Must everything be a competition?

On races, swears and living a good life

Jun 14, 2024

Mōrena and welcome to The Weekend. Last week I gave a shout out to our award winning journalists on staff and this week it’s all about not being so competitive. In fairness, I don’t consider industry awards to be a competition as they are entirely subjective and impossible to predict or even work for but people definitely still get competitive about them.

This week, though, our weekend coverage is led by a stunning first-person feature from Calum Henderson about attempting one of his hobbies in a competitive arena. Jigsaw puzzling, an age-old pastime designed to be undertaken patiently, is becoming a speed sport. In February, staff writer Tara Ward attended the speed puzzling event at the New Zealand Masters Games. What she witnessed was frantic, stressful and extremely competitive. In other words, the opposite of poring over a horse puzzle while sipping a cup of tea.

Calum, who loves to puzzle in the usual way (“as mindlessly as possible”), balked at the idea of individual speed puzzling – competing a 500-piece puzzle on your own as quickly as possible. But after “competing” in an online competition, he found there’s probably a way for both forms of puzzling to coexist.

I find competitiveness an endlessly fascinating topic, as someone who’s been labelled competitive since I was a kid. Is it binary? Can you be both competitive in spirit and able to enjoy things as hobbies? Or will all pastimes become professional endeavours eventually?

I love to puzzle quietly at home or as a bonding exercise with friends and family. And I have no interest in entering a competition like the one at the Masters Games. But Calum’s competition puzzle has been sitting on his desk since he competed his online attempt for time, and I can’t help but wonder: how fast could I do it?

Behind the Story

Spinoff editor-at-large Toby Manhire spent “nearly every waking hour” of the past six months living in 1984. Researching, hosting and executive-producing Juggernaut: The Story of the Fourth Labour Government meant learning everything about the 1984 snap election, David Lange, Roger Douglas and the huge reforms they oversaw.

Interviewing more than 20 key people from that era, Toby pulled together hours and hours of transcripts and archive material to create a six-part record of arguably the most impactful government (for better or worse) in New Zealand political history. Toby joined me live from the Juggernaut launch to talk switching mediums, working with unreliable memories and resisting the urge to interrogate former politicians.

Turning a hobby into a competition

“This is speed puzzling, a sport on the rise internationally and here in Aotearoa. It takes one of the most peaceful and relaxing activities ever invented and turns it into an intense and stressful white-knuckle race against the clock. As someone who enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles slowly and as mindlessly as possible, I find the whole concept kind of appalling. Why must everything be turned into a competition all the time?”

Read the full story here.

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Tech is now our second largest offshore earner. Is this key industry ready to ride the AI tidal wave? Some companies already are. The AI opportunity is much larger, and more lucrative, than just adding a chatbot to your website. In this story, two NZ companies and AI experts dive into what's happening, and what could happen, in this space. From digital humans to large language models. Read the full piece on The Spinoff now (sponsored)

Remembering a barber and a friend

A beautiful essay from Spinoff founder Duncan Greive on his longtime barber and friend who passed away at the end of May.

“George Bernard Dyas, who called himself “Young George”, which only got cuter as he aged, died on the last day of May, aged 84. He wrote his own obituary, radiating the gentle humour you got as a free gift every time you nestled down into his barber’s chair. I was comfortably his most junior patron, a spry 44, and had only seen him for 15 years, whereas others had been going steady with George since before I was born. “

Read the full essay here.

People really want to look at nice houses

Stewart Sowman-Lund tuned in to the property show that’s replaced the beloved Sunday on TVNZ and found it… fine. But viewers flocked in, suggesting the things that people say they want and the things they’ll actually consume are vastly different.

“There’s something a bit sad about all of this. Not just the fact people would rather watch a rich man show people around rich people’s houses than spend an hour in the company of agenda-setting journalism, but that TVNZ can’t (or won’t) offer both options. As Newsroom’s Tim Murphy wrote recently, it feels counterintuitive for the state broadcaster to choose to cancel programmes that ‘do what many viewers and politicians might expect TVNZ to be doing’.”

The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week

Radio New Zealand has let a spate of swear words slip through on air this week, and there was no way I could let that slip through without asking what the fuck is going on?
Joel MacManus makes his case for the Golden Mile upgrade in Wellington.
Liam Rātana takes us on a whistle-stop tour of some of our country’s most notable placename changes.
Claire Mabey ranks and reviews Wellington’s secondhand bookshops
Toby Manhire sets out to answer the question at the heart of our new podcast, Juggernaut: why do those Lange-Douglas years cast such a long shadow 40 years on?

Reader feedback of the week

On Juggernaut and the ghosts of 1984

“Excellent work Spinoff that fills a void in our documented history. I remember working in a room at Treasury on the Royal Commission's Social policy income maintenance in 1987 next door to Roger Douglas who was promising he would solve the effective marginal tax rate problem of his promised flat tax (ie if you push up the tax rate on low incomes to flatten the tax system abating rebates are required to protect low incomes. If you don't want high income people to benefit from the rebate it must be aggressively reduced creating huge work disincentives ) On the RC we could not imagine how he was going to do this. And we were right to be skeptical! Echoes of this in 2024 budget when Willis says they can’t implement ACT's flat tax right now.”

— Susan St John

More contenders for some new but old place names

"My late partner, who was a native speaker (Ngati Kahungunu) had a few corrections she would liked to have made:
Remuera to Remu Wera (burnt skirt)
Hataitai to Whataitai.
Timaru to Te Maru.”

— HarryMc

Thanks for reading and see you next week,

— Madeleine Chapman

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