RNZ: The Weekend

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. This weekend we're looking at domestic lives. Nic takes us on a journey to the Riccarton House.

If we say cabaret what does that mean to you? A musical about the growing power of the Nazi Party in the Weimar Republic? It's also a thriving art form with a strong presence in Aotearoa. Emma Vickers is a curator and performer who this year is directing The Living Lounge at Splore festival on the last weekend of February. It's a performance stage, which climaxes with 'The Wide-Awake Club!' cabaret. She joins Emile Donovan to talk the role of the circus tent in a pandemic.

How do you sleep? We getting told we need "full 8 hours", but where does that phrase come from? We're constantly being given advice on how to sleep, apps are geared to "unwind" our minds, you can buy countless books about how to be a more rested you. But we don't always interrogate that advice or look at how our ancestors behaved. Professor Roger Ekirch is a historian at the Virginia Tech. He has spent decades looking at the accepted history of sleep trying to understand how our ancestors slept, and how they viewed the concept of rest.

2021 marked the 90th anniversary of FMC, or the Federated Mountain Clubs. As an organisation it predates the Great Walks, but they've made a lot of huge wanders themselves. To tell us more about the history of the clubs and where they're headed this century Emile spoke to Former editor of the organisation's magazine Backcountry Shaun Barnett, and the current President of the FMC Jan Finlayson.

Liam McIlvanney is one of the most distinguished British crime fiction writers around these days. He also happens to be a Scotsman who lives in Dunedin.After his first novel, All the Colours of the Town in 2009, McIlvanney went on to publish Where The Dead Men Go in 2013, which won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best New Zealand Crime Novel in 2014. In 2018 he published The Quaker, introducing us to DI McCormack, the detective inspector tasked with solving the mystery of a Bible-quoting serial killer stalking the streets of late-60s Glasgow. The Quaker was met with rapturous acclaim and received the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year - an award named after Liam's father, the acclaimed crime writer William McIlvanney, often referred to as the father of Tartan Noir. Liam's fourth novel, the Heretic, the second featuring DI McCormack, which was published this week.

Dr Karam Shaar is an economist, a consultant on Syria and the middle east, a policy adviser and a lecturer on middle eastern politics. He lives in Karori in Wellington, a long way from where he grew up in Aleppo in Syria. Dr Shaar is concerned that world has stopped watching what has happened in Syria and how the members of the Syrian diaspora are being treated around the world.

Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2021 was vaccine, but it could just as easily have been 'misinformation'. This nebulous thing has been front and centre since the dawn of the pandemic; most notably the spread of scientific misinformation, inaccurate or misleading science which can be spread both deliberately and inadvertently, and can really undermine confidence in authorities and health workers. Stemming the flow of misinformation has proved difficult, for governments and particularly for social media companies: do you try to repress it, stop it from spreading - adopt a mitigation approach, as it were? Do you go for an elimination approach, deleting misinformation, pretending it never existed? Do you try to educate people to get better at spotting it - a time-intensive process which might not even yield results? All these questions and more are the focus of a new report from the United Kingdom's Royal Society, which comes to some fascinating conclusions about what works when tackling disinformation and what doesn't. Frank Kelly is a Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and Chair of the report, he spoke to Emile Donovan.

In 1928 Lewis Eady started the first purpose built music store in Queen St, selling sheet music and pianos, and the rest really was history. It was the beginning of a musical dynasty in Auckland which stretches through to now. The shop itself stood for decades and the family business is now dedicated to teaching new generations of musicians with the Chiron music school. To discuss 100 years of musical wrangling in Tamaki Makaurau Emile is joined by the 4th generation owner of the business John Eady.

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. This weekend we're looking at domestic lives, beginning in Tauranga with the Brain Watkins House.

Now quick pop quiz. Who said this - Logan Roy from Succession or King Lear? "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" Well yes, it's King Lear. But they were both played by the same actor. Brian Cox famously wrote a book about playing King Lear titled The Lear Diaries. He's now playing Logan Roy in the smash hit HBO show succession. Shakespeare aficionado Trevor Bell has been teaching drama on the North Shore of Auckland since the early 1980s and he's directing a new production of The Merchant of Venice for Shoreside Theatre's Shakespeare in the Park 2022. He joins Emile to talk about the modern impact of the bard.

Over the summer months we've been taking a few trips around the country with the former Prime Minister, head of the UN's development programme, and tramping enthusiast Helen Clark, who after many years of travelling around the world has put her time in Aotearoa to good use by walking some of the Great Walks. This week we're heading to the Routeburn Track!

There's a pub closing down in County Cork in Ireland and a very special photo has turned up in the process. It appears to be of an All Black visit to the pub in the 1970s. Do you know who is in this photo? To explain the story about the photo and establish what we DO know about it, Emile is joined by the Public Relations Officer for the Castlemagner (Castle-Mayne) Gaelic Athletic Association Paul Gallagher.

It's been a pretty tough time for the performing arts industry over the last two years, but the show must, Covid-19 settings allowing, go on. Actor, singer, performer and director Vanessa Stacey is the Director of the 2022 New Zealand Fringe Festival in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, and for her it marks a bit of return to the beginning.

Does the language we speak affect the way we think? The way we act, the way we behave? Can it explain variations in subsets of people? This might seem like an odd question, but it's one with long-standing roots in something called Linguistic Relativity: the extent to which the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition. It's a controversial hypothesis, and one about which Tom Pepinsky has just written an article for Language, a journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Tom is a professor of political science at Cornell University in New York, as well as the director of the University's Southeast Asia programme.

Changes to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act (CCCFA) regulations came into effect in December and the headlines this month have been dominated by anecdotal stories of issues they have created for consumers. The changes were put in place to protect borrowers from predatory lending practices, but critics warned even before they came into effect that they would lock people out of an already very difficult housing market. Associate professor Claire Matthews from the Massey University Business school has been keeping an eye on the situation and joins me now.

Tensions have been rising in Ukraine over the last few weeks, and international discussions have been escalating as a result. Russia has gathered 100,000 troops near the Ukranian border but the Russian government denies planning an invasion of any Ukranian territory. It comes on the back of a series of demands that Russian President Vladimir Putin has made to western powers, including that Ukraine should never be allowed to join NATO and that the defensive alliance abandons military activity in eastern Europe. Dr. Lena Surzhko-Harned is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science at Behrend College at Penn State University and a contributor to Harvard's Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

Dr Fiona Cross loves spiders. She loves their webs, the mini eyes, their mini legs. She is an arachnologist, that is, as the name might suggest, one who studies spiders. Although as she told Emile Donovan, she had quite a phobia about them when she was younger.

Most people, were you to ask them, would say they love animals. Yet it's also statistically likely those same people, and I include myself in this, also eat the flesh of animals, wear their skin, drink their milk. This seeming contradiction is the topic of a new book - How to Love Animals: In a Human-Shaped World - by the Financial Times' chief features writer, Henry Mance.

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. This weekend we're looking at churches and Nic's eye has fallen on a very special one in Burke's Pass.

Tsunami warnings are in place on the north and east coast of the North Island and the Chatham Islands as authorities monitor the impact of the eruption and Cyclone Cody. Dr Emily Lane is a hydrodynamic scientist at Taihoro Nukurangi NIWA who specialises in tsunami, storm surge and flooding inundation.

The pacific region is continuing to assess the impact of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha apai underwater volcano eruption. The Nationall Weather Forecasting Centre in Nadi is reporting the eruption is ongoing and continues to provide updates and forecasts while communication remains down with the whole of Tonga. Steven Meke from the National Weather Forecasting Centre joins Emile to discuss what we know currently.

When you think of central Otago, what do you think? Arid, tussock-covered hills and wilding pines, drenched in sun, rolling into the distance? It was not always thus, according to a fascinating new peer-reviewed study in the Palaeontologia Electronica science journal - the result of self-funded research by Dunedin-born palaeobotanist Mike Pole. Pole paints a distinctly different picture of Aotearoa in antiquity.

News broke earlier this week that A US man has become the first person in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig. Doctors in Maryland acknowledged what they were doing was experimental, but the results seem positive so far. It comes after decades of work to get to this point by geneticists, scientists and doctors around the world. One of those people is Dr Paul Tan. Tan has been working in the field for 20 years in several different companies. He's currently the Director of NZeno which is working towards breeding pigs with gene-edited kidneys that could be transplanted into humans. It's complex time consuming work, in a field of science which often isn't well understood.

Scientists are predicting that Tonga's main island, Tongatapu, could be blanketed in ash this morning. Auckland University volcanologist Professor Shane Cronin says the magma type erupted is what's called an intermediate composition - similar to what comes from the Ruapehu volcano.

Communications are still down with Tonga, but the Tongan community in Aotearoa is gathering this morning to send their support to their whānau in the Kingdom. Pakilau Manase Lua is part of the Tonga Auckland group and he joins Emile to discuss the experience for the Tongan community in Aotearoa.

We begin this morning in Tonga, where a massive eruption of the Tonga-Hunga Ha apai underwater volcano has sent dust and debris into the stratosphere. A 1.2 metre-high tsunami struck the Tongan capital Nuku'alofa on the island of Tongatapu yesterday evening, breaching the shoreline and flooding coastal roads and properties. RNZ Pacific's Head of News Susana Lei'ataua joins Emile to discuss what we are learning this morning as the sun comes up over the pacific.

What exactly is counter culture? Were Baby Boomers every actually cool? Musician, historian and critic Nick Bollinger has been on a mission to find out what the cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s sounded like in Aotearoa. He's got a book coming out later this year on the subject, but he's fresh out of the archive now and ready to play us some hits, from a period of great change.

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. This weekend we're looking at churches and Nic's eye has fallen on St Mary's in Tikitiki.

Over the next summer months we'll be taking a few trips around the country with the former Prime Minister, head of the UN's development programme, and tramping enthusiast Helen Clark, who after many years of travelling around the world has put her time in Aotearoa to good use by walking some of the Great Walks around the country. Today we're hiking over Hump Ridge, and we're packing the camp kitchen!

There has been a lot of discussion over the previous year about what role Mātauranga Māori can have in Aotearoa New Zealand. There was the famous letter to the Listener in which 6 academics argued that it wasn't science, and a roaring response from Pakeha and Maori academics alike. In December the Waitangi Tribunal found that "Maori were put at a disproportionate risk of being infected by Delta" and that Government was in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi for what the tribunal referred to as "political convenience". These ideas and disparities have a strong history in Aotearoa New Zealand, and no more so than in the Tohunga suppression act. But what actually was that, and what is it's legacy now? Emile is joined by Ahonuku - Reader in Law at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Māmari Stephens.

What three things would you want for a prison escape? Would a ouija board, a strong imagination and a credulous captor be on your list? They were key tools in 1916 for two prisoners of war in the First World War who carried out one of the most remarkable escapes in the history of the genre, without breaking a sweat. They're the subject of author and journalist Margalit Fox's latest book 'The Confidence Men'.

Was 2021 the worst year on record? With Covid-19, lockdowns and economic and environmental turmoil, a lot of people have been saying they thought it was a real annus horribilis. Latif Nasser went on a mission to find out.

Foreign affairs commentators are optimistic a combustible situation in Kazakhstan has stabilised. Over the past couple of weeks Al Jazeera reports Kazakh security forces detained almost 10,000 people over the unrest, which descended into violence - at least 164 civilians are dead, including children, as well as 16 police. In an attempt to calm the unrest, the government was dismissed by president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and a state of emergency was declared - but the protest escalated into calls for a change in leadership. Earlier this week it was announced troops would start to leave Kazakhstan after Presidentt Tokayev nominated a new prime minister. But where does this leave oil-rich Kazakhstan, a key geopolitical area between Europe and Asia? Rouben Azizian is the director of Massey University's Centre for Defence and Security Studies - he was a visiting professor at the Kazakhstan State University for eight years between 2006 and 2014.

It feels like every week is a busy one in British politics, but this was an especially full one. Downing Street was forced to apologise to Buckingham Palace for two staff parties in No 10 on the night before Prince Philip's funeral. This comes after weeks of investigations, accusations and revelations about parties, work events and gatherings held by political staff at Number ten Downing St. The UK's Prime Minister Boris Johnston has been fending away questions about his involvement, saying he is waiting for the results of an independent inquiry led by Sue Gray. Meanwhile, Prince Andrew's military titles and royal patronages have been returned to the Queen and he will stop using the title His Royal Highness in an official capacity. This comes after a US court ruled that a civil action over sexual assault allegations brought by Virginia Giuffre could go ahead. So, what on earth is going on? Emile is joined by UK correspondent Olly Barratt.

The story of the tennis player, the vaccine mandate and the federal government continues to twist and turn in Victoria. Novak Djokovic is set to be detained by Australian immigration officials again today as his lawyers urgently prepare to fight the cancellation of his visa for a second time. Djokovic has been ordered to attend an interview with immigration officials in Melbourne this morning, after which he will be formally detained, following a late-night court hearing on Friday. Emile is joined by veteran tennis journalist and broadcaster David Luddy who has been watching the case like a hawk.

Chess is the most popular it has ever been in New Zealand new players are picking up the pieces every year. It's hit somewhat of a sweet spot in popular media with the success of Netflix series The Queen's Gambit and with the internet providing a space for any enthusiast group in the world to connect. The New Zealand Chess Federation's 129th NZ Chess Congress is underway right now and the national final is being held later today! It all sounds pretty exciting and we wanted to find out more so we're calling up the President of the NZ Chess Federation Nigel Metge.

Musician, journalist and icon Moana Maniapoto joins Emile to play some of the favourite artists she has joined on stage around the world over her career. No part of the musical globe will be left untrodden!

An initiative aimed at wiping out possums once and for all the Eastern Bay of Plenty is reaching the end of its first year. The Korehaha Whakahau project, run by Te Runanga o Ngati Awa, is Predator Free 2050 Limited's first iwi-led landscape project and is a year into its possum eradication mission. Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Manager Taiao Michal Akurangi says it's a perfect opportunity to show how effective iwi can be on land they know and understand.

Very few people have seen as much news unfold in front of them as journalist, correspondent and editor Jon Sopel. Jon joined the BBC in 1983. He's been the chief political correspondent for BBC News 24, a Paris correspondent and a correspondent from conflicts in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently he's been the BBC's North America editor, a position he held until the end of last year. He took over that role in 2014 and it's fair to say quite a lot has happened in the intervening 7 years! He's also the author of multiple books on news and politics - most recently Un-Presidented - Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others - which came out last year.

New Zealand offers many opportunities for "energising" bush adventures, says Helen Clark. In the second episode of Lady and the Tramp, Clark reflects on her experience walking Marlborough's Queen Charlotte Track.

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buldings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. Today we're going to Lawrence!

What happened to all the jokers?, asks writer and columnist John Summers in North and South last year. And he has a point. When my dear-departed great-grandmother Georgie Morrissey was alive every man on the face of the earth was a joker. Some of the young ones were bodgies. Their female accomplices were widgies. John Summers explores this idea of slang - and the death of a particular slang word or phrase dies - in his piece in North and South.

The Omicron variant has cause chaos across the world, plunging many countries who thought they were on the cusp of controlling Covid-19 back into full public health response mode. The transmission rate of the virus has changed the game in Europe, and in the UK in particular. While the virus may not be as deadly as the delta variant, the impact it is having on public health systems is extreme. New Zealander Dr. Gary McLean is a Professor in molecular immunology at London Metropolitan University and a researcher with Imperial College. He joins Emile to discuss entering 2022 in the shadow of Omicron and what Aotearoa needs to be prepared for.

The date January the 6th picked up a new resonance in the United States Capital last year. The demonstration taking place outside the Capitol in Washington DC turned violent quickly and hundreds of people stormed government buildings. 140 police officers were assaulted and $1.5 million in US dollars in damage was caused. It led to something of an existential crisis in the US and the treatment of insurrectionists has been no different. Jeremy Stahl is a senior editor at Slate in Los Angeles and he's been reviewed all 733 criminal cases of those charged with actions relating to the January 6 events have been treated.

Aotearoa has one of the world's richest troves of marine fossils, but we're still just finding out exactly what it is we're sitting on. A recent research project in Canterbury used medical CT imaging to scan plesiosaur fossils collected in New Zealand back in 1872.The scans reveal a new level of detail, confirming that plesiosaurs swam mostly with their heads down, in contrast to the Loch Ness creature, and showing a close link between the New Zealand fossils and South American specimens from 70 million years ago. Paul Scofield is a Senior Curator Natural History at Canterbury Museum and adjunct Professor in Geology at Canterbury University.

Wordle. If you know, you know. For the uninitiated, Wordle is a very simple, brainteaser-style word game. You can only play once per day. Every player is trying to guess a word - the same word, for everyone. They're given six attempts. If one of your guesses has any of the correct letters, the game tells you. It has certainly taken off online - every day hundreds of thousands of people head to the Wordle website to guess the word, to preserve their streak and compete with friends and family. The game was created by New York-based software engineer Josh Wardle , he joins Emile to discuss his simple but viral game.

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There'. It's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. Today we're looking at a brewery in Taihape!

New Zealand offers many opportunities for "energising" bush adventures, says Helen Clark. In the first episode of Lady and the Tramp, Clark reflects on her experience walking Fiordland's Milford Track.

News broke this week that Italy is returning a fragment looted from the Parthenon in Athens to the Greek Government. The piece of marble is part of a carving of a draped figure from the eastern side of the Parthenon's frieze. While the chunk seems small, it's significance in the ongoing global debate about repatriation of stolen artefacts is hard to overstate. Alice Procter is an Australian art historian living in London, a city at the heart of the Parthenon drama. She runs "Uncomfortable Art Tours" at six London cultural institutions and hosts a podcast called The Exhibitionist looking at museum culture. She is also the author of The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it, which came out in 2020.

Peter Bogdanovich, the US film director known for films such The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon has died aged 82, his agent confirmed on Thursday. Film critic Dan Slevin joins Emile to discuss the life and work of a Hollywood stalwart.

News broke earlier this morning that cinema legend Sidney Poitier has passed away. Poitier is one of the most important figures in film history. The Bahamian American actor was the first black man to win an Academy Award and he starred in a series of hit films whose resonance is still being assessed today. Professor of history at the University of Memphis Aram Goudsouzian is the author of the biography Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon.