MFAT are apoplectic. While they were scaling-up aid to Ukraine and signing agreements to curb the shadow fleet, part of the Realm of New Zealand was selling its flag to let the Russian war economy fill its boots. This helped deep freeze Raro-Wgtn relations. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

Whoever set up a functional gmail style inbox of Epstein's inbox deserves a journalism prize. jmail.world

Luxon in a nutshell.

In today’s Weekend Herald

This is (a) a clever idea, and (b) quite freaky

In other words, traffic deaths are a policy choice

I hope this means people start to re-hire copyeditors and fact-checkers, who do things like "confirm people in stories are real" and "events definitely happened": thelocal.to/investigatin...

Also note that Seymour loudly touted the British response as the one AoNZ should have taken And has never acknowledged he was utterly wrong

I have no idea how we are expected to fund our postgraduate student’s studies. To be fair, I’ve been funding mine from my own pocket for years, using money I earned from paid talks & radio/paper columns. But I’m approaching 2026 with no paid columns anymore & no paid talks lined up. It’s a bit scary

I can’t remember who said it, but like 10 years ago someone said “if public libraries didn’t already exist, the concept would be treated today as preposterous left-wing gobbledygook,” and I think about that a lot

Elizabeth Smither was once married to a great NZ artist but thinks that this AI angel is inspired by Chagall

Bloody hell

This is from Grokipedia's woeful AI-generated article on New Zealand. Yes, it really is citing Hobson's Pledge as a factual source.

Lovely to wake up to the aristocratic trilling of Katherine Rich on RNZ panicking about the Uber ruling. Why not interview an Uber driver instead of the Chief Executive of BusinessNZ? Another baffling RNZ mystery

It's actually great the Ockhams have adopted a zero-tolerance approach to generative AI in book production, and a shame these authors are casualties of their publisher trying to save a buck. (Incidentally I think both the covers are garbage.)

And there's now a Wikipedia article about McLeans Grassland Reserve (which incidentally mentions the Mayor's comments). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLeans...

Academics who have advised a graduate student from China over the past years would be banned from federal funding. This would give the federal government one more lever to attack scientists. And how long before they expand the list of "hostile foreign" countries?

If you need me, tap me on the shoulder. I’ll be happily working all day listening to this on a loop.

Good statement from the US conference of Catholic Bishops

What's from Chicago, hates Illinois Nazis, and is holy as fuck? It's the Pope in 1982.

Worth a listen as well. #nzpol

Julie K. Brown is THE journalist to follow on matters Epstein; her reports led to Epstein being rearrested in 2019. She uncovered 80 potential victims, some as young as 13 and 14 years old when the abuse occurred.

DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT

Every element of this is comedic perfection.

We in the rest of the world wonder why so many Americans vote for Republicans. This is why. They live in an entirely different reality.

This amazing labour-of-love book about the Tongariro National Park helped me to understand just what a calamity the fire is...

If you'd told me that a speaker at the Free Speech Union conference would call for banning non-Christian public expressions of faith to an applauding crowd, I would have said yes, obviously that is going to happen newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/10/t...

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

The Mamdani political sign generator is kinda fun https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/ccshan/for/for.html

If I'm doing the math correctly, Musk's big pay packet yesterday could have made each of these now-dead people millionaires instead. He is among the sickest men the world has ever produced.

What a boondoggle - the Saudi ‘Line in the Sand’, with trains with no baggage and global-cladding-gobbling bird-killing mirror finish sounds like the world’s most wasteful and expensive dumb thing

this is incredibly lucid and valuable research.

Before her (too early) death, the amazing Sharon Begley wrote this piece on double helix co-discoverer James Watson and the racist and sexist pronouncements he seemed to revel in making in later life. Fascinating read about a troubling individual. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

Australia has so much solar generation capacity that it's offering customers free electricity for three hours in the middle of the day: electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

Over the last months, we’ve entirely rebuilt search on Our World in Data — we just launched it: ourworldindata.org/introducing-... Let me know what you think. Does it work for you?

The East Village is hootin and hollerin

A bonfire of the climate policies. An emissions Guy Fawkes Day

If you're in need of positive and rather wholesome news, there's a high school teacher named Bryan who took a ton of freely licensed celebrity headshots at the New York Film Festival last month for Wikipedia, and I truly can't believe how drastic the upgrade is for some articles (thread)

Folks, people who appreciated Siouxsie's work during the pandemic and/or who like free speech and academic freedom should help out here if they can. And that's all of us, one way or another, right? www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/852...

My latest column in Prospect: Don't worry about AI video destroying democracy. AI's destruction of the journalism business is a much more serious threat: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

most of the time I think he’s at least really committed to fascism. but there’s just a lot of evidence he’s bored as fuck and they keep coming up with these little projects for him. I mean it’s important for elderly people to stay active.

Another great current affairs magazine dies after a long illness. The new owner spiked my old mag 3 weeks before print day. I feel for the editor. Planning for a year of magazines - all that work - only to have it unexpectedly killed, those stories untold. I know what that’s like. It sucks.

AI agents tried to do graphic design, video editing, game development, and administrative chores like scraping data. "Even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991," writes @willknight.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/ai-age...

Language models are terrible at counting (part 12381...) It's concerning how many workflows/copilots etc. these tools are now creeping into, despite making small numerical errors all over the place (which a causal eye might not catch). Below from GPT-5 and Sonnet-4.5:

lol Grokipedia science articles are literally just word-for-word copies of Wikipedia

If I could change one thing about political reporting in New Zealand it would be the reflex to treat policy criticism from the political opposition as not only meaningful but the most important thing.

#nzpol Labour is proposing to create a Capital Gains Tax on property - excluding farms and the family home. That income will help make GP visits free for the majority of people. Is that a better policy than continuing tax-free profits on, say, someone's seventh property? Absolutely. A🧵

Such a clear explainer of the problems with the rushed new NZ maths curriculum

Sign this petition about the Regulatory Standards Bill, please petitions.parliament.nz/212f27b2-98f...

A couple of weeks ago, Trump struggled with a broken umbrella as he boarded Air Force One. Let me tell you how we got to this point — and the tragic downfall of the noble umbrella. 🧵