New Zealand has never experienced anything like the Covid-19 lockdown of the past seven weeks. Simon Day spoke to a University of Otago researcher analysing the way lockdown has affected New Zealanders’ perception of the world. When New Zealand went into lockdown at midnight on March 25, and the government demanded New Zealanders stay at … Read more
Fresh off another Ockhams nomination, here’s one of New Zealand’s foremost historians on the realities of research – and the end of a golden era at our national archive. It felt like I had finally reached the inner sanctum of New Zealand historians. In January 1993 I arrived in Wellington on a three-month contract researching … Read more
Librarian Rebecca Hastie with a crash course on the fraught task of “weeding”, the systematic removal of resources from a library collection. Writer and reviewer David Larsen wrote an article the other week conveying his immense displeasure and concern that the National Library is removing 600,000 books from its collection. David’s piece, along with the … Read more
The National Library says it is ‘making room for more New Zealand and Pacific stories’ and hopes the books it’s purging might ‘spark joy’ for other people. David Larsen considers it a whacking great clear-cutting. It would be irresponsible for me to tell you the National Library is about to burn six hundred thousand of … Read more
DiscoveryCamp is inspiring young Māori and Pasifika students to persist with science. Simon Day talks to three graduates about the opportunities the programme has provided. From studying chemistry in the classroom, suddenly Cha’nel Kaa-Luke (Ngāruahine, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Porou) was in a real lab, learning about quantum computing, the science of social media, and how to … Read more
We’ve largely moved beyond moral panics about teens’ consumption of books, television and movies, but worries about the effects of online pornography remain. But are we concerned about the wrong things? Throughout history, the regulation of children’s access to violent and sexualised media has been a startlingly consistent social concern. Over the course of the … Read more