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4 days ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Floods in Christchurch and Banks Peninsula earlier this month closed roads and damaged businesses. Shanti Mathias explores how local authorities have been preparing for extreme weather events, and whether it made any difference. Between April 30 and May 1, Christchurch had its fourth-heaviest day of rainfall on record. More than 140mm fell over three days in unrelenting grey sheets. In the city’s rivers, the water started to rise.
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1 week ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
When batteries end up in the general waste, they can cause fires, putting people and property at risk and damaging the environment. Shanti Mathias investigates why disposing of batteries is so complex – and so expensive. When a rubbish truck catches fire, smoke twirling out over the road, the safety procedure is immediate: the driver needs to dump the entire contents of their truck on the kerb and wait for Fire and Emergency to deal with it.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
With a new cause to support, the ice bucket challenge is back. But what are the pitfalls of attempting to raise money through social media? I was waiting for a friend when I first heard about the ice bucket challenge. “Can you help me with this?” her younger brother asked. I followed him outside, holding a camera while two others poured water over his head. None of us had anything else to do, because we were 14. The year was 2014. Soon enough, it was my turn.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Queenstown resident Ben Hildred just spent 100 days doing more uphill cycling than almost anyone else could imagine. He talks to Shanti Mathias about its psychological impact. Ben Hildred swings his leg over his bike, parks it, orders a kombucha and sits down opposite me at Bespoke, a Queenstown cafe. He is still wearing his bike helmet. That’s not surprising, perhaps. For the first 100 days of this year, Hildred rode his bike every day for about eight hours.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Coal mine expansion into the West Coast’s Denniston plateau attracted more than 70 protesters over the Easter weekend. Climate activists say this is only the first step in resisting the Bathurst mining company. “Oh yeah – right there is where we’re digging trenches to keep tents from getting flooded,” said Adam Currie. It was April 19, Easter Saturday, and the climate activist was giving The Spinoff a tour (by video call) of an encampment on the Denniston Plateau.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Last year, 20,000 observations of Christchurch species were made during the annual City Nature Challenge, a way for anyone to get involved in biodiversity. It’s back again this month. Even in suburbia, even on grey autumn weekends, there is biodiversity. You just need the time to look for it: to name the bird flapping through your backyard or identify a spider dangling from the corner of a shed or a frothy lichen growing across a park bench.
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4 weeks ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
The internet seems to be permanent. But all those dead links are a reminder that useful information sometimes only stays accessible when someone is paying for it. Sometime in the early 2010s, it occurred to my high school teachers that they ought to be teaching us something about how to interact well on the internet. “The internet lasts forever,” I remember being told, with the vague threat that future employers might find my nascent Facebook accounts and judge me based on their contents.
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1 month ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Two members of Peace Action Ōtautahi, an activist group, were taken into custody after police requested CCTV footage from the University of Canterbury showing them briefly interacting, which contravened their bail conditions. At the start of March, two protesters from activist group Peace Action Ōtautahi chained themselves to the building of NIOA, an Australian arms manufacturer that supplies the Israeli Defence Forces and has an outpost in Rolleston, just outside of Christchurch.
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1 month ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
German butcher Lisa Willert is proud to keep Christchurch’s oldest butchery going. She gives Shanti Mathias a quick tour. Lisa Willert’s six-year-old daughter understands her mum’s work solely in terms of the TV show Peppa Pig. That makes sense: Willert is a butcher, the owner and operator of Everybody’s Butchery in Addington, Christchurch. “When the meat plant guy rings while we’re driving to school, she screams from the back, ‘can we please have Peppa Pig?’” Willert says, laughing.
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1 month ago | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias
Shanti Mathias scrolls through council archives and Papers Past to discover where street names come from. In Sydenham, a suburb south of Christchurch’s CBD, there are some familiar names on the road signs. Milton Street. Coleridge Street. Wordsworth Street, which, naturally branches into Shakespeare Road. There’s Tennyson Street, of course, and Shelley Street. Walking around, or even just looking at a map of the area gives me vivid flashbacks to first year English literature papers at uni.
