Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website.

Hemma Vara: Five great sustainable, ethical clothing labels – all made in NZ

“WORLD founder and ethical fashion champion Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet claimed it’s almost impossible to manufacture clothes in New Zealand, so we set out to find some labels that are not only creating garments (and jobs), but have taken extra steps to ensure their goods are sustainable and ethically made.

If you judge the ethics of New Zealand’s fashion industry by the 2018 results of the Tearfund and World Baptist Aid’s Ethical Fashion Report alone, we have a long way to go. But it’s not telling the full story, as there are a number of New Zealand brands that deserve our attention. And yes, these brands are not necessarily cheap like chain stores, but they are comparable to other designer brands.

Here’s five ethical clothing labels to consider.”

Alex Casey: Real life read: I dated six of the Heartbreak Island contestants

“They were hottest people I had ever seen in my life, all skin tight dresses and sharp suits, hair coiffed and curled for the gods. Me? I was wearing pants that I had legitimately worn to bed the night before, a pilled grey jumper and my hair was in a mum bun despite not having even a whisker of a child to my name. My socks had pictures of hedgehogs on them and my nose eczema was flaring up big time. I was not Heartbreak Island, I was Fartbreak Island.

Despite all that, for half an hour last week, they were mine.”

Toby Manhire: Revealed: David Seymour has won more votes for TV dancing than he did in actual election

“Despite being consistently flayed by the show’s judges after dancing like a cyborg trapped in a vat of jelly, Seymour has found himself salvaged by the audience, whose texted ballots are weighted equally with the judges’ scores. Mediaworks refuses to say how many votes it receives, but given that Seymour finished with more than 16,500 votes in his Auckland electorate in September’s general election, he has on average received in excess of 2,300 votes in each of the seven weeks of the televised contest.”

Samuel Scott: Moore Wilson’s: the home and heart of Wellington food

This month legendary Wellington food emporium Moore Wilson’s turned 100. Samuel Flynn Scott meets Julie Moore, the most important and influential person in Wellington food.

Andrew Geddis: This humiliating apology to Hager shows just how badly the police screwed up

“So, the search of Hager’s house and removal of his property was, the police admit, unlawful. What is more, by a remarkable coincidence the police search took place at a time when Hager was in another city, meaning that it was an hour before Hager was able to assert journalistic privilege over that property. Despite being alerted to that claim of privilege, the police nevertheless used photos they had taken of an email exchange and website login information to try and track Rawshark down.

Let’s just pause and recap at this point.”

Danyl Mclauchlan: Why it’s getting hard to see Ardern’s government lasting past 2020

“It’s a universal truth that the purpose of living in a home is not to make it your own. Instead, it’s to work, with every meal cooked and piece of clothing laundered, towards the illusion that your home – the place that will forever sculpt your lives and the lives of your children – is in fact uninhabited. For a home is but a condensated window into our souls. And what are our souls if not empty?”

Alex Braae: The satirical Facebook page that Stuff got shut down is a fake news faultline

“Stuff is home to many outstanding journalists, but it’s often the less serious or important articles that get a lot of clicks. And that’s especially the case on social media, where the nature of community engagement means that a lot of things that go out under the Stuff banner would be more accurately described as content, than journalism.

Unfortunately for Stuff, and pretty much every other newsroom that aspires to be mass-market, that means people will conflate the website’s content with their idea of what journalism should be. That’s where the NZ Stuffed page found a niche – sometimes gently, sometimes savagely satirising Stuff’s output. It got quite big, too – at the time of closure, it was up to around 9,000 likes.”

Branko Marcetic: A brief history of New Zealand’s most absurd three-strikes cases

“Probably the most well-known ‘three strikes’ case is that of Raven Casey Campbell, the first person to be sentenced for a third strike in New Zealand. Campbell, who earned his first two strikes by committing robbery (both aggravated and not), got his third when he groped a female prison guard while serving his second sentence, an offence that constitutes indecent assault.Under the “three strikes” law, Campbell was meant to serve a further a seven years for what he did, a sentence far out of proportion with the crime, regardless of how gross it was. (For comparison, a man who rented his year-old son out to be abused by paedophiles received eight years). The only reason he didn’t is because the judge, realising the absurdity of the situation, opted to give him parole after two years and four months, still more than twice the amount he would’ve served for that crime without the three strikes provision”

Rebecca Stevenson: Nine women for TradeMe founder Sam Morgan to follow on Twitter

“I couldn’t help but notice (as did women’s affairs Minister Julie Anne Genter) that of those “under 10” people (presumably not aged under ten) no less than 100% were men. And not one of them was your dad, Sam. Harsh, if probably fair.

And what a gallery of men it is. Your Kiwi contingency is well-covered among the under 10/top nine, with Xero founder Rod Drury, dentist and pro sugar-tax campaigner Dr Rob Beaglehole, and journalist Bernard Hickey. Heavy. There’s 2016 Prime Minister’s Scholarships winner Bain Hollister, who founded IT services company Clearpoint and is the chairman of cleaning app Goodnest. There’s a social enterprise/philanthropic venture fund managing director Kevin Starr and former TradeMe man Nigel Stanford.

From shores beyond there’s Elon Musk, which is so very cliche, but OK, whatever, and there’s Edward Snowden (ditto) and Alain de Botton (thritto?). But even Musk, who was also recently outed as following no women on Twitter, now follows three of them.

So we thought we’d do you a solid and highlight some women you might want to give a follow. Because it’s definitely not weird that not one single woman made the cut. It totally had to be nine. Because nine is less than ten. I get it.”