The win over Munster was Ward’s seventh Ulster appearance, an occasion the former Ireland under-20 international marked with his first senior try.
As he seeks to establish himself at the Affidea Stadium, there has at least been one familiar face already in the team.
Ward’s brother Zac, an Irish Olympian in rugby sevens at Paris two summers ago, made his own breakthrough for the side last season.
The older of the siblings has five tries from the wing already during this campaign and again caught the eye against Munster.
“We’ve grown up together playing in the back yard and stuff so to now be out there in front of 16,500 in a sold-out Affidea, it’s pretty surreal,” said the back row of playing alongside the brother six years his senior.
“Watching him throughout the sevens and stuff, whenever I was in school and just coming out of school, he’s definitely been really influential on me. It’s just nice to have a familiar face around the place as well and its class to play with him as well.
“I dropped the ball out there and he was the first one to come over and give me a pat on the bum and say, ‘keep your head’, so it’s been really good.”
The younger of the Ward brothers, who are the sons of former Ulster captain Andy Ward, is not the only inexperienced player to make an impact in recent weeks with locks Joe Hopes and Charlie Irvine also playing meaningful minutes.
With the likes of Stuart McCloskey, Iain Henderson, Nick Timoney and Jacob Stockdale around them, Ward believes it has been hugely beneficial to be able to lean on the advice of Test players as they make the step up.
“The biggest thing probably is the speed of the game. Physically, I’ve been playing for Ballynahinch in the AIL [All-Ireland League], so it’s obviously a step up physically when you’re playing South African teams and big interpros.
“It’s definitely just the pace of the game, you’ve got to be so switched on and defensively you’ve always got your head on a swivel.
“Having guys in the club that have so much experience, it’s so good for the young boys coming through that they can give us such a help to make the jump.”
Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.
Thankfully, we can still turn to our bookshelves — and podcasts — to ground us. We tapped science doyenne Alie Ward, the host of the funny cult favorite “Ologies” podcast, to share her picks for the best science books of 2025.
Spanning fascinating subjects from bees to human anatomy, Ward’s insightful list reminds us that books remain a timeless vessel for truth and knowledge.
“Dr. Li is the botanist of our dreams… the way he talks about ferns and why he loves them, and about growing up in Taiwan (in essentially a fern forest), and how the sexual reproduction of ferns has been a great way to draw attention to the LGBTQ and nonbinary community is so charming and funny. They even named a whole genus after Lady Gaga because they were listening to ‘Born This Way’ a lot in the lab and also because there are sequences in their DNA that are ‘GAGA.’
“Laura Silburn’s illustrations are gorgeous — they really put a lot of texture into some of these plants that are really tiny. Every page is like looking at a botany poster. As we’ve seen so much science research being underfunded, especially in the last year, there’s this big question by the culture at large of why does it matter? Why does studying the fern genome matter? It has real-world impacts — that’s fewer pesticides on your crops because we figured out something from a foreign genome. I always love when something is overlooked or taken for granted and because of someone’s passion and their dedication to studying it, we learn that it can change our lives.”
“Krystle is an astounding photographer and an incredible visual artist. Her passion for native bees is infectious. A lot of people, when they think of bees, they think of honeybees. And honeybees are not even native to North America. They’re not native to L.A. They’re not native to this country. They’re feral livestock. What I love about her book is it opens your eyes to all of these species that are literally right under our noses that we wouldn’t even consider — and that a lot of people wouldn’t even identify as bees.
“The other reason why I love this book is that she puts these essays into it that are about her experiences going to find the bees. So you’re getting to see these gorgeous landscape pictures. You’re getting to see what it took to find the bee, how to look for it, and more about this particular species. It’s organized in these ABCs that you can pick up at any chapter and check out a bee you’ve never heard of before.”
“Justin is hilarious. He is such a good writer, and his voice is really, really approachable. The way that he writes about science is through such a wonderful pop culture and pop science lens. You feel like you’re reading a friend’s email who just has something really interesting to tell you.
“This book is all about anthropomorphizing everything from our toasters to why we like some spiders but hate other spiders. This is a discussion that is so important in this time when we literally have bots on our phones that are like, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’
“Justin speaks to human psychology and our need to want to be friends or villainize objects —or technology or animals — and project our own humanity onto them in ways that are sometimes helpful and sometimes dangerous.
“As a science communicator, you can tell people the most fascinating facts and can give them the best stories. But unless you can give people a takeaway, then a lot of times it doesn’t stick or the interest isn’t there. He really addresses the question of ‘Well, what does this mean for my life?’”
“The humanity that she brings is such a wonderful base for how our bodies fail us sometimes and what we are trying to do to bring them back. From her being present during orthopedic surgeries and the way that she describes the sound of hammer on bone (and just the kind of jovial atmosphere in an operating room that, as a patient, you would never be clued in about because you are passed out half dead on a slab). She really soaks up a vibe that you would never have access to. She goes to Mongolia to learn about eye surgery there in yurts. She takes you to places you would never be able to go. She’s rooting around in archives and old papers — she just makes anything interesting.
“Mary really is both an ally and an outsider, and I think that that’s a really beautiful thing in her book.”
“Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an absolute force. I’ve followed her work in economics and in equity for years, and I was really excited for this book to come out. We did an episode on kalology, which is the study of beauty standards, years ago and I have always loved the conversation of how different members of society have a certain tax on them — these extra resources that they are expected to provide.
“I was really excited to read about specifically women of color, because that is something that I don’t feel is discussed at large. Anna combines the sociology of it with the reality of her experience and other women of color. Because she is so deft when it comes to policy and economics, she also considers, ‘What can we do about this?’ It’s not just enough to discuss this, but what can be done?
“She has totals of what the gender gap is and what the double tax is, and it’s written up like a receipt. This book really addresses the double tax in a way that, even if you have no insight or it’s something that you haven’t thought about — or you are someone who hasn’t experienced this — it’s laying it out economically in a way that is really accessible and has a lot of impact.”
Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her first essay collection, “Underneath the Palm Trees,” is forthcoming in early 2027.
Animation is an art of the impossible, though it often settles for the ordinary. Much of what comprises adult animation merely translates into line what might be shown in live action — humans in human settings. Which is fine. Some great shows fit that bill — “King of the Hill” and “Bob’s Burgers,” for example. Still, there are infinite avenues to explore, and so it’s good to have Adult Swim, the network that once produced a series whose heroes are a meatball, a shake and a bag of fries, still making aesthetic trouble.
“The Elephant,” which premieres Friday on the network, and Saturday on HBO Max alongside a documentary on its creation, “Behind the Elephant,” is an animated take on exquisite corpse, the old surrealist game in which three artists contribute the head, torso or legs of a single figure, folding the paper so as not to see what the others had drawn. This project enlists four fab animators over three acts — “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward, Ian Jones-Quartey (“OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes”), Rebecca Sugar (“Steven Universe”) and Patrick McHale (“Over the Garden Wall”) — to make something that not only had we not seen before, but none of them had either, until their independently produced parts were put together. All are “Adventure Time” vets, as are Jack Pendarvis and Kent Osborne, who conceived the idea, served as “game keepers,” and share story credit with the animators.
Exquisite corpse was also used in character design. It invariably produces monsters, if amusing ones, which explains why the character — let’s call her The Character — in Ward’s act has a cactus for an arm and a giant pink foot in place of one leg. In the Jones-Quartey and Sugar act, she has robot arms, fishnet stockings and a “music button” in her chest (the city parties when its disco plays), and in McHale’s, a TV for a torso. One regards The Character as the same person in each act, and through changes that occur within each act — identity, death and reincarnation are at the heart of the show. She’s always different, though always the protagonist. (And seemingly female.) Which is not surprising if you’ve ever watched “Adventure Time,” where even every villain is also a protagonist.
Ward takes the first act; Jones-Quartey and Sugar, who are married, worked together on the second; and McHale brings it home with Act 3. Ward’s section is easily recognizable as his work in its mix of the uncanny and the offhand, both from “Adventure Time” and the psychedelic “Midnight Gospel.” Sugar and Jones-Quartey opt for a New Wave angularity far from their usual styles, and McHale cycles through several looks until his Character, who arrives already hoping to get off this wheel of endless rebirth and cease to exist, settles down for a spell in a realistically portrayed city in the snow — New York, I’d say — in conversation with a lonely inventor. McHale also brings in, for just a few seconds, the eponymous elephant in an apropos reference to the parable of the blind men who imagined that animal to be a different sort of beast depending on where they laid their hands.
Each animator (or team) integrates their position in the game — and the nature of the game itself — into their storytelling. Ward’s Character, born onscreen, wonders “What am I? I’m not sure.” In the second section, Sugar and Jones-Quartey have their narrating Character say, “I could feel my existence stretching in both directions, back to the nothingness before anything happened and forward to the nothingness after everything is over. And if everything has a beginning and also a end then this was just the middle.” By virtue of owning the conclusion, and it’s a moving one, McHale brings order to the whole; given the scattered process, and the changes between and within each section, it feels remarkably cohesive and intentional. But metamorphosis is the soul of animation.
If “The Elephant,” described by the network as “a creative experience,” had appeared before it was already published, it would have certainly joined four other animated series — three from Adult Swim — on my list of 2025 favorites. It demands a second viewing, and you’ll want to watch “Behind the Elephant” to learn more. You may want to watch that twice as well.
