ICYMI: When will we know the lockdown is working?
23 March - 30 March
Dispatch from the frontline: A supermarket checkout manager on life under Covid-19. They’re not getting paid extra, they miss their families and they’re tired of people losing it over yoghurt. Several days into the lockdown, Leonie Hayden talked to a supermarket checkout manager about the craziest time of her career. It’s a fascinating and occasionally infuriating insight into human behaviour, and a reminder that we should all be extra thankful and considerate to our hardworking supermarket workers across the country right now.
Lockdown policing can’t work well while there’s still confusion over rules. When officials – including police themselves – don’t seem clear on the rules around movement, it makes it harder for everyone to do the right thing, writes law professor Andrew Geddis. “Along with other front-line personnel face, [police are facing] an extraordinarily stressful next month. But the very stress that they will be under actually strengthens the need for some clearer guidance in this area. It seems only fair that we can collectively avoid creating situations where we may inadvertently run into conflict with them by doing the wrong thing. And to do that, we need to understand what the wrong thing is.”
Siouxsie Wiles & Toby Morris: When will we know the lockdown is working? In her speech announcing New Zealand’s move into alert level four, Jacinda Ardern warned that “things will look worse before they look better”. So far, half of that statement has proved to be true with the number of cases climbing every day as we near the end of our first week in lockdown. So when will it start to look better? Dr Siouxsie Wiles along with illustrator Toby Morris explains how the ‘the lag’ works (ALSO: Read Siouxsie and Toby’s explanation of how ‘bubbles’ work here).
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Madeleine Chapman: Just how cool was Jacinda Ardern in high school? The Spinoff’s former senior writer Mad Chapman (remember her?) spent a great chunk of last year writing a book on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. That book has now been released, and while you’ll certainly get arrested if you try and buy a physical copy, you can, however, purchase it as an ebook. For a taster, read this extract on Ardern’s high school years below.
Remembering Rumblemania. In the midst of all this coronavirus coverage, it’s possible you may have forgotten that last week marked the 10th anniversary of the release of Dane Rumble’s solo album The Experiment. If this is important to you then please join staff writer Josie Adams as she looks back on why New Zealand fell so hard, so fast for Rumblemania.
Netflix’s addictive Tiger King will leave you feeling grubby for watching. “It’s the incredible breadth of the Tiger King saga that makes it so compelling. Thanks to Exotic’s desire to film his own reality show, and his love for the warm glow of the media spotlight, there are swathes of footage showing everything that went down in his compound and among his complicated network of relationships,” writes Sam Brooks in his review of the Netflix show everyone seems to be talking about. “Unfortunately, Tiger King seems more interested in showing us the full sordid picture than exploring any of its subject in depth.”
Ohura Medieval Market Day, and the fight to keep a small town standing. It’s a town where people often feel the rest of the country has given up on them, in the middle of a region where every place feels isolated. So how did Ohura become an unlikely centre of Medieval Combat sports in New Zealand? Alex Braae spent three days there finding out.
