Despite all your predictions to the contrary, the children still have not colluded against me. Read more

When Arthur Dent complained that he had not been informed of Council’s plans to bulldoze his house for a bypass, Mr Prosser, the Council officer, calmly told him that the plans had been on display for months - in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. Arthur found the plans there the day before the bulldozers showed up at his door. Read more

This week, the Chinese government celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s 1949 takeover of the country. Read more

Chutzpah really should be part of New Zealand's vernacular. I don't think I've heard it since moving to New Zealand almost 16 long years ago, but we do see a bit of it here. Read more

Finding that water flows downhill is not all that surprising. But it can be vey much worth knowing how fast that water moves, and how badly wrong we can be if we assume the waters are still. Read more

Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers salient advice about an awful lot of things. Don't listen to Vogon poetry. Don't forget where your towel is. And don't have too strong a sense of perspective because fully recognising our place as an insignificant dot on an insignificant dot against the vastness of all creation is mentally debilitating. Read more

When Alice tried to recite one of her lessons while down the rabbit-hole in Wonderland, she thought only a few words had come out wrong. The Caterpillar corrected her bluntly: “It is wrong from beginning to end.” Read more

Let’s say you’ve bought non-refundable tickets for a movie, and then hear scathing reviews. It’s better to tear up the tickets and make other plans for the evening rather than bloody-mindedly watch the film just because you’ve already paid to go. Read more

The great legacy of the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were the durable institutions that have since guided how we are governed. Read more

Freshwater management is a tough political problem. Read more

The very best part of grad school was the drinking. Well, not so much the drinking. Too often, the beer was stuff that would make an Export Gold taste like Export Gold had taste. It was the arguing about economics, over beer, until close to sunrise, with other people who cared deeply about ideas. That was heaven – despite the bad beer. Read more

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short report making the case that New Zealand is the world’s last sane place. Or, at least, if it’s going mad, it’s going mad more slowly than the rest of the world. Read more