Pomegranates and protests
The Iranian uprising reaches around the world
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend. It has been a massive week on The Spinoff, with an abundance of local election coverage as well as Rent Week, which is focusing on what renting is like around Aotearoa – not just the negative experiences, but the positive ones too. This edition of the Weekend highlights some of this amazing work, as well as looking at the protests in Iran, just one of the many important global news stories that have been happening while New Zealanders try to figure out which council candidates to vote for. Make yourself some Coffee Supreme and read on.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
Pomegranates and protests
Shamim Aslani grew up in New Zealand, but she heard family stories of Iran: tart beads of pomegranate, tiled courtyards, children with names like her own. She was dreaming of an Iran that no longer exists, and she writes a beautiful essay about how that feels. Her essay arrives on The Spinoff in the wake of the protests in Iran, and around the world, following the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini after being taken into custody by the state’s morality police. The country has erupted in protest, with the millions of Iranians who live around the world joining in in solidarity. The state has killed protesters and limited communication through the internet. This article, written by an anonymous Iranian New Zealander, has some ideas of ways you can help.
Understanding the protests in Iran as an opportunity for global solidarity
Rent Week: Reasonably tidy?
Have you ever spent a day scouring the floors and dusting the skirting boards in hopes of getting your bond back when you move out? As part of Rent Week on The Spinoff, Toby Morris takes on the stipulation that tenants must leave houses in a “reasonably clean and tidy” condition. Often, this ends up being punitive, a way to make tenants do cleaning that should be a landlord’s responsibility. One of the most revealing aspects of this story is a poll that asked respondents whether “reasonably” clean and tidy was different to “perfectly” or “extremely” clean and tidy, highlighting the vagueness of language that can work against tenants.
Local elections: Wayne Brown would rather be surfing
Now Viv Beck and Leo Molloy have dropped out of the race, Wayne Brown and Efeso Collins are in a two-man race for the Auckland mayoralty. When Duncan Greive interviewed Brown this week, he asked him about his antagonistic relationship with some journalists and his electoral campaign which, Greive observes, “feels more like a rambling talkback caller’s list of gripes than a big, joined-up vision for the city”. Brown, whose platform is predicated on him being a “fixer”, argues that Labour-associated leaders have done Auckland no good, and that central government should stay out of issues like water management and housing density. Auckland’s population is relatively young, but local election voters tend to be older; this may have a big impact on who becomes mayor.
Toby Manhire talks to Slime the Nitrate Monster, who is running for Otago Regional Council
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Number of the Week: $3,000
For Rent Week, data journalist Emma Vitz looks at whether you’re financially better off renting or owning a house in New Zealand, assuming you have a mortgage. She found that overall, buying a median cost house in July 2022 would put a homeowner ahead by about $3000 a year. However, the story is slightly more complicated than this, because regional varieties in house and rent prices are massive; house prices in Auckland are so inflated, for example, that it’s definitely a better option to rent. This is a story that speaks really strongly to the value of data, and it’s extremely thought provoking – why are houses valued the way they are? What makes buying a house attractive beyond potential financial gains?
Ranking every supermarket cake mix
Last week, I had to make an emergency cake. You know the kind – you’ve just got home and people are coming over in 40 minutes and there is nothing to feed them, but you have just enough time to combine flour and sugar and eggs into something relatively edible. It’s at moment like this that a cake mix seems attractive, an easy breezy cakey possibility, and much more straightforward than measuring out the ingredients yourself. Intrepid writer Laura Dallaston, who is planning her wedding, decided to bake and test every cake mix she could find in Aotearoa supermarkets and rank them based on how good they tasted. The results are not that surprising but I enjoyed the meditations on convenience, cost, and cake.
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Everything else
Renting regulations: Can you hang up pictures? Can your landlord ask about your employment status? Can you have pets? Is a healthy home a human right? (yes).
American photographer Tyler Mitchell explains how he created this beautiful photo.
Many young people don’t learn cursive; that has long-term implications.
American actor and director Lena Dunham on her new movie Catherine, Called Birdy and moving past controversy.
Stewart Sowman-Lund queues for a coffin (not that one).
Otago Museum agrees to give back treasures to Indigeneous Australians. More museums: a report from a British Library exhibit about how real man Alexander the Great became a myth.
Multicellularity is a glimpse at the origins of life.
In this (very fun) article about citizen science, I touched briefly on how scientific methods have been used to oppress and exclude people. I appreciated this thoughtful editorial from scientific powerhouse Nature about how the journal has promoted eugenics and other harmful ideas.
In “reducing attention spans”, the TikTok trend of turning hours-long movies into a few minutes.
“Roads” is one of the most common words used by local election candidates on policy.nz (get your votes in!).
ESG investing is not quite what it seems. (If you want to go deeper I found this podcast informative and also horrifying).
Bringing heritage trees back to life has delicious potential.
Reviewing the new Emily Writes book about parenthood and growing up.
And finally, I’ve been reading the inimitable Brigid Delaney’s Guardian columns for years. She’s written her final article for now and it is predictably poignant and chaotic (her best column is definitely the one about the snake and P!nk).