says. “Halfway through the interview I saw it and he saw me turning it on. He was polite enough not to acknowledge it. [The clip] ended up getting 10 million views or something. Selena Gomez shared the clip because it was about the actors’ strike.