What swimming 80 kilometres does to the body
Saltwater can really take it (your tongue) out of you
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend, bringing you the best of The Spinoff from the week that was, with help from our gracious sponsors Coffee Supreme. I’m slightly losing it via going to too many book events — I got click-happy with tickets for the Auckland Writers Festival — which has provided several opportunities for observing book festival behaviours. Long digressive sentences via asking a question at the end? Watching the slightly awkward pause on a panel when someone has opened their mouth to speak but another panel member jumps in first? The “clutching a book while plucking up the courage to get an autograph” wander around the event centre? There’s a thrill to it — watching this stuff is like sports to me.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
33 hours of swimming… in exchange for a new tongue?🏊♂️
Jono Ridler is an ultra marathon swimmer who just completed the longest swim on record in New Zealand, swimming from Great Barrier Island to Auckland. The swim, which he did to raise awareness of biodiversity loss in the Hauraki, has rightly gotten attention as a feat of endurance, but the body horror elements have been ignored … until now. Alex Casey tells me about her conversation with Ridler: “This man's tongue was falling off in chunks, he was tripping off sleep deprivation and seeing snowmen, and his whole body swelled up like he was stung by thousands of bees,” she says. “A great reminder, especially for those of us who sit in a chair and typey typey all day, of what humans are actually capable of.”
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New Zealand’s legal weed grower puts everything on the line🌿
Chris Schulz goes green for this story, vising a super-secret greenhouse in Te Waipounamu. Jesse O’Steen, an American living in North Canterbury, is growing completely legal weed that he wants to make accessible to New Zealanders with prescriptions to use marijuana. The plants need lots of attention, warm places to grow and lush fertiliser, and on top of that, O’Steen and his wife have to navigate the complex legal environment for this substance. The electricity bills are through the roof, but O’Steen is optimistic: “I just want to cultivate good weed,” he says.
Number(s) of the week: the end of $5 prescriptions - and lots of bread🍞
I sat next to Toby Manhire on Thursday afternoon, watching the Budget debate on Parliament TV while also trying to do work, hearing him mutter about how many times Christopher Luxon used the words “addicted to spending” (14, if you were wondering). This masterful, hilarious piece of political commentary is the result. “Christopher Luxon appeared to have cut and paste paragraphs from his last half-dozen speeches. The central pitch: You think you’re bread and butter, mate? Well, I’m breader and I’m butterer. Anything you can’t do, I can’t do better.” Also: “It was like Cocaine Bear, but everyone had been snorting bread and butter; too many Chrises and not enough charlie.”
We published lots of different perspectives on the budget — read all our coverage here
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Prize-winning books galore!🏆
Great week for New Zealand literary prizes — the winners of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were announced on Wednesday. Claire Mabey takes a tour through the winners, which have everything from talking magpies to lush recipes to the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi. And Himali McInnes, an Auckland writer and doctor, has won the Pacific section of the Commonwealth Short Story prize for a piece about refugees moving from Sri Lanka to Aotearoa. If you want to lap up the literary goodness, enjoy a selection of poetry from the books that won prizes, a conversation with fiction winner Catherine Chidgey and return to McInnes’s Sunday Essay from last year about renovating her house.
Wayne Hapi returns to his past 🔍
Wayne Hapi has an astonishing origin story as an actor: he answered an ad at a Dunedin WINZ office which led to an audition. He’s since appeared in a wide range of local films, and is a supporting cast member in The Gone, a NZ-Irish police drama currently on TVNZ. Buster, Hapi’s character, supports young people in the fictional town who don’t have many other good options — similar work to what Hapi did as a youth worker, getting troubled young people to speak honestly about their emotions. Working with an Irish cast was particularly special, Hapi tells Sam Brooks — he learned lots about Irish people’s connection to their land and whakapapa.
Everything else
More spending money 💸
The military spends $5m per year on recruitment advertising. Who does it help?
The aspiration of home ownership means people spend money maintaining mortgages, but would it be possible to have stable homes without owning land?
People spend hundreds of dollars on tickets to concerts with half-hearted, bootleg music from the Lord of the Rings and Hans Zimmer
It costs companies a lot of money to slap their name on a stadium. But are the names even that cool?
Trains are great. But restoring wide-spread passenger rail would be enormously expensive
The cost of being: having teenagers in the house makes grocery bills go up!
Lots more water🌊
Auckland’s port and shipping industry links us to the commerce of other nations across the wide blue ocean (from 2003)
How humpback whales use bubbles as tools
When water comes down the hills in Tairāwhiti, it sweeps out decades of destructive forestry remnants. What happens now?
The ocean is getting hotter everywhere — but this stunning interactive shows how it’s particularly devastating to Aotearoa’s unique moana life.
More books! Books! Books! 📚
A mammoth, revealing conversation between Maaori poet essa may ranapiri and Joshua Whitehead, poet from the Peguis First Nation in Canada
How Rebecca Kuang’s latest book skewers mainstream publishing - while being published by a Big Five house
Loved loved loved this essay on women writers and jealousy!
More writers on writer: this glorious interview between Louise Wallace and Jane Arthur about motherhood and love poetry
We simply love to see how the fanfic community has proved that AI models have scraped their writing — and be reminded why fanfiction is important.
