Health NZ has spent $26,000 sending North Island patients south for complex gynaecological cancer surgery, after the Wellington service collapsed. #nzpol

Heck yes!!

From Peter Thiel to James Cameron, NZ will hand out citizenship to the worst people but if you are a nurse’s son with autism, you will get deported. Every day a new reason to be ashamed of being a kiwi. Utterly embarrassing.

Is capitalism finally eating itself? (I would say the answer to this problem is obvious, but that doesn’t seem to matter in these spectacularly illogical times)

Parisot (the Director) tells a story about how Tim Allen just started crying after a scene one day "I don't like these feelings i'm having." Says Tim. "I'm going back to my trailor" and walks off. There's silence for a second. "Oh my god." Says Rickman. "I think Tim just experienced acting."

This is an absolutely searing 0 stars review of the latest Avatar. Obliterating but also entertaining (and critically incisive) reading…

I get these monthly-ish now, so basically I don’t answer emails unless I know the person or know the business or have a way of verifying. It’s a huge loss for genuine strangers/businesses/media wishing to connect. A huge waste of everyone’s time. And it’s just the beginning…

I attended the vigil tonight. As well as lighting candles we could add notes, I decided to name the people from Gaza who have shared their stories with me over the past year

If you have Trans people in your life, check and love on them this holiday season. The world be trying to make them responsible for it's problems. But they deserve love and the right to exist. Show up for them this Christmas!!!

Sadness arrives uninvited. Joy demands more—it requires us to search, to kindle, to protect the flame against every wind. When we choose joy despite everything that argues against it, we don't just save ourselves—we illuminate the way for everyone around us.

onion person forgetting Indigenous people exist and have every right to not enjoy Avatar. I do not like James Cameron using things that happened and still happen to Indigenous for his blockbuster series. I don't like the white saviorism. I don't enjoy the magical ndn trope.

My kid is 14. He uses discord to talk to friends when playing Minecraft and dnd. He has no interest in FB or instagram or TikTok, but a social media hard-cap of age 16 would limit his social life unnecessarily with no benefit. Ffs, direct policy at platforms not users. Or ban boomers as well.

“a people’s right to safely practise their faith or exist in their Jewishness, their Muslimness – whatever it may be – is sacrosanct” thespinoff.co.nz/society/22-1...

Especially relevant in NZ, where funding for the Archives NZ digitisation programme of official records was axed in 2024.

I cannot believe this is the world we live in now

#nzpol Pay attention, Aotearoa New Zealand, because this awful National/NZ First/ACT coalition government considers you and your loved ones expendable. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

This is the maths of our coalition of ROADS ROADS ROADS They will build roads - which creates more traffic while they lie about it - and slash the much cheaper and actually traffic solving mass transit. Neoliberals love roads. Stupidity, like most things neoliberals love.

the CACKLE I just let out, happy holidays yo

Out of Office finally on! Now, food, Christmas Carols, finding presents? Birthday! I am going to lose my mind on some escapist scheiße for a week or two.

People in walkable cities see cool dogs. Argument over.

Have started thinking about how I will do research now that Google cant be trusted. It will be funner but slower. Thinking about just going to talk to people again, turning up at their door unannounced with a clipboard: ‘I came from NZ - can you tell me about _______ I need a reputable source.’

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

The only good part of this whole "AI" nonsense is that it's forcing us to examine why genuine art is so important to us as a species.

I don’t know where white people who stand on stolen indigenous land get the audacity to talk about mass uncontrolled immigration like have some shame.

I was lucky to talk to Sam Dapanas recently for Panorama Journal about Indigenous writing, publishing, the challenges faced by Māori writers, my own books and quite a few things I don’t often get asked about in Aotearoa. It was such a pleasure to go real deep in an interview.

I made a list of some of my favourite books from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. These can sometimes be quite hard to find in UK bookshops, but I recommend seeking any of these out if they appeal.

What kind of person feels hard done by when those with nothing slightly approach pay levels that reflect human decency? Not only have I never felt this or known anyone else to feel this, it was actually beyond my wildest imagination before I saw this. These people are bizarre anti-humans.

I think we are entering a phase in the publishing industry where authors, especially established ones, may have to insist in their contracts that their books are copyedited and proofread by humans. Otherwise, the tasks will be increasingly performed by in-house AI software.

Further evidence that this government is demonstrating poor economic management. Without a doubt, this would have been at a significant cost to the New Zealand tax payer. $510m healthcare savings this FY, anyone? (2/2) #nzpol www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

It has the added benefit of being a lot more useful than despair, too.

PATHA's statement follows: “This is a win for trans young people, their whānau, and the health professionals who care for them. The High Court has recognised the harm this ban will cause, and the significant issues in the decision Cabinet made to restrict access to this life-saving care.”

Any reprieve will be a godsend for a lot of kids who need to access care. Thanks to PATHA for doing this.

BREAKING: The High Court of New Zealand has granted PATHA’s application for interim relief, declaring that the Crown should not take any steps to enforce the incoming ban on new prescriptions of puberty blockers to transgender children and young people. More to come:

The hazardous levels aren't just potential - they're absolutely real in several areas, & they're extreme. I worry about people aren't aware how bad the water really is - there are no public health warnings & certainly no one is taking responsibility for it.

Researchers identified nitrate-rich cow urine as a primary cause of contaminated groundwater. A 2021 study found up to 100 cases of bowel cancer and 40 deaths might be caused by nitrate-contaminated drinking water each year - 800,000 New Zealanders exposed to potentially hazardous levels. #nzpol

#nzpol Congratulations Luxon, economic recovery is on its way ... and these people have just chosen to be destitute

Turbine|Kapohau magazine, which I’ve been lucky to edit alongside ada duffy and Isabella Smith, is live! Have a click. I’ll be linking to some of the pieces here in between moments frenetic travelling turbinekapohau.org.nz

My position on taking action. And on the important space between everything and nothing.

Apropos of nothing.

Surely a misuse of urgency?

“Transgender and nonbinary youth (ages 13 to 24) whose pronouns are respected were 31 percent less likely to attempt suicide in the past year than those whose pronouns are not respected, according to a new report from The Trevor Project” www.advocate.com/exclusives/p...

These folios are just some of many that we expect to see making their way into the world in years to come: congratulations to the whole MA 2025 cohort - the next phase of your lives as writers has just begun! 🥂💐

Mauatua Fa'ara-Reynolds is the winner of the Letteri Family Prize for Creative Nonfiction with her hybrid and poetic work Our Bark-Skinned Bodies, and Stephenjohn Holgate is the winner of this year's Modernletters Fiction Prize with his rich, poignant novel about three generations of Jamaican men

Niamh Vaughan is this year's winner of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing with her 'hilarious and terrifying' memoir The World Reversed, and the winner of the Biggs Family Prize for Poetry is Will Salmon, with his 'deeply humane' poetry collection, Worm 🧵 www.wgtn.ac.nz/modernletter...

Massive thanks and congratulations to the editors of this year's Turbine | Kapohau, which was launched last night during the Adam/Biggs awards ceremony. You can sample some of the work Stephenjohn Holgate, ada duffy and Isabella Smith have selected in this thread... Thanks also to Ash Davida Jane!💐

An OIA confirms it: the Ministry of Education are using AI - Copilot- to develop the new school curriculum. Article here, more as it develops. Please share widely: www.emilywrites.co.nz/yup-theyre-u... #nzpol #kikorangi

‘It says almost nothing about how the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) will contribute, despite the fact that the strategy’s objectives cannot be met without them.’

Comment from Victoria University: The easiest way to prevent others contracting Long Covid is to stay home when sick, and for govt to increase paid leave

Interesting to catch up on the career of our former Iowa Workshop convenor Ben Shattuck, who has written the screenplay of his own book, The History of Sound. The film stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, and opens in NZ later this month.

I spend so much time verifying everything now from art to cited sources to photos to historical references to citations to quotes to legal and medical information that it's really hard to fathom how much work AI has collectively added to the world, not reduced