ICYMI: The Spinoff guide to air travel etiquette
17 February - 24 February
The lies we tell ourselves about the sexual abuse of boys. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the dozens of stories around sexual abuse, it’s that we need to challenge those who minimise the actions of rapists based on the gender or ages of their victims. In the same way its wrong to blame sexually abused girls for the way they dress or act, framing the grooming of underage boys as being “hit on” or that it’s “a compliment” is seriously harmful, argues Emily Writes. “As a mother of two boys – as a human being – this terrifies me. If sexual grooming is explained away as being ‘hit on’, then my god, we have so far to go.”
Good news for Simon Bridges: his big tax idea is already happening. National leader Simon Bridges recently said that “people on the average wage shouldn’t be paying almost 33% in the dollar.” Which would be fine if it were true, except it isn’t. As Alex Braae explains, Bridges somehow “managed to travel back in time and reset the rates of marginal and effective tax rates… fortunately, for several years now, nobody has had to pay anything like that level of tax.”
The Spinoff guide to air travel etiquette. You may not be punching strangers’ seats, but there’s plenty of other behaviour guaranteed to make your fellow passengers seethe with rage. According to seasoned air traveller Catherine McGregor, here’s how to travel by plane without making people hate you: armrests belong to the middle seat, keep your socks on, don’t get drunk, and – perhaps somewhat controversially – only recline during the night. “If you find this rule hard to remember, ask yourself: is this a part of the day when I would normally be lolling around like a Roman senator at dinner? If not, sit your arse up straight.”
Just briefly, a quick word from Alex Casey, senior writer at The Spinoff
I love everything that I do at The Spinoff, but the stories that matter the most to me are those which expose the insipid culture around sexual violence in New Zealand. Whether it’s the political volunteer who found herself vomiting at the sight of her attacker in Parliament, or a Roastbusters survivor reflecting on her trauma five years on, I am constantly in awe of the bravery and the trust that is placed in The Spinoff to tell these stories right.
These stories are very resource-intensive, from hours of interviewing and corroborating, to travel costs, to the significant legal fees. Which is where you come in. If you support The Spinoff Members, you are directly funding this most time-intensive work. And believe me, there is much, much more work to be done.
Burps, farts and boogers. Our first eight weeks with twins. While we were all busy enjoying our Christmas breaks, The Spinoff’s commercial editor Simon Day became a father for the very first time. Here, he touchingly recounts the moments of joy that have pulled him through the first eight weeks of raising his twin boys. “Our existence is precarious. One day the boys might gift us four hours of sleep in a row, the next we are in hospital because one of them is struggling to breathe,” he writes. “Keeping them alive is the biggest burden we’ve carried. But it is also our greatest achievement. Surviving each day feels worthy of celebration.”
Disabled voices on Peter Singer: ‘Who’s actually listening to this guy?’. “We certainly run the risk, if we make a big song and dance about it, that we get the Jordan Williams’s and David Seymours on our case and all of a sudden Peter Singer becomes the hero of the free speech brigade,” educator Red Nicholson told Leonie Hayden after it was announced that the controversial philosopher would be visiting New Zealand “But at the same time, if we let a guy come to New Zealand and speak about how we should kill disabled babies, and we sit there and go ‘oh well, maybe no one will listen to him’, that feels naïve.”
EXCLUSIVE: Jacinda Ardern ‘offered me a banana’, says man. After it was reported in the news that the prime minister handed someone a bottle opener, The Spinoff can now reveal that Jacinda Ardern once offered a man a banana. “I gratefully accepted the banana,” the man in question exclusively told The Spinoff. “It was a little on the small side, but other than that, definitely in my top 30 bananas.”
Remembering 0800 SMOKEY, the campaign which turned Auckland into the City of Narcs. “For five chaotic weeks in 2000, the Auckland Regional Council experimented with extreme, multi-level peer pressure. The goal: to get cleaner-burning fuel into Auckland cars. The method: turning citizens against each other in a whistle-blowing free-for-all,” recalls Josie Adams. “Even pre-supercity, Auckland was a vehicular hellscape. The council estimated that 80% of air pollution was down to transport emissions, much of which was sulphur from sub-par diesel. The council wanted oil and gas companies to provide cleaner fuel, but to get there it needed citizens to want it, too. Thus began 0800 SMOKEY, a public awareness campaign that relied on every driver having a messiah complex.”
This week’s newsletter was written by staff writer Jihee Junn.