Lume wants music fans to buy an album once, own it permanently and spend time with everything around it. In an industry built around skipping quickly, that feels almost rebellious.

After Sundance, SXSW and a growing pile of international praise, Big Girls Don’t Cry will open the New Zealand International Film Festival. Its world is rural Aotearoa in 2006, when MSN existed, dial-up internet screamed and being 14 remained a private emergency.

Auckland’s mayor has promised to wear a different local startup’s T-shirt every day for 100 days. It is daggy, cheap and probably more useful than another 60-page innovation strategy.

An east London neighbourhood is preparing to open a community sauna heated by food waste from nearby homes. It sounds slightly ridiculous, which may be exactly why it makes more sense than most climate projects.

Dutch children keep turning up near the top of global wellbeing reports. Maybe the lesson is not that the Netherlands has perfected childhood. Maybe adults there just leave kids a bit more room to have one.

The most wanted thing at the 2026 World Cup is not a luxury ticket, a limited shirt or some grim VIP fan experience. It is a free charm bracelet, which is silly, sweet and probably says more about football than half the official campaign does.

New York has always been a city where people look up at the skyscrapers, but lately the most interesting things are happening beneath the pavement. A new wave of midnight urban explorers is popping open heavy iron manhole covers at three in the morning, leaving police scrambling to weld the city shut.

While you’re trying to coax a house spider into a Tupperware container, a small team in Australia is spending their 9-to-5 squeezing deadly venom out of funnel-webs. It turns out saving lives is a remarkably manual, highly stressful corporate grind.

Les Mills Snr was an Olympian, a mayor and the name behind one of New Zealand’s most recognisable global fitness stories. But the more interesting legacy is cultural: he helped turn strength, discipline and showing up into something ordinary people could build a life around.

The first rung of work is starting to look suspiciously like a trapdoor. Young people are being told to become entrepreneurial before anyone has trained them, hired them or paid them enough to stop calling freelancing a personality trait.

Artists in New Zealand are constantly told their work matters, then asked to prove it again in another form, another budget, another application. The result is a creative sector where making the work is only half the job, and surviving long enough to make it can feel like the actual art form.

Creative people have spent the past year drawing hard lines around AI, then quietly stepping over them when the deadline gets ugly. The real question is not whether the tools belong in the work, but who gets paid, credited and replaced once they do.