‘You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…’: Wendy Parkins on the book everyone should read thespinoff.co.nz/books/08-10-...

Wild and windy and warm spring day in my garden! #dunnerstunner

Extra luggage to bring back from my quick trip to Christchurch!

I was researching the transcribed version of the 1851 UK census a few years back, and a man's occupation was recorded as "Hamster". When I looked up the handwritten original, alas, he was a "Barrister". Imagine my disappointment. 🫤

Union members at the ABC and across the media industry stand with John Lyons and reject the US President’s unfounded attacks on our colleague.
#MEAAmedia

Applications are invited for the 2026 CISS Scottish Writing Fellowship at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand. Flights, accommodation & stipend for 2 months at the Caselberg House near Dunedin. Apply at the link below by 31 October. Good luck…! www.otago.ac.nz/ciss

When journalism was cool. And risked everything to challenge power.

I always love those lists of "35 under 35," but as I get older, I find that I would love to know about innovations/art from people over 65. "65 over 65" please. Elders have incredible ideas that are the result of having seen the full lifecycle of previous ideas and learned from it.

Stopped in our tracks by this sleeping beauty on our walk today ❤️ One of many snoozing in the sun along the length of Allan’s Beach

Headline of the year

😢

A blue hyacinth on Bluesky. Spring is springing here despite the state of the world. So that’s something. 🫤🌷☀️

Very happy to be included in the finalists for Best First Novel in the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards. Hope to meet my co-finalists at the Awards evening in Christchurch next month!

One of the drivers of the cost of living crisis is spiralling insurance cost, and one of the drivers of that is the cost of climate-amplified extreme weather events. So when Luxon Govt, Fonterra, and oil cos fight efforts to cut emissions, they are adding to the cost www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

this just in from the "no shit, Sherlock" desk ...

💡Fonterra has agreed to sell Anchor Butter etc. for $3.845 billion.

Since we've ALL paid the price of decades of excessive pollution of our fresh water and the climate by intensive dairy, that money should now go into fixing the damage!

#MakePollutersPay #nzpol #TooManyCows

Now THIS is how you write acknowledgments in a scholarly book (from Irmbtraub Huber's 2023 Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry). What a welcome note of urgency and conviction

The shrinking violet beside the garden shed ❤️

Aeons ago, when I worked in interloans at a university library while I was a grad student (and we wrote out the requests by hand!), I would have been delighted to see interesting requests and it would have filled in my dull days trying to imagine what project linked them all...

Exactly right. Keep putting true, interesting, beautiful things into the world. It’s a vote for a livable future, and the opposite of what they want.

Soooo tired of people posting errors from AI / ChatGPT queries as a joke -- stop feeding the machine that is killing all our creative / intellectual futures!!

I was fortunate enough to be taught by one of the most eminent Arthurian scholars who set this book on a third-year course in the distant past when I was an undergraduate. Such a treat! (Wrote my essay on it, of course)