Compiling the best reading from your friendly local website. Kristin Hall: Remembering Big Fresh, New Zealand’s greatest supermarket of all time “This one time at Big Fresh, I was going up to press the moo cow button and some other little c*** pressed it right before I got there. I lost the fucking plot and … Read more
For at least 22 years, the Hyde Street Party has been a highlight of Dunedin’s scarfie social calendar, a dawn to dusk marathon of drinking, dancing and general debauchery. This year’s party took place on Saturday April 1 and Joel MacManus was there for the whole thing. This story will appear in next week’s issue … Read more
The government is about to push through a plan to build the most expensive road in New Zealand history – without declaring an up-to-date business case or providing any good evidence of the need. Simon Wilson asks why it wants to waste so much of our money. Boy did it rain last week. In that … Read more
The Spinoff and Spark proudly present Pod On The Couch, a weekly podcast exploring music and the people that make it. This episode: Henry Oliver talks to Jane Yee and Duncan Greive about their teenage Britpop obsession. Last week, music explainer site Pitchfork published a list of the ‘The 50 Best Britpop Albums‘. Having largely missed Britpop in … Read more
The Spinoff Music team review albums from The Chainsmokers, Arca, Bonny Doon and Father John Misty. ALBUM OF THE WEEK Father John Misty – Pure Comedy Like early-Elton John but darker… way darker When ex-Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman delivered his sweet sophomore album, I Love You, Honeybear, via his solo moniker Father John Misty, amongst … Read more
On Monday we published a piece in which midwives spoke out. They talked about how exhausted they are, how they’re underpaid and overworked and underappreciated. Today we share the responses we received from politicians, and from NZ’s main midwives organisation. Following Monday’s story, we heard again and again from readers who were shocked by the … Read more
Watch the first in RNZ’s big new series of interviews, The 9th Floor, and read our slightly shorter interview with their interviewer – on the contrast with Morning Report, Jim Bolger’s surprise attack on neoliberalism, and why John Key isn’t involved. RNZ this morning launched an ambitious new series of filmed interviews with former New Zealand prime … Read more
To conclude our week-long series on Greymouth writer Peter Hooper: two poems by his former student Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, from his new collection of verse, Blood Ties. Poem for John Pule: the last days of Peter Hooper Stoned on Waiheke on Pule’s grass that was a surprise: “Well, yes and no, Jeff, … Read more
Spinoff Comedy editors Sam Brooks and Natasha Hoyland have a pretty good handle on the local comedy scene but were stumped by a few unfamiliar faces in the comedy festival programme. So they did some self-directed research and ended up finding a handful of new favourites. Sam’s I-Watched-The-Helpful-Comedy-Festival-YouTube-Links List Rhys Nicholson Rhys Nicholson is a … Read more
What is typhoid? How do you catch it? And while we’re at it, why have health authorities failed so miserably at communicating with the public over the outbreak? A woman in Auckland died of typhoid last week and no one was told about it until after the funeral days later. Neither her family nor visiting … Read more
Head of news concedes ‘regrettable error’ over TV and online stories on what appears to be a phantom Hamilton police survey. Broadcast and text stories relating to a purported police survey about beggars on Hamilton streets have been removed by TVNZ following a Spinoff report published this week. “We didn’t verify there was a survey … Read more
A report published today highlights what it says are systematic failures in the Family Court. Jess McAllen speaks to Deborah Mackenzie of The Backbone Collective, the organisation which commissioned the report. Women dealing with the Family Court have helped create an independent watchdog report highlighting the system’s failure to keep them and their children safe. … Read more
A new report from Recorded Music NZ shows two years of growing revenues after 15 years of decline. But not everyone is convinced the news is as good as it seems. New figures released by Recorded Music NZ show that in 2016, the New Zealand music industry increased by 16% to $86 million, up from … Read more
The best-selling books at the two best bookstores in the English-speaking world. WELLINGTON UNITY 1 Hit & Run: the NZ SAS in Afghanistan & The Meaning of Honour by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson (Potton Burton, $35) Hager, in an interview with Vice: “I feel confident that one way or another, they [the government] haven’t … Read more
As the number of cases of typhoid in Auckland approaches 20, some people are asking if the outbreak is related to all the heavy rain and flooding we’ve been having. It’s a good question, and the answer is almost certainly no. Dr Siouxsie Wiles explains why. Typhoid is caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi (or … Read more
Everything Tara Ward knows, she has learned from Shane Cortese and the Nothing Trivial gang. Here she outlines the 10 stages of pub quiz grief. Watching three seasons of Nothing Trivial broadened my general knowledge more than the time I fell into a Buzzfeed Quiz vortex of time and space and spent seven hours discovering … Read more
Looking back on 1990s supermarket chain Big Fresh, it seems scarcely believable. A food shopping Disneyland with live country music, a TV room for the kids and giant animatronic vegetables swaying in the rafters? Did that actually happen? But for 15 glorious years the Big Fresh supermarket chain really did exist. Kristin Hall met the … Read more
Prompted by his son’s recent fourth birthday, Gareth Shute look backs and decides which of the preceding “terrible” years did the most to fray his nerves. Before I was a parent, the phrases “terrible twos” and “terrible threes” were meaningless to me. I figured it was a slip of the tongue when people alternated between … Read more
When you crunch the numbers on Auckland’s housing crisis, the result is clear: we’re still going backwards. So why aren’t we changing our approach? Leonie Freeman thinks she has a solution. Even before we dial up the numbers, it’s clear we are in an uncomfortable space. Changing policies, high level cluelessness, a demand-supply failure and … Read more
Dead Dads Club is not a title you’d expect for a Comedy Festival show, but then Sarah Harpur specialises in unexpected comedy. Sam Brooks talks with her about black comedy, the hilarity of grief and the repressed Western approach to death. Content warning: this interview discusses suicide and the experience of grief. Sam Brooks: So why … Read more
Alex Casey talks to Sandra Clark and Francesca Emms about Together We Make a Nation, their multimedia storytelling project that shines a light on refugee women in New Zealand. Seeking to tell the stories of former refugee women who now call New Zealand home, Together We Make a Nation weaves together video, yum recipes, data … Read more
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. It’s a remarkable success story: create a enterprise that combines both business … Read more
All week this week we look at the life and writing of Greymouth novelist and poet Peter Hooper (1919-91). Today: a West Coast memoir by Steve Braunias. I was only passing through the West Coast, lived in Greymouth for not much more than a year, packed a picnic lunch and a copy of the newly … Read more
Calum Henderson watches TVNZ’s Darryl: An Outward Bound Story, a warm Kiwi comedy about how one moustachioed man goes bush to find himself. Few New Zealanders who watched it unfold on television will ever forget the men’s 50km walk at the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Overcome by heat exhaustion, race leader Craig Barrett’s legs turned to … Read more
Gordon Hunter was a detective – a very good one, according to everyone who worked with him and not a few who were put away by him. He was also one of the most memorable rugby coaches of his, or any, era. This weekend the Highlanders and Blues will contest the trophy named in his … Read more
‘Beggars pretending to look homeless by bringing props to streets’ blared a recent One News report, citing as evidence a survey of the homeless population by Hamilton police. Just one problem: the survey doesn’t appear to exist. Branko Marcetic goes in search of the phantom police survey, and looks at what our readiness to accept … Read more
One ominous graph and some stray thoughts on the Canon Media Awards nominations, out yesterday. The Canon Media Awards nominations came out yesterday, celebrated in the customary style by our nation’s media outlets. We spent a morning trying to disentangle the data and see what it all meant, but ended up exhausted and confused, so … Read more
Alea Balzer talks to journalist, critic and experimental music obsessive David Keenan about his debut novel This Is Memorial Device. When is life the equivalent of music, except in memory, except in dreams? Can you be alive for the moment in the moment or is it always retrospectively that you understand the magic of it? In … Read more
Host Alex Casey is joined by comedian/writer Michele A’Court and Mana magazine editor Leonie Hayden to discuss what happened in the world of women over the past month, with help from their legendary sponsors at BON tampons. With a delicious box of Munchkins in the safety of The Spinoff podcast studio, the On the Rag team huddle together to … Read more