Nights

It's time to showcase another unusual museum here on RNZ Nights. It's our regular segment we call Nights at the Museum. And tonight we're headed to a place packed with wooden faces, painted smiles and more than a century of history. Our feature museum is Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, the world's only museum dedicated entirely to ventriloquism. And Museum curator Lisa Sweasy joins me on the line n...

It's time for Shower Thoughts, our weekly attempt to answer the questions that get stuck in your head and refuse to leave. Tonight's one is this: Why does something like a loaf of bread go hard and stale as it gets older, while fruit goes the other way, getting softer and softer? What's actually happening to these foods at a structural level before they end up in our mouths? Well, to help us get t...

It's time for our regular look at foreign policy, shifting global power, and New Zealand's place in the world. Joining us fortnightly to help make sense of it all is Anna Fifield, journalist, foreign affairs commentator, author, and the writer behind the Substack Between Giants. Tonight, we're looking at an upcoming election. Not ours, although we might get to that later. We're talking about the U...

Now - we touched on it during the show last night with regular Ben Strang, but wanted to chat further about this Netball New Zealand story dominating headlines. On Friday - RNZ's Dana Johannson revealed that the organization had walked away from a proposed private league backed by Ali Williams and Anna Mowbray, throwing the future of the domestic competition into question. Netball New Zealand have...

If you keep a close eye on your KiwiSaver account, you'll probably have noticed some pretty good returns in recent years. Depending on the fund you're in, a lot of that has been driven by the huge growth in tech stocks linked to AI. But there could be trouble in the water. Talk of an AI bubble is getting louder, and if it does pop, we could all end up getting soaked. So how worried should we be, a...

John Dolan has co-edited a notoriously provocative newspaper in Moscow, taught in Iraqi Kurdistan and has been fired from jobs in both Saudi Arabia and East Timor because of things he'd written. Along the way, he created Gary Brecher, the pseudonym behind The War Nerd, which grew from a newspaper column into the successful podcast Radio War Nerd. But before any of that, John lived a rather quieter...

Nights sports commentator on what's going with Netball New Zealand, the India vs New Zealand cricket series and a 3-year old footballer causing a stir.

That long-running battle between Wellington and Christchurch for the title of our second-largest city . . . Well, that looks pretty much settled now, with the Garden City pulling ahead, while Wellington's population has fallen back to 2017 levels. And it's not just Christchurch that's growing . . . New Stats NZ data shows the majority of the country's urban areas are on the up, with the capital an...

Don't try to be cleaver . . . two ticks blue. That has become the defining message of Nationals campaign. as it fights to return to government, while also trying to stop ACT and New Zealand First supporters using MMP's overhang to their advantage. That's despite an overhang on the right almost certainly returning National to the ninth floor of the Beehive. On the campaign trail, Sir John Key has s...

Polo cross, underwater hockey, foot volley ... who doesn't love a good hybrid sport? Well in just a few days time, the best speedgolfers in the world - yes you hear that right, speed golf - are going to be teeing off on our shores for The World Speedgolf Championship. Kiwi Amy Linton is the back-to-back New Zealand Women's open champion - and she's hoping to take out the top spot. So what is speed...

This Dwarfism Awareness Month a fantastic article was published in Australia to raise awareness and understanding of what it's like living with the physical condition. The piece centrered around hearing from a person with dwarfism about what we should and shouldn't ask ... what's appropriate and what could be considered offensive.  Well, we thought it would be wonderful to have our local Nights ve...

It's been three years since the Erin Patterson case first gripped Australia and the world after she murdered three people by serving them a meal laced with deadly death cap mushrooms. Since then there have been multiple podcasts, books, countless news articles and now television series, with New Zealand's own Melanie Lynskey set to play Patterson. And today, the case was back in the headlines, wit...

Now to some sad news for theatre and film fans out there, prolific British actor Sir Patrick Stewart has died aged 86. Best known for his roles of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek and Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men - tributes today praised him for bringing a deep sense of humanity to everything he did and for inspiring a new generation of stargazers. Joining Emile for some reflection in the...

If you're a Wellingtonian of a certain age you might remember flicking through the pages of Capital Times. Started in the early 80's, the publication spent decades telling local stories - news, entertainment, arts, politics, hospitality and even social pages. Capital Times ceased publication back in 2013 - but now 1,377 of it's issues have been digitized by Wellington City Libraries. Former managi...

Now - we may think we're a die-hard sports-loving lot in this country ... particularly when it comes to rugby ... but the future of some of our main competitions have been up in the air. Just last month a summit was held between New Zealand Rugby and stakeholders ... on the table was changing-up or scrapping our current NPC and Super Rugby competitions. But news today - NZR has decided to keep the...

Nights' resident screen critic joins Emile Donovan to review his screen picks of the week.

It's the return of friend of the show, writer and all-round thinker Danyl McLauchlan, who joins us to explore some of the best political novels of the 21st century. Tonight, he's diving into Iain M Bank's Look to Windward a book set in the far reaches of space but wrestling with some very earthly questions.

As we close in on election day on November 7, it feels like there's a new poll, with a new set of numbers, coming out every other day. But there's one poll that boasts of having a pretty good track record since it began in 2002. I am, of course, talking about the Muffin Break Bean Poll . . . Buy a coffee at one of the more than 30 Muffin Break cafes around the country and you get a bean to cast yo...

AI is coming for your job. We've all heard that one by now, as large language models get smarter and seemingly more capable by the week. But one profession you might not have expected to be pondering that question quite so soon is mathematics. Long seen as one of the great frontiers of human intelligence, maths is now becoming a testing ground for just how far AI can go. It seems like every week t...

Listening to a piece of music can be an incredibly emotional and deeply personal experience. It's something we often do alone, with headphones on or the stereo turned up at home. But in Japan, there's a long tradition of experiencing music a little differently, through listening bars, places where people come together specifically to sit, listen and appreciate the music. It's this culture that's a...

Mouth ulcers - also known as canker sores - are one of those pesky things that can really ruin your week. And even though they can be small - oh the pain - so with up to one in four of us get them coming back again and again - we thought we should chat to an expert. So, what causes them, what makes them come back, and how can we know if it's that's worth getting help? Joining Emile is Dr Anita Lim...

Getting kiwis into their own home has been a major issue this election. For a lot of people - even if they earn a good wage, a major barrier is saving enough for a 20% deposit that a lot of banks require. Our major parties are aiming to address this by extending access to 5% deposits and expanding some of those income limits under the current First Home Loan Scheme. But is this the best approach a...

How do you convince an alien species that humans deserve to live? And what if you're starting to doubt they do? That simple but terrifying premise is at the centre of a new science fiction novel from New Zealand author Mandy Hager. It's Hager's 23rd book, and set in 2297, on an Earth devastated by climate catastrophe. The title of the book is Lifted and it officially launches in Wellington at Unit...

It's time for Shower Thoughts, our weekly attempt to answer the questions that get stuck in your head and refuse to leave. Tonight's one is this: in a world of GPS, Google Maps and instant tracking, why are we still relying on bits of colourful fabric to tell us who and where we are? Do we actually still need flags in the 21st century? Joining Emile to fly the flag for flags, and possibly put us s...

It's time for us to get up to speed. To tune into the zeitgeist. To chat about what's happening in pop-culture and the world wide web. Joining us tonight, for our regular segment on Nights, it's the Dial-Up with Anna Rawhiti- Connell.