With even less subtlety, Luxon and his National team are also blatantly stealing votes by scrapping one of the most admirable aspects of our democratic system. Namely, the ability to register and to ...

This week’s essay on classic children’s books features Philippa Pearce’s great YA novel about memory and loss. The image of Ely Cathedral is from circa 1881, and depicts the landscape as it was not ...

Decades ago, the Washington Post ran a carton showing White House advisors gibbering in terror backstage as a beaming Ronald Reagan suddenly looked away from the teleprompt and started ad-libbing…oh ...

Christopher Luxon went into and came out of today’s special caucus meeting as damaged goods. If survival is to be counted as winning, it has still looked more like a Pyrrhic victory than a cause for ...

The Werewolf series of essays on classic children’s books focusses this week on Cynthia Voigt’s great story of a young girl’s resourcefulness, against the odds. Curiosity has always been a good friend ...

Well, the football World Cup is over and the good guys won, geo-politically speaking. Meaning: Spain was the first European country to officially join the case that South Africa brought before the ...

People with more wealth enjoy better health, and their children get a head start in life. Pretty obvious, really. Yet criticism of this state of affairs is often attributed to the politics of envy. We ...

Soaring temperatures, bigger storms, more lightning strikes hitting tinder-dry conditions. Wildfires in Canada, France, ad Spain. Could climate change possibly be to blame? Not according to US ...

True, it may seem weird to try and warn teenagers about the horrors of war by writing them a story about teenagers who kill each other in a TV reality show. Nine times out of ten, you’d end up with ...