writing

writing for the spinoff

I have written so many pieces for The Spinoff but these are some of my favourites and/or crowd favourites. I might add some of my favourite pieces from beloved student magazine Salient one day too.

longreads

Connecting the Chathams How do you get internet to somewhere hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest land? Not included in the story: a plot to grow weed around a server farm, the offer of an arranged marriage, breaking one law, holding a baby petrel.

International education changed India. It’s changing New Zealand, too Everyone involved in the international education industry knows what they’re trading. This is a story about the many faces of wealth.

Summer is for swimming. But what’s in the water? The idea is that you can tell how much I love swimming in rivers in this story. A joy to report!

Can Sandringham’s South Asian flavour survive gentrification? Lotta knocking on doors was required for this one

Staring down the silent epidemic of myopia in children Winner of the inaugural Science Media Centre Journalism award in 2024 in the junior category <3 I loved working on this one - it’s an example of an issue that is important where known interventions could make a huge difference.

below: any day I get to wear hi-vis is a good day. This was for the ‘summer is for swimming’story vising a Central Interceptor site in Auckland

fun stories

Rainbow warmth and garish colours: what happened to stripey polypro? Featuring a small Shanti decked out like a synthetic zebra.

How far can you go without leaving your street? In which Shanti spends seven days on the same road. One of those stories you really regret pitching….

What’s behind the explosion of apple varieties at the supermarket? and When it comes to mangoes, New Zealanders aren’t getting the good stuff Two delicious fruity stories!

Inside an exclusive, chaotic, painful NFT party Would NOT recommend attending an NFT party!

stories I really love and think are important The ‘third world’ isn’t the bogeyman New Zealand media and politicians make it out to be Using ‘third world’ in a derogatory way goes to show how ignorant it is to assume that places where brown people live are bad. See also Dileepa Foneska’s examination of what Aotearoa can learn from the ‘third world’ for BusinessDesk. Mostly I wrote this because hearing ‘third world’ on the radio every second morning makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.

If there was a disaster next week, where would you go for food? Loved doing lots of reporting for this, talking to food rescue organisations and academics and having to think about climate disaster in practical terms.

New Zealand isn’t doing enough to fund climate action. This is how we know The journalist’s curse is that you read some bland report about cliamte funding and then discover that it is interesting and important and the details seriously matter.

From fish to flour to feta, snow feeds us all Figuring out how to conect these ideas about snowmelt and crops was quite difficult but I’m glad that I managed to pull it together.

Sinking lids and rising profits: the problem with pokies Tfw you think ‘hey did that new policy a council put in place a few years ago actually work?’

Supermarkets know everything about you, from your gender to your license plate number. Do you care? Surveillance is so normal and yet we must question it, must try to keep noticing it.

Why so many nurses move to New Zealand and don’t plan to stick around Some of the same ground as my Indian international students story: people act within immigration settings in particular ways, and yet the consequences are so unpredictable.

creative writing

essays

I grew up riding trains across India

What I learned - and didn’t learn - from four years of homeschooling Aka what was Shanti’s childhood like? Kinda unusual but also great!

Knots, published in Starling Magazine.

short stories

My short story ‘getting closer’ appears in the 2024 edition of IIML literary journal Turbine Kapohau. You should read it, it involves anxious 19 year olds, a random Austrian man and the jungle.

If you somehow come across a copy of Sick Leave Journal’s ‘fiction’ issue from 2021, there is a story I wrote in there! I think it’s pretty good. If you are unlikely to run across copies of small Australian literary journals, email me and I can send you a pdf of the story probably. It involves cousins, pyramid schemes and anxious 19 year olds. Don’t worry I am now finished writing stories about anxious 19 year olds, I have moved on.

newsletters

The American-ness of Christian memes Rohan Salmond of the WONDERFUL newsletter Modern Relics let me write a post!

The next big target for disinformation? Climate change. I subbed in for Ellen Rykers and wrote an edition of Future Proof, her Spinoff newsletter focused on climate change.

I also wrote The Spinoff’s The Weekend newsletter for two years.

poetry

I write one good poem every two years! My dear friend Naomii has pointed out that the hit rate would be higher if I wrote more. Maybe one day some of these poems will come to live on this website, who knows?

zines

Mostly Good Ideas is the publishing imprint for my zines. You can find a full copy of How to have a low-carbon adventure there, and the sequel ‘I had a low-carbon adventure’ is now available too. I also have a series of zines about portents that will be uploaded in full one day. More zines are under way!