New Zealand Listener

New Zealand Listener is the country’s most respected general interest magazine, bringing you a wide variety of news, stories, columns, reviews, plus TV listings, every week.

New Zealand Listener1 min read
Masthead
Editor Kirsty Cameron Chief Subeditor Geoff Cumming Managing Editor Ruth Brown Art Director Derek Ward Books Editor Mark Broatch Entertainment & Arts Editor Russell Baillie Television Editor Fiona Rae Digital Editor Dionne Christian Subeditors Patric
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The Fabric Of Life
Our lives are bound up with material stuff, from birth to death, the newborn swaddled in towels to the body wrapped in a shroud. So it’s fitting that Fabric-a-brac, a movement founded to extend the life of the woven and knitted material with which we
New Zealand Listener7 min read
Death And Paperwork
In “We need to talk about dying” (May 25), the need for a pathway for the dying is mentioned. It would be nice if this pathway included what happens after death. Standard medical practice currently violates nine out of 10 of the Health and Disability
New Zealand Listener2 min read
Bright Lines
For our new Limerick Competition, we asked you to write a limerick about the solar storms that caused pink skies across NZ. Going to bed I saw the sky had gone pink Woke up my wife asked what did she think It’s only you The skies are blue Once again
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10 Quick Questions
❑ Sword ❑ Feather ❑ Heart ❑ Shield ❑ True ❑ False ❑ Japan ❑ China ❑ Korea ❑ Qatar ❑ 121 ❑ 501 ❑ 1331 ❑ 14641 ❑ Track and field ❑ Gymnastics ❑ Weightlifting ❑ Swimming ❑ Renaissance ❑ Renouvellement ❑ Vitalité ❑ Croissance ❑ Four
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Walking A Tightrope
The political theorist Hannah Arendt complained that what we mistakenly call politics is often merely the careers of ruthless and ambitious people who are proximate to power. Real politics – for her – is ordinary men and women taking action in their
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Gate Closing
Early election drums are beating in Australia, accompanied by the potent issue of cutting immigration – a sure vote lure during these times of chronic housing shortages and rising layoffs. Anthony Albanese has previously said his Labor government wil
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Fantastic News
What does life look like after the end of reality? The just-concluded Indian general election, in which nearly a billion people were eligible to vote, suggests it’s a prospect worth contemplating. There has never been an election in which the contes
New Zealand Listener3 min read
No Business Like Show Business
Best in show. Is there a more divisive concept in civil society? Our forebears may well have held “Best Decorated Cave” events, human competitiveness being a usefully adaptive trait. But the value of modern shows can be hard to spot, as with the rece
New Zealand Listener3 min readCrime & Violence
Tikanga And The Law
Parliament’s regulations review committee is investigating a complaint laid by Gary Judd KC, who has taken issue is with a rule introduced by the Council of Legal Education that makes a course in tikanga Māori compulsory for law students. Under the L
New Zealand Listener9 min read
Growing The Nest Egg
Forget about yacht racers or the All Blacks. New Zealand has another class of world beater: investment advisers. Their work propelled New Zealand’s state pension funder to the top of the world rankings. The winning team is the NZ Super Fund, aka the
New Zealand Listener12 min read
Glass Act
It usually fell to the children to put out glass milk bottles at the letterbox. We dropped coins into them as payment, and later, to foil petty thieves, tokens bought from the dairy. The milkman (or sometimes woman) drove the truck around every stree
New Zealand Listener8 min read
Modern Love
It’s on TV commercials where it instantly signals universally acceptable good taste; it’s in your doctor’s office and your dentist’s waiting room, silently exuding a reassuring stability; it’s in furniture chain stores where it’s popular for its easy
New Zealand Listener8 min read
Kai & connection
It’s an unusually warm and windless autumn morning in Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara. By midday, the regular Tuesday crew of volunteers start streaming into the commercial kitchen of LTD., an events space on Dixon St metres away from the Cuba St hosp
New Zealand Listener8 min read
Breaking Ranks
Dario Nustrini entered the army for many of the usual reasons young people do. The way he left it was anything but usual. After six years in the service, on deployment alongside Nato forces in Iraq, the communications specialist had an epiphany: “The
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Family Affairs
by Coco Mellors (HarperCollins, $37.99) is out on June 5. Blue Sisters is everything the title suggests: a gritty tale about three women whose surname describes the state of their troubled lives. But there’s more than melancholy at work in Coco Mel
New Zealand Listener2 min read
A Bigger Tent
How do you make a successful literary festival even better? Piles of planning, clever pairing of speakers and not being afraid of genre fiction. A record 85,000 people passed through the rooms of the Aotea Centre over the several days of the Auckland
New Zealand Listener4 min read
Road To Ruin
1. THE LAST SECRET AGENT by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (A&U) Kiwi spy’s wartime exploits 2. QUESTION 7 by Richard Flanagan (Penguin) Nuclear physics and life 3. WIFEDOM by Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton) Orwell’s forgotten wife 4. THE EARTH TRANS
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Short Cuts
For a long time, comedian Dai Henwood never told anyone he had incurable cancer. He was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in April 2020, during lockdown, and told a small group of friends via WhatsApp. Turns out the large tumour found had spread to
New Zealand Listener2 min read
Future Imperfect
by Jenny Ackland (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is out on June 4. Moving through this world is an eccentric group of circus women: “We sew and drive and perform and reclaim.” Illicitly, on the side, they offer “reclamations” for women who do not want to b
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Books & Other Adventures
by Harry Ricketts (THWUP, $35) We owe Harry Ricketts. He’s a poet, critic, biographer, even sports historian. He’s been an academic (English at Victoria University of Wellington), and co-editor of the former review journal NZ Books. Now comes this
New Zealand Listener5 min readInternational Relations
Gone In 72 Minutes
by Annie Jacobsen (Torva, $40) Day in and day out, the American Secret Service trains its staff for nuclear war. If it ever happens, they will be more prepared than the president, who in Annie Jacobsen’s terrifyingly realistic scenario gets six min
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In His Happy Places
When Phil Spencer arrived in Auckland last New Year’s Day to film yet another TV series, he got a ride from the airport through the empty streets to his Auckland rental. He turned on the television. On it was an episode of Location, Location, Locatio
New Zealand Listener5 min read
Finding Their Own Rhythm
When “drum and bass” emerged from the UK’s frantic “jungle” electronic dance music scene of the late 90s, it sounded like it had arrived through a rip in the time/space continuum. With its eerie, floating chords, delay-ridden effects, strange spacey
New Zealand Listener2 min read
Minister Of Sound
NO ONE IS A BIGGER FAN OF SHAPESHIFTER – in profile or enthusiasm – than former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern. She gave copies of two of the group’s albums to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their 2018 visit to New Zealand. Launching Labour’s
New Zealand Listener2 min read
Style Counsellors
66 by Paul Weller Alongside Elvis Costello, Paul Weller is one of just a few from the British post-punk era with a proven capacity for successful reinvention. With the Jam (1976-82) he initially tapped Mod culture but emerged as a distinctive socia
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Cherchez Les Femmes
There’s a stereotype that the French love their women, but it certainly seems evident when you look at le cinéma français. Two grandes dames and two bright young things star in three of this year’s female-centred offerings in the French Film Festival
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Living The Dream
COPA 71 Having last year’s Fifa Women’s World Cup played in our backyard was a remarkable thing, a joy to behold and it took only one Spanish male official to kill the feel-good factor in its aftermath. After all, co-hosting the quadrennial tourname
New Zealand Listener4 min read
TV Picks Of The Week
Men are still terrible Screening: TVNZ 1, 9.15pm Streaming: TVNZ+ The name is a legacy one – there’s no tower block in the story this time – but DS Sarah Collins (Gemma Whelan) is back and as grumpy and gay as ever. In this four-part adaptation of t
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Tv Films
Can we keep him? TVNZ 2, 7pm Charming family-fare fantasy about a wee laddie living by a remote Scottish loch in the 1940s who raises a Nessie-like monster after it hatches from an egg. Starring Emily Watson as the kid’s permanently worried mum, it
New Zealand Listener1 min read
Saturday June 8
The film of the book that satirises films and books about the African-American experience. You could go a bit crazy thinking about the layers of irony in Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, but he pulls it off with a
New Zealand Listener1 min read
Sunday June 9
We can thank Blondie’s popularity in the UK for this Sky Arts doco about the guy who started drumming when he was a kid in New Jersey and never stopped. In fact, he says in the film that his goal was “to never have to go to work. That’s why they call
New Zealand Listener1 min readGender Studies
Monday June 10
We hope the Aurat March movement in Pakistan is having some effect, but given the level of misogyny on display in this documentary it’s difficult to see real change any time soon. Nevertheless, says director Anam Abbas, her film about the 2020 march
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Tuesday June 11
Man, he’s been everywhere. British adventure traveller Simon Reeve continues his – yes, we’re saying it – epic journey through the Americas. Because he’s Simon Reeve, there are plenty of hairy situations as he travels from Venezuela in the north to T
New Zealand Listener1 min read
Wednesday June 12
We seem to be doing things backwards in the Taskmaster universe – after this special, the cast of season 17, which has already screened on TVNZ 2, was announced. Don’t worry, you can catch it on TVNZ+, along with all previous 16 seasons. Good grief,
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Thursday June 13
Australian actor and writer Roxburgh says he’s always found the world of drugs and the government policy around them fascinating, hence this four-part series that delves into the history, harms and possible benefits of common recreational substances.
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Friday June 14
The febrile atmosphere of the fashion industry makes pretty good drama, although some recent attempts have been better than others. Halston won Ewan McGregor an Emmy, but The New Look struggled with narrative coherence. Perhaps French TV will have a
New Zealand Listener7 min read
Local Heroes
FREEVIEW 51 SKY 422 iHeartRADIO rnz.co.nz/concert NB: Programme details are correct at the time of going to print; check RNZ website for updates News and Weather 6.00, 8.00, 9.00, noon 6.00 Mornings with Carey McDonald 10.00 RNZ Concert Days 3.00 R
New Zealand Listener3 min readDiet & Nutrition
Know Your Oats
QUESTION: I have been eating rolled oats for decades. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about buying the different flavoured oat sachets for a snack or lunch at work. How do they compare nutritionally to standard rolled oats? ANSWER: Oats are nut
New Zealand Listener2 min read
Island Time
Wine grown on Waiheke, the lovely, sprawling island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, is among the most expensive in the country. The hilly terrain means the vineyards are small, labour intensive and costly to run, and transport costs are heavy. High land
New Zealand Listener5 min read
Winning Ways
Atray of these for dinner is just about the best thing I can think of to eat. Squashed, crisp-edged potatoes, tossed and baked in pickle brine to give them a subtle but important chip-shop-vinegar feeling. Once hot and crisped, the potatoes are toppe
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Live Long And Prosper
I tell my students to remember that every line of their data is a person. An actual person with a life outside the tiny slice they dedicated to telling us about. I have always tried to remind myself of this, but it was made real when I was doing my P
New Zealand Listener3 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The New Triad Of Pc Power
During the dark days of the pandemic, computer makers couldn’t believe their luck. With billions of people plunged into lockdown, many of them were ordering new computers so they could work from home. Schools bought devices en masse to send home with
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The Bigger Picture
Rodger Fox, who has died aged 71, lived and breathed music. Yes, he had to – playing trombone in a jazz big band takes a fair amount of lung power. But just as much breath was spent teaching it (he lectured at the NZ School of Music) and promoting it
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Best In Show
That whirring sound you can hear is the inner grinding of what passes for my brain. It is busy attempting, yet again, to come up with a money-spinning scheme for Lush Places. My last, or so I thought, rather good idea – to write a best-selling childr

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