Looking Out, Looking In

Kieran Mabey

Writing words is to open words; Opening words is to open ourselves.

ESSAYS

Welcome to LOLI

Essays of social observation & personal rumination, both silly and serious.

  • Loco Motives: the Crazy Things We Do for Cars

    They deform our cities, steal our time, and kill us, but the only thing that seems to grow bigger and faster than these machines themselves is our twisted love for them—even I too now love a car.

  • In Search of Ireland

    Are you reading these essays from Ireland?

  • Finding Facebook

    An homage to the weird and wonderful people on Facebook marketplace, selling their things, and sharing their stories.

  • My Year, Through Art: 2024

    This is an annotated list of my favourite art from the year: best song, album, TV show(s), episode, movie, standup, and book(s).

  • Hanging On: a short film

    “Dream of success, till last breath…” Synopsis: From a nightmare, Carl awakes to a dream day, before finally going to sleep.

  • Some Thoughts on Haiti…

    The most recent viscous vilification of Haitians is part of a long history of American hatred and violence towards what I consider to be the most important, most interesting, and perhaps most misfortunate nation in all the Americas.

  • After the Altar: My Marriage Maxims

    “Love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds…” So said Shakespeare. But does love not alter, when the altar it finds? Must not love, through alterations wind, to reach the version of itself that then persists through time? I share my immediate meditations on marriage…

  • Oh, the places you’ll go…

    We travel to experience change. But the places we go, and the people that live there, are often left more changed than ourselves. Travelling to observe the other often inhibits our capacity to conceive of ourselves as the other, which is the starting point of—and path to—true change.

  • What We Think About When We Think About Books

    What is reading? Reading is at once both an essentially solitary and intimately social act; a practice of self-discovery as much as self-creation; the most distinctively human art form of self-interpretation through narrative; and increasingly, a radical rebellion that asserts and exercises both one’s right and capacity to pay attention.

  • The New TC: From Tom to Timothée

    Do we still make movie stars? Timothée Chalamet—with his on-screen physicality, vulnerability in roles, and canny decision making in navigating the industry while building relationships with auteur directors—has positioned himself as this new generation’s brightest star, and perhaps the first true movie star in over a generation.