ICYMI: The wood planks that hid Polynesian students from the police
16 December - 23 December
In the attention economy, bullsh*t wins, and you’re helping shovel it along. In 2019, we’re living in a world of infinite content. As a result, it’s brought about the rise of a number “cut-through” techniques in an attempt to grab our attention amid the 24/7 news cycle. In politics, that means some of the worst ideas and most deceitful statements are often the most amplified, and therefore the most successful, Danyl Mclauchlan explains.
Good housing is considered a privilege in New Zealand. In Sweden it’s a human right. Former Auckland and Wellington resident Phoebe Carr nows lives in Gothenburg, Sweden where she’s experienced a “very different way of renting. One that’s underlined by the understanding that housing is a basic human right, fought for by a mighty tenants’ union, built by waves of massive government-funded projects, and a joy to live in as a tenant.” With 30% of the country’s population living in public housing, she argues that New Zealand could learn a lot from the Swedish system.
The Single Object: The wood planks that hid Polynesian students from the police. In the 1970s, police swooped into the homes and workplaces of alleged Pacific Island overstayers in what came to be known as the Dawn Raids. At Seddon High School (now Western Springs College Ngā Puna O Waiōrea) random immigration checks were a common occurrence up until the early 1980s, forcing many students into hiding beneath the school’s woodwork room. Nina Tonga goes in search of the wooden planks that hid these students and explores their fascinating histories.
How not to be a dick this holiday season. Whether its the waiter serving tables on Christmas Eve or the girl working the mall gift-wrapping counter until midnight, the holiday season can be a stressful time for a lot of people out there, so we’re here to remind you that kindness, patience, and basic manners are free. In fact, they should be liberally applied to not just others, but to ourselves as well. Remember: be kind to yourself and just know that whether you’re organising Christmas, attending Christmas or choosing to sit festivities out for whatever reason, you are not ruining Christmas.
The Side Eye: Bugged Out. It’s been two whole decades since the dawn of the new millennium, and at the time, many feared we were heading for the end of days: supermarkets were selling out of canned food, bottles of water were being hoarded, and Ken the cockroach was on TV urging us to all “be prepared”. Twenty years later, Toby Morris looks back at the phenomenon known as Y2K and asks: was it all just a scam?
The Steve Jobs biography is a monster that won’t stop spawning. “We forget how weird Jobs was because most of his behaviour… are now standard tech culture affectations But they were all unprecedentedly weird things for a business executive to do back when Jobs first did them, and they were a big part of him being fired by his own company in the mid-1980s,” Danyl Mclauchlan writes in his retrospective of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. “It feels like there’s a stronger link than Isaacson admits between Jobs being brilliant and visionary, Jobs making dumb decisions even though everyone begged him not to, Jobs being generally very weird, and Jobs behaving in ways that were unacceptable to most other humans.”
I love that my face is ageing. If we started seeing ageing as a process of becoming more and more ourselves, would we find more value in it? It’s an interesting question posed by Amy Russell who writes: “I find the continual change interesting and almost exciting, like an adventure. My face is on a lifelong journey that started when I was born and won’t finish until I die. The face I will have when I die is, by definition, the one I’ll have been working toward my entire life – a final testament to my (I hope) many years of lived experience. Why not see that as something precious I’m gradually achieving? Why not welcome each change as it arrives?”
That’s it for The Spinoff Weekly this year. We’ll be back on Monday, January 13.
In the meantime, read our reviews of the last decade in food, politics, books, and more.
And if you’re still struggling to sort out a Christmas present, give the gift of independent journalism by supporting The Spinoff Members (and for a limited time, members who give $80 or more annually will receive a FREE Spinoff teatowel illustrated by none other than The Side Eye’s Toby Morris).
The Spinoff Weekly is written by staff writer Jihee Junn.