As the Avatar marketing budget starts to render everything blue, a reminder that in 2013 Steven Joyce signed a deal allowing James Cameron to make unlimited Avatar sequels underwritten with a 25% govt subsidy. One big win for Joyce was the inclusion of NZ tourism ads on DVD releases.

The history of nuclear weapons development during the Cold War is fascinating/horrifying. They were loaded onto: depth-charges to deep-fry submarines; anti-air missiles for atmospheric blasts to shoot down planes; and even issued man-portable versions lobbed by recoilless rifle a km or two.

Allegedly I have 10k followers on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, and only 1.7k here. Here’s an A/B test with identical content. Despite 1/6th the ostensible audience, here it generates four times the engagement (and no trolls).

The most wholesome story of the true New Zealand is immigrant bakers - mostly refugees - dominating pie awards and becoming beloved regional icons.

Fossil fuel companies were given confidential drafts of legislation during their (successful) two-year campaign to weaken oil and gas regulation and overturn the offshore exploration ban - new reporting from me via the OIA www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

The Cook Islands allowed over a hundred shadow fleet tankers trafficking sanctioned Russian and Iranian oil. A Big Read from me looking at the curious case of Maritime Cook Islands with an investigation employing big data analysis and fieldwork in Raro. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

What do you mean I can't idly search the Companies Office for filing updates on a Monday evening? What does MBIE expect me to do instead? Enjoy a drink and presitge television? This is an outrage.

Extremely fun story tomorrow.

Never picked the Fugees as the hardest-core hip hop group of the 90s. Lauryn Hill did years for tax evasion, and now this. pitchfork.com/news/fugees-...

Elon Musk to Grok engineers rn:

Lessons from the McSkimming affair: Cover-ups can be worse than the crime/misconduct; No suprise does not mean trying to bury suprises with suppression orders; It's not rotten apples we should be talking about, it's fish who decompose from the head down.

New Zealander of the Year: McSkimming's complainant.

Fatherhood summed up in one image:

I'll say two things about SPG funding boost announced today: 1) No mention of likely costs to the government, 2) The removal of caps on above-the-line-spending on leading actors/directors was largely in response to criticism of SPG subsidising 20% of ScarJo's $25m fee to apper in Ghost in the Shell.

BusinessDesk has a fantastic (and rare) for a data journalist in New Zealand. The Herald and BusinessDesk are separate publications, but whoever is in this role will work with me on projects like Budget day visualisations 1/2 careers.nzme.co.nz/jobs/6697721...

Think I'm working on my best story since Citizen Thiel. So good I don't even mind writing on the weekend. 3000 words in and it feels like I might be half-way? Just 200 more pages of OIAs, three hours of interview transcripts, and several dense pages of legalese to sythenise and I'm g2g.

In memorandum of the burning down of Palmie's The Fitz, here's my first (and only, really) piece of gonzo journalism for Salient in 2003 about the Worst Pub in the World. CW: Piss and vomit. @jgreenbrookheld.bsky.social

Had panicked today and worked like a demon thinking it was a short week and I only had one more day before the weekend to finish a long-brewing project. I came home, frazzled and barely holding it together, and my wife told me today was Wednesday, not Thursday.

Thai E-Sarn (refugee from Food Alley RIP) on Hobson St might be the best Thai joint in the city. Beef salad 10/10 no notes.

Watercare’s fault reporting service has all the charm of a back-end spreadsheet, but a minor leak in our meter box got sorted <24 hours so AG.

More Talley's v TVNZ: This time with bonus minister talking of a 'culture of fear' at the company. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Goddamn (allergic?) eczema outbreak on my eyelids. My eyes are gonna be swollen shut by morning. Spring is whack.

Talleys v TVNZ defamation trial reaches a crescendo. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Objectively, nothing tops chorizo-fried bacon, right?

Pickup sticks ‘til ‘26.

Out in Titirangi we have lots of power outages. Some water outages. But the most insidious and debilitating is a fibre outage, now ticking into its 30th hour.

My final story from the epic/tragic/comic Zuru nappy trial. Feat: Reflections on the startup exit stories we tell ourselves, competition issues raised for for supermarkets and suppliers, and a hand-scrawled note where the Taylor family are schooled about FAANGT. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

The Zuru nappy trial hearing, just concluded after four long weeks, keeps bringing the tea. (Honestly, the most bonkers civil case I've ever covered.) www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Week three of the Zuru nappy trial and it somehow becomes even more absorbing. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/zur...

The NYT is categorically wrong to describe closing Alien: Earth ep2 with Stinkfist as a "mistep". It is glorious and proof that the content-creating algorithms are perfectly datamining my long-gestating preferences and long may that - and this show - continue. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/a...

The trial that keeps on giving: www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Absolute scenes at the Zuru nappy trial. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/zur...

I spent all day at the High Court hearing about the intricacies of nappy production and how Zuru operates. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Exciting developments in the Nippert household. Am jazzing up my kombu tsuyu udon soup recipe with fish tofu and frozen fish balls (mirin-drenched oyster mushrooms warming in oven).

TFW you're the first guy to publicly call out an obvious con, get threatened with multiple lawsuits and see two football teams change hands in the aftershock, and finally - after 14 years! - see my original reporting proven in court with prison resulting. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Back to dreading the weather. Gonna have to rip up my deck to see where stormwater is pooling, as panicking every time the daily level hits 50ml and engages overflow seepage is doing my head in.

Buy for a dollar, sell for two is great advice from very savvy businessman Prop Joe. Not buy for $23.5m, tip in tens of millions more, then sell for a dollar. Looking at you, Discovery.

I love wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_t...

Whether it’s the economy turning, or dubious targeting, the entity formerly known as the Provincial Growth Fund has experienced a sudden deterioration in the quality of its loan book. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

Watching delayed. Barely half-time. Ardie Savea is surely due another world player of year nom.

FFS: Seepage into the office again. First since Gabrielle. Once more I reinvent myself as a crawlspace hydrology engineer.

The latest on Waipareira Trust v Charities Registration Board: www.nzherald.co.nz/business/wai...

Just to accurately lay out the course of events, people were yelling at him because his auto-responding robot that was trained on Twitter’s userbase still displayed — against all odds — a modicum of empathy. He then made the robot speak like him and within hours it was calling itself Mechahitler.

Once more I ask why I, a journalist based in Auckland, has better access to courts filing in Wisconsin (through PACER) than those in Wellington.

That one time a Chinese military officer baller went rogue and purchased the hulk of a decommissioned aircraft carrier during a bender, with a cover story as it being floating casino, and ended up bootstrapping the PRC navy into C21 second place in CAGs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese...

Open letter to open letter writers: Get a blog.

I built a corporate rich list, then hand-scraped tax info from cashflow and income statements to rank New Zealand’s biggest taxpayers and assess how well ETRs and CTRs match the statutory company rate. www.nzherald.co.nz/business/com...

The joys of waking to a power outage: Dark, cold, no coffee, having to wriggle through a hatch in the garage to liberate vehicles from a dead electric door.

Immagonna start a Laotian food truck and call it Rocket Larb.

Sound the international reference klaxon, kiwis! (Heat, 1995.)