Damian Reilly

Damian Reilly

Thursday

Damian Reilly

The Twitter dominance of Piers Morgan

No one has mastered Twitter like Piers Morgan. Every day he singlehandedly generates great tsunamis of outrage and ecstatically surfs them onto the beach of global fame. In a time – and on a platform – where self-promotion is king, Morgan’s incredible talent for it stands out. Take this week. Morgan began by offering the opinion that Holly Willoughby, telegenic host of the popular British show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, had ‘very sizzling’ legs. Cue predictable howls of indignation about the sexual objectification of a high-profile woman. ‘But Holly’s legs ARE sizzling, just stating a fact’, he tweeted playfully. That was Monday. https://twitter.

piers morgan

Saturday

Damian Reilly

Breaking the bank | Who’s afraid of bitcoin?

From our UK edition

Sam Reed, 29, is co-founder and chief technology officer of the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (BitMEX), the largest crypto trading platform, and the 26th-largest exchange of any type in the world. His story — of how he went from itinerant web developer to co-founder of what some have called the ‘Goldman Sachs of bitcoin’ — is both inspiring and a bit jealousy-inducing. Living, he says, a relatively quiet life in Hong Kong in 2014 after trying, and failing, to launch a series of internet start-ups (‘I was doing a ticketing start-up to compete with Ticketmaster, which is kind of a dumb thing to do’), he started giving workshops and presentations to aspiring web developers. One of these presentations changed his life.

Damian Reilly

Editor’s letter | Who’s afraid of bitcoin?

From our UK edition

It wasn’t so long ago that only the most committed bores spoke of money in abstract terms: money as a mere ‘concept’ (the rest of us got on with earning it). Today, that’s not the case. Thanks to bitcoin, everybody seems to have accepted money really is just an idea, one that in its current, government-controlled form might be due an upgrade. Last year, bitcoin came — seemingly out of nowhere — to dominate financial news for what felt like months, forcing a re-evaluation of traditional notions of value and currency. The world watched as the price of a single bitcoin tore ever upwards, hitting a peak in December of £14,354.

Friday

Damian Reilly

The woke go broke

It could just be, two years on from the election of President Donald Trump, liberal America is finally arriving at the fifth of the seven stages of grief, the one characterised by guilt. I realised this over the weekend as I watched Bill Maher, self appointed voice of the liberal conscience, delivering some hard to hear home truths to the faithful from the pulpit of his primetime chat show. Citing a recent survey, Maher told his audience: ‘Eighty percent of Americans find political correctness to be a problem, including 75 percent of African Americans, 74 percent of Americans under thirty, 82 percent of Asians, 87 percent of Hispanics and 88 percent of Native Americans.

eminem woke

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

Kanye West is the gift that keeps giving

Kanye West is perfect. Every time I think he can’t go up in my estimation, he does something more magical. Last night, having established himself as the most important political figure in the free world, he decided the time had come to find new worlds to conquer. ‘I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!’ he tweeted, out of the blue. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1057382916760707072 And this not three weeks from the Oval Office audience he gave President Donald Trump, an occasion at which he, brilliantly, chose to communicate only through free association – oscillating at a frequency barely within the realms of human comprehension.

kanye west candace owens

Tuesday

Damian Reilly

What Putin and Trump understand about UFC

Did you watch the Conor McGregor fight at the weekend? It wasn’t for the faint hearted. McGregor took a stupendous beating from a man, Khabib Nurmagomedov, whose hairline seems to start at his eyebrows. I’d got out of bed at 4am to watch and quickly rather wished I hadn’t. There was nothing balletic or mesmerising about the megaviolence, the way there often is with a McGregor fight. Instead, it was like watching a particularly brutal and skilful bludgeoning outside a pub. Khabib spent a good portion of the contest squatting over his prone opponent and thumping him very hard in the face. As I say, not an easy watch in the small hours, although there was an excellent riot at the end.

conor mcgregor khabib nurmagomedov ufc

Monday

Damian Reilly

Taylor Swift for President? The singer could be the Democrat to take on Trump

I understand how America’s Republican teens will be feeling this morning, which is to say very hurt indeed. Taylor Swift has revealed herself to be a Democrat and the news will take some getting over. For years the singer had been the slam dunk winner in any argument about the impossibility of being both culturally relevant and right-leaning in modern America. Yes, the Dems have pretty much every star of stage and screen behind their cause, but the right had Swift, the biggest star on the planet, the ace in the pack, on theirs. Take that, libs! Why did the right think Swift was on their side? Well, because back in the mists of time (2008), on a website called MySpace, 18-year old Swift wrote ‘Republicans do it better’.

taylor swift

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

The sex-mad genius of Philip Roth

A few years ago I asked Martin Amis about Philip Roth. “All his dildos,” he replied, “he’s not letting it go.” At the time the comment struck me as harsh, but this morning when I saw the sad news of Roth’s death I remembered it with a little amusement. I understood what Amis was getting at: Roth often did seem sex mad. But it was very much part of what made him glorious. Philip Roth wrote standing up and you could kind of tell by reading him. To me, starting a Roth novel always felt a bit like embarking on a run with a supremely fit and virile man, a man who could run at any speed, fast or slow, all day and all night. Forever.

Wednesday

Damian Reilly

Peace in our time: If Katy Perry and Taylor Swift can do it, why not the Middle East?

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and both have at times seemed utterly unresolvable.

Tuesday

Damian Reilly

Sorry folks, but Donald Trump is funny. Intentionally funny

Sooner or later even President Trump’s most ardent detractors are going to have to admit that he is capable of being funny. Intentionally funny. Worse, they’re going to have to admit that he’s funny for precisely the reason that Hillary Clinton isn’t: because he’s able to laugh at himself. Did you see him at CPAC? He bought the house down. Halfway through his speech he seemed to drift off into a kind of reverie. Leaning on the lectern, he saw himself on the monitors. “What a nice picture. Look at that. I’d love to watch that guy speak,” he said, pointing up at the screen. And then, using his hands, turning his back on the audience as if looking in a mirror, he started pretending to work out how the man on the monitor must do his amazing hair.

Thursday

Damian Reilly

The straight dope

From our UK edition

It’s not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled. The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Thursday

Damian Reilly

Survival of the sneakiest

From our UK edition

Could there be a better metaphor for the corruption that now pervades all top-level sport than the use of motors in professional cycling? It’s so perfectly shameless. If you’re going to cheat by finding illicit ways in which to enhance your performance, as virtually all sportspeople today are forced to do (we’ll come back to that), why mess about with half-measures? Find a motor and strap it on. Undying glory and unimaginable wealth are just the other side of that mountain. Open that throttle, baby!

Thursday

Damian Reilly

Stand up for Arsène

From our UK edition

I had 20 good years supporting Manchester United but now I follow Arsenal, and I find the treatment of the magnificent Arsène Wenger by large sections of my fellow fans mystifying and depressing. I supported Manchester United because when Rupert Murdoch bought top-tier English football in the early 1990s and started marketing it aggressively at the middle classes — who, like me, had previously had no interest in the sport — United were the only logical choice. They played pulsating, swaggering football and often scored thrilling wins from seemingly impossible situations.

Thursday

Damian Reilly

Fighting chance

From our UK edition

Middle age is OK by me. National Trust membership, a Waitrose loyalty card, lying on the sofa drinking red wine and yelling at the telly — since I turned 40, this stuff all just feels right. But by a mile, the best consolation of middle age I’ve found is the cagefighter Conor McGregor and living vicariously through his kicks, punches and verbal smackdowns. How dull my previous enthusiasms for cricket, tennis and football now seem by comparison with the heroic derring-do of this 28-year-old killing machine, a former plumber from Crumlin in Dublin.