Is meditation just another hobby?
All roads lead to a quiet room on a Monday night
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend, the newsletter where we drink the delicious beverage of our sponsor Coffee Supreme and read the best stories on The Spinoff and around the internet. I’ve spent most of this week lost in a very twisty and gripping fantasy novel series (Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief) and have to stop myself from explaining the plot so I don’t look like this. Being completely absorbed in fictional political machinations has made meditating impossible, as all I can think about is which baron sent the assassins, but I’m glad that Sharon Lam has a new hobby – more on that below. Other Spinoff stories I’ve also appreciated this week include Don Rowe’s interview with a viral vegan TikTok couple and Alex Casey’s visit to a bird hospital.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
A perpetual dabbler finally finds some peace
Writer Sharon Lam has tried a lot of hobbies: dancing, diving, clay modelling, German classes. They rarely stick; the thrill is in the novelty, the sensation of learning beside strangers, having a reason to get out of the house. “Each class, sport, instrument, becomes nothing more than a five-minute dilettante distraction, and none of them transcend into an actually fulfilling pursuit,” she writes. But despite being avowedly secular, when Sharon tried meditation, she found something different: a sense that her practice meant something, that a new wholeness was present in a quiet, dimly lit room filled with people sitting in silence.
The Aotearoa Liberation League is using TikTok for the revolution
A few months ago, a friend who spends a lot of time on TikTok sent me a video from the Aotearoa Liberation League (ALL). “I’ve been seeing these videos everywhere,” he said. “Do you know what’s up with them?” The TikTok videos had great production values, and featured Samah Seger and Chris Huriwai — the couple behind the ALL project — talking about issues like the police state, the dairy industry and decolonisation. Māori affairs reporter Don Rowe talks to Seger and Huriwai about why they’ve chosen TikTok to communicate their politics online, and how they see veganism and animal rights as fitting into a more just Aotearoa.
It’s legal to pay disabled people $2 an hour. Why?
In this week’s episode of Alice Snedden’s Bad News, the comedian reflects on some of the jobs she’s paid for and been useless at, which reminded me of some of the more random employment I found on Student Job Search during university. (I can confirm that I was not a motivated or diligent worker at the beer festival — but I still got paid!) An exemption to minimum wage laws allows people with disabilities to be paid well under the minimum wage. Employers say this is necessary to give people the dignity of work without taking away from their benefits. But disability advocates say it patronises the real contributions that all people can make — and is productivity the sole determinant of good work, anyway?
Attitude reporter Josh McKenzie-Brown explains how the minimum wage exemption works
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Number of the week: 154 years later
It’s Taranaki heritage month and writer Airana Ngarewa is remembering what happened at Te Ngutu o te Manu, where military strategist Riwha Tītokowaru lived in the 1860s. Tītokowaru wanted peace, but the colonial forces were still attacking; he went on to lead his people victory, inflicting on the Crown one of its most devastating losses of the musket wars. As Airana writes, this piece of history hasn’t been commemorated with the significance it deserves — it certainly wasn’t an episode I knew anything about — especially because it’s a story of demanding truth and justice, not death. A new pouwhenua has been placed on the land as it was returned to Tītokowaru’s iwi Ngāti Manuhiakai this year, a reminder that people lived in died in Taranaki to keep the land with its original guardians.
Every patient is cherished at the bird hospital
Birdcare is Aotearoa’s largest specialist hospital for birds, native and introduced. Alex Casey pays a visit and finds some bizarre and adorable sights — buckets of baby ducklings and humans wearing hoods so the birds don’t imprint on them. But while the birds are very cute, they’re also in distress, often because of human causes, like voracious roaming cats, poisons and window collisions. And despite the best care they receive, not every patient makes it. “Birds are a reflection of the health of the environment around us. Think about the people you care about and love: how can you condemn them to a world that doesn’t even support birds?” says Lynne Miller, Birdcare’s general manager.
Everything else
Gut stuff: why does New Zealand have such high rates of people getting sick from campylobacter? And what is the cultural context of increasing IBS diagnoses?
New Zealand’s toheroa shellfish population still haven’t recovered from becoming a globally popular dish last century
Three podcast recommendations: an excellent episode of Business if Boring about what Semi-Permanent does other than be the source of your flatmate’s cool tote bag. I also loved the scandal in this podcast about whether the British government knew that the governor of their foreign territory, the British Virgin Islands, was going to be arrested in the US in a drug sting operation. And Everything is Alive, the poignant/funny/whimsical podcast that interviews inanimate objects, is back for a fifth season. The vacuum cleaner episode was wonderful.
The farmers living with the damage the Pakistan floods left behind
The local elections are over but local government lasts forever, so it’s worth assessing the resistance to the Three Waters reform. And who were the big losers?
Kingsland, the 43rd coolest suburb in the world. … If you say so, Time Out!
As a regular recycling day forgetter, I loved this on remembering to take out the trash, and why recycling has such a moral weight.
Eating delicious vegetarian food is easy if you don’t try to make vegetables taste like meat. (I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life and can confirm that the key is learning to love the legume).
Solidarity with academics on strike and an evergreen McSweeney’s satire about precarious work in academia.
A plea for Great Kiwi Bake Off host Peter Gordon to do what the people (Alex Casey) want and record a sleep podcast.
Two very cool stories about how science can learn from indigenous knowledge about the world: how ancient stories about big floods record the impact of glaciers melting after the last ice age, and the importance of preserving the boab trees in Australia’s Tanami desert, which support indigenous elder’s recounting of the Lingka Dreaming
Reality TV has had a golden age on New Zealand TV, but three recent scandals show how that era is ending, says Duncan Greive.
What’s On Invers is a popular Facebook page in the Deep South. But some locals say it’s toxic.
This story about Chinese same-sex couples using pandemic rule changes to get married in Utah on Zoom was very heartwarming (other than the homophobia of the Chinese state)
And finally, Swedish band First Aid Kit have a new album out in a few weeks. I’ve been rewatching the music video for one of the singles — it’s hard to go wrong with filming pretty women running around in dramatic dresses. Enjoy!
