New Zealand Listener

New Zealand Listener is the country’s most respected general interest magazine, bringing you a wide variety of news, stories, columns, reviews, plus TV listings, every week.

Barbie deserved better • Louise Duffy’s mother died a slow death after her advance directive was ignored. Four years later, her daughter has a draft bill that could fix this.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Party favours

“Quote Marks”

Bright Lines • Creative words competition

Kicking it down the road • Thoughts of fiscal responsibility are tossed aside as both main parties chase voters within traditional hunting grounds.

White Queen ready to rip

Taken for a ride

A simplistic solution

A matter of definition

Splitting hairs

Outsmarting AI • As NZ looks to AI to streamline the public service and welcomes Big Tech data centres, are we sure we can harness the good and contain the bad?

TE REO ALLY • Te Hiku Media uses AI to help revitalise te reo, but ad agency Motion Sickness is sticking with people.

AI FOR GOOD

An incident at homeless court • Steve Braunias draws up 10 responses to a car crash in an Auckland courtroom.

Life during wartime • Ukraine-based Kiwi Andrew Gunn visits Zaporizhzhia, a city 25km from the front line, where children go to school daily in the face of Russian drone and missile strikes.

Star gazer • Actor Jarod Rawiri, who appears in Silo Theatre’s Constellations, on the things that matter most.

Time traveller • Her father was a wastrel and AA Gill called her too ugly for television, but Mary Beard outlived both to become one of the world’s most recognisable historians.

ON THE FUTURE OF SPECIES: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence

Letter perfect • Science is hard at work on bold new biological innovations, argues a leading geneticist, but will we get them right?

MAIN CHARACTERS

Windows to the soul • Bestselling author’s third is a rollicking romcom that adeptly hits all the required emotional beats.

Short cuts

THE NOWHERE BOY

BILLIE KING

Apple of their eye • A young child pays the price of his teenaged parents’ volatile relationship.

If wishes were horses • Two spirited women fight for what’s theirs, guns in hand, in early 20th-century rural Australia.

MOTHER GHOST MANGO SEED

Undiminished spirits • A woman unearths a side of her mother – and dark events in the history of her country – she never knew existed.

Poetry • Eating Pancakes at IHOP by Haro Lee

BESTSELLERS

Nobody’s prefect • How celebrated poetry collection Head Girl inspired a TV show about three Wellington flatmates who might have more in common than it first appears.

Hewing a truer hero • Hugh Jackman has a stab at playing Robin Hood in a movie that rethinks the screen perennial but isn’t very merry.

Fine brush work • Two short films at the Doc Edge Festival make compelling portraits of NZ artists.

King of clubs • Pioneering DJ and producer Roger Perry has died aged 59. Long-time friend Simon Grigg pays tribute to a man who had an unmatched influence on Auckland nightlife.

Lifting the Veils • Kiwi-Brit Finn Andrews returns, and this time he’s full of life.

Cult appeal • Latest Gloriavale series was made for an international audience.

SATURDAY JUNE 27

Less of a grind • Heart-valve replacement without open-heart surgery is becoming more widely available in NZ, with benefits for young and old.

Health briefs

Hot fusion • UK food writer Zena Kamgaing shares her love of bold flavours from around the globe.

Brothers in wine • Fashionable albariño grapes are now more widely...