Compiling the best reading from your friendly local website.

Kristin Hall: Remembering Big Fresh, New Zealand’s greatest supermarket of all time

“This one time at Big Fresh, I was going up to press the moo cow button and some other little c*** pressed it right before I got there. I lost the fucking plot and had a full on meltdown.”

Greg Pritchard: In praise of the feijoa, New Zealand’s most socialist fruit

“Every April though we’re reminded that New Zealand can be a place where, like any good little socialist, the average Kiwi thinks of his (or her) fellow man (or woman) and shares excess production without giving a thought to material reward. The reminder comes in the form of the humble feijoa, New Zealand’s most socialist fruit.”

Siouxsie Wiles: Sorry Paleo Pete, but I’ll take medical qualifications over your ‘common sense’ any day 

“‘What do you need a qualification for to talk common sense?’ That was the response of Australian celebrity chef Pete ‘Paleo’ Evans during a recent TV interview about the health advice he gives out. The common sense he’s referring to in this instance is his belief that we should all be abandoning our modern agricultural diets because they are out of sync with our biology and making us chronically ill.”

Simon Wilson: The most expensive road in New Zealand history is coming to Auckland. Why?

“The Auckland Chamber of Commerce wants the EWL built. CEO Michael Barnett says traffic congestion in the area costs freight operators millions of dollars a year. National Road Carriers, representing the freight companies, agrees. ‘Based on an average 10-minute delay per trip,’ says CEO David Aitken, ‘congestion is costing freight operators a conservative $50 million a year.’

Hmm. Already looked at that ’10-minute delay’. But even if his $50 million a year was right, the EWL would take 37 years to make economic sense. Is that a good business case?”

Emily Writes: Midwives in their own words: ‘We are only human’

“Why are midwives leaving their profession? Who would stay given the conditions they work under? In their own words – here’s what our midwives say.”

The Spinoff: An amazing two hours of Gareth Morgan raging at people on Twitter about tourist poo

Gareth Morgan was not happy about Paula Bennet dismissing a tourist tax. He tweeted his displeasure.

And then some people responded and he, well, he engaged with them. Forget about what they said, just read his, well, engagements, all 42 of them, unexpurgated, across two hours from 7pm last night.

Duncan Greive: On Monday Jesse Mulligan showed the Project NZ its future

“It launched with a bang and a Bax and a song and a dance in February, but in recent weeks it’s been a little too easy to forget The Project NZ was on. Not because it’s not good – it almost always is, when you watch it. The problem is more one that all new shows face after the frenzy of launch has subsided nowadays – how to command and sustain attention in an era when a thousand different media outlets and platforms are screaming 24 and 7.

On Monday night, we saw something which suggests the show might have found a way out.”

Steve Braunias: A West Coast memoir

“I was only passing through the West Coast, lived in Greymouth for not much more than a year, packed a picnic lunch and a copy of the newly published the bone people when I tended a few dope plants most summer weekends in the beech tree forest above town, drank at the Golden Eagle, met girls, reported on crime, joined the film society, looked at the caryards on dead Sunday afternoons with my coalminer flatmate, gave the secret knock on the locked door of the Railway Hotel pub to get in on Sunday nights, entertained thoughts of living there forever and ever – there was a magic night going to see three punk bands playing at Lake Brunner beneath a full moon, a girl said come back to my place, I said where d’you live, she said next to the graveyard in Cobden.”

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