Ahead of the reality franchise’s return to New Zealand, allow us to introduce the eight brides and grooms.  Chuck on a veil and tie back your man bun, because it’s time to say “I do” to a new season of Married at First Sight NZ. The reality TV “social experiment” returns at the end of this month after a five-year hiatus, with eight more single New Zealanders about to marry a complete stranger in the hope of finding everlasting love.  Along with some awkward introductions and nerve-wracking weddings, the new season also features MAFS Australia expert John Aiken, who will guide the em ..read more

After a long and illustrious career as a goal kicker, Dan Carter’s favourite way to unwind is… kicking goals. Why can’t he get enough of it? And what it’s like to watch him do it for an hour straight? A semicircle of people wielding cameras and phones has formed in the Eden Park changing rooms to watch Dan Carter put on his rugby boots. “I actually used to sit over there,” he says quietly, gesturing to the opposite side of the room. “Do you want to move?” asks one of the photographers. “Nah, it’s all the same.” It is not natural to have this many people watching you tie your laces. Lesser mor ..read more

Dame Susan Devoy takes us through her life in television, including late night ER debriefs, her proudest CTI moment and the show she watches in secret.  Quite aside from her four world champion squash titles, Dame Susan Devoy will likely go down in history as one of the best Celebrity Treasure Island contestants of all time. The former athlete and race relations commissioner became beloved for her no-bullshit catchphrases and acts of spontaneity on the show. Who can forget when she vomited mid-interview, assessed a possum’s “big vag” or described her own tired eyes like “pissholes in the ..read more

Hera Lindsay Bird reveals the best places in Ōtepoti to score more for your apocalypse-prep book hoard. Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve been killed in a car crash, and this second half of my life is just the brain unspooling itself, like one of those episodes of a hospital show written during the writers strike. I think this is partly because I’ve moved back to Dunedin after a 10-year hiatus. There’s something strange about revisiting your old life, like stepping into the air-temperature ambience of a dream.  There are lots of things I miss about the North Island. The food, for a start ..read more

ThreeNow’s new murder mystery series takes us on a dark, damp journey into the Australian wilderness. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.  High Country is ThreeNow’s new Australian eight-part crime drama, set in a remote part of the Victorian highlands. It tells the story of a police detective who is transferred to the small town of Brokenridge, and begins to investigate a series of local disappearances. The more the detective delves into the disappearances, the deeper she finds herself entangled in a web of murder and lies. What’s good ..read more

Introducing a new way to read The Spinoff every weekend. After nearly 10 years of being an online magazine, we’re finally embracing the weekend liftout. Despite our best efforts to convince you otherwise, writers and editors at The Spinoff don’t work weekend. It is through the sheer power of technology (scheduling stories, not writing them) that articles continue to appear on the site Saturdays and Sundays. But no more! Starting this very morning, we’ll be publishing our full weekend slate all at once on Saturday morning for you to browse – consider it a true weekend magazine.  ..read more

Tip one: let yourself be nurtured by this big old man. Tip two: don’t ask him to adopt you.  So, you’ve arrived at your first session with a new therapist. He tells you to make yourself comfortable and you opt for the tweed armchair, hoping it makes you look like a robust, stable person, rather than the couch (too lazy) or the wooden stool in the corner (beyond help). Once the pleasantries – and agreement on where to send your invoice to – are over, something about him catches your attention. His hairline; jawline; the arch of his brow. That familiar glint in his eye; the smile your moth ..read more

I didn’t know books could open you back up; that there were books that stayed with you, where reading was like a chemical event. I knew nothing. The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand. Not too long ago, I was listening to the American writer Bud Smith on a podcast. It was dusk, late summer. I was driving through the countryside, only half listening, when he had this burst of eloquence. He said the reason he reads and writes is because it’s the most active form of art; the author and reader are in collaboration. They have to work together to find m ..read more

A poem by Tessa Keenan, from AUP New Poets 10. Mātou These days we are a photograph; one of a farm strewn with cows that used to be bright harakeke or swamp. The kids point at it and say the sun sits behind a smudge (left by someone at Christmas); the water turned hot that day: in the bottom right-hand corner, a trough sparkles to prove it. Across the fields there is a mountain. Beyond that, the city we live in. (We were driving up a road we’d never been on when Dad told Mum to stop. He opened the car door and walked up to a nearby fence. I don’t know what, or who, told him he was in the righ ..read more

The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25) The masterful Irish writer completes, at minimum, 40 drafts of each of her stories. Which may explain why they are so perfect. 4 The Last Secret Agent: My Untold Story of Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Enemy Lines by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin, $38) An unputdownable memoir of Latour’s life as a spy during Wor ..read more