Back to the Cretaceous period, probably
Asking questions about fossils
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend. My room is still covered in the remnants of a past obsession. It’s sort of like an archeology dig: if you add up the dinosaur stickers in my stationery drawer (I guess this counts as outing myself as a Sticker Person and I can live with that), and the “Dinomania” book on my shelf and the realistic dinosaur figurines I spent a few hectic months collecting it’s easy to conclude: Shanti once spend much too much time talking about dinosaurs and then had to suffer dinosaur-themed gifts from her nearest and dearest long after the initial enthusiasm had faded. And that would be a correct assumption, unlike (scientific controversy alert) the people who assembled the brontosaurus. But the version of myself that spent a lot of times at parties in 2019 asking people about their favourite dinosaurs was completely revived by Chris Schulz’s interview with a person who bought a dinosaur egg this week.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
What a dinosaur egg means
Recently, Chris Schulz met Sophia*, a woman who was in the process of buying a Mongolian dinosaur egg from a Webb’s auction. The egg now lives in her home; Sophia feels protective over this object, so old it is impossible to imagine. If you’ve been following The Weekend, you’ll know we have a recurring interest in how precious objects, like dinosaur eggs, change hands. In my aforementioned dinosaur era, I read a lot about this: I’d highly recommend Paige Williams’ 2013 New Yorker story about the contested sale of a tyrannosaurus relative from Mongolia. I also loved these two articles about the work of Mongolian paleontologists to explore their country’s amazing geographic history. Sophia, the anonymous woman Chris talks to, doesn’t have any articles of origin for her dinosaur egg, but tells him that she would consider returning it to Mongolia in the future. Exporting fossils from Mongolia is heavily restricted but specimens (evidently!) make their way out of the country nonetheless.
A separate, but related topic: the tricky ethics of contemporary museums
Could Tairāwhiti be forested with natives instead of pines?
After Cyclone Gabrielle, forestry slash caused a huge amount of land damage to Tairāwhiti. For this month’s Side Eye, Toby Morris illustrates the history of land use in this beautiful area. Pine plantations, planted in the 1950s to reduce erosion have created a vicious cycle, where the land is exposed when trees are harvested, exacerbating flooding. New crops of trees planted for carbon credits may mean that this pattern continues. But it doesn’t have to: while slower-growing, native trees have deeper roots, don’t have to be harvested in one go as they’re more valuable, and support biodiversity. The animations in this piece are really cool and helped me to understand the issue!
The hero of New Zealand crime literature
Craig Sisterson is a fierce advocate for New Zealand crime writing and the founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards for New Zealanders writing in the genre. Claire Mabey gets a drink with him in London to hear about how he got into crime fiction. “Crime is a huge part of the market: for readers, libraries and bookshops,” he says, explaining how he keeps the awards inclusive by allowing self-published books and hosting events in libraries. Crime is a genre with blurry edges. Sisterson describes it thus: “Our books don’t have to be detective fiction. They don’t have to have a police officer, they just have to have crime and thrills as a spine or a heart, or a big part of the story.”
Support independent journalism in Aotearoa by becoming a Spinoff member.
It’s because of our members that our small team of journalists are able to cover stories the length and breadth of New Zealand, then tell them in an engaging and compelling way. From up-to-the-minute news and sharp political reporting, to stories that delight and entertain – it's all made possible thanks to the support of readers like you. Tautoko mai, become a member today.
The Kardashians challenging beauty standards? That’s hypocritical
The Kardashians are supposed to be self-aware now. At least, that’s what the teaser trailer to the current series of their show implied. Alex Casey was watching, and she wasn’t satisfied with the celebrity sister’s attempt to meditate on their inordinate cultural power — not when they’ve all made billions of dollars from selling products branded with their names that capitalise on their image as architypes of the contemporary beautiful woman. “The ‘conversation’ was roughly as transparent and flimsy as an $80 ‘Cut it Out’ swimsuit from Kylie Swim,” Casey writes. “The Kardashians are trying to have their cake and sell you a waist trainer too…. they can’t challenge anything while also making one trillion dollars a second off that very same thing.”
Why did I write four stories about how we use Facebook today?
A few months ago, I had a theory: that lots of people don’t love the ad-filled Facebook newsfeed, but keep using their accounts for genuinely useful features offered by the social media giant. Being a journalist, and not a social scientist, I tried to prove this thesis in a series of articles about how New Zealanders use Facebook. First, I wrote about Facebook Marketplace, the best place to get approximately 100 “is this item still available” messages. Then I reported on Facebook Groups, where you can find comrades for your niche interests, and Facebook Events — still maybe the best way to get people from the internet to your in-person event. I finished the series, which I cannot emphasise enough no-one asked for, this week with a story about Facebook Messenger, which is astonishingly ubiquitous in New Zealand. Once you have a network there with lots of your friends, whose phone numbers you don’t know, it can be surprisingly hard to leave. But could an announcement that Facebook is being merged with the main app change that?
Everything else
OK, look, I have to do a quick homage to the dinosaurs (they were on earth for much much longer than humans have been!) with some of my favourite dinosaur reads: this classic about how we know about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and this one about New Zealand’s (much less well-preserved) dinosaur history.
How Swanndri became a New Zealand icon
Ensuring women’s sports are represented on the internet is the best kind of groupwork
Loved this interview about how to teach kids to have a healthy relationship to food
Everything you need to know about election advertising (there are a lot of rules)
Shanti’s podcast corner: I’ve decided to increase the number of opinions about city planning I feel entitled to give via this podcast about the making of Chandigarh
Priyanca Radhakrishnan has been promising to read a very famous New Zealand book for years, and it still haunts her
Toby Manhire charts the Kiri Allan story following her political exit this week
I loved this on the possibility of buses as cross continental travel
Speaking of transport, there’s a Harbour-Bridge-sized-gap in Auckland’s cycle network
Tracking remaining internet cafes around the world
There are a lot of climate doom headlines – but we can’t afford to despair about the ecological crisis, writes Rebecca Solnit. There’s too much work to do.
Searching, and searching fruitlessly, for Tom Cruise
It’s so hard to make good individual climate choices in a system that is geared to produce emissions
Omg omg in very cool big animal news you have to watch this video of a magnificent freshwater stingray in the Mekong river and then read the follow up
And finally, I’ve loved Sinéad O’Connor’s music since my mother introduced it to me. She was so much more than Nothing Compares 2 U and the SNL pope incident, and this beautiful piece remembers her after her passing on Wednesday.