Connor Lambert started taking photos at 15 without much of a reason, then spent years photographing musicians, summers and people in ways that made ordinary life look suspiciously good. These days he is in Wānaka, heading up operations at Wolf Coffee Roasters and taking another long-running obsession, coffee, just as seriously.

Waiwera Thermal Resort spent years abandoned, got demolished and seemed destined to become another place Aucklanders talked about using the words “remember when”. Now a $58 million version has cleared resource consent, although anyone hoping to be fired through the Black Hole again should probably sit down.

KFC opened a pawnshop on Ponsonby Road where Aucklanders could exchange anything gold for fried chicken and its new Liquid Gold sauce. The gold didn’t even need to be real, which is fortunate because trading Nana’s jewellery for three tenders would be a fairly difficult thing to explain later.

Streaming promised everything, everywhere, all the time, and somehow ended up making a Friday night feel like scrolling a spreadsheet. Down in the physical aisles, people are paying five dollars just to talk to someone who has actually seen the movie.

Brad Matthews is 25, leads a team of 25 and says Morning Made now reaches around 30,000 retail doors across New Zealand, Australia and the United States. What began as an alternative to his morning coffee has become a much bigger bet on how people want to start their day.

For decades, outsiders joked that New Zealanders turned every statement into a nervous question. What they missed was the quiet confidence hiding inside the lift.

twenty-seven names returned to New Zealand Fashion Week this week after six years away, celebrating 20 years since two best friends started making clothes from their Wellington flat. In a fashion industry built around whatever comes next, simply still being here might be the more interesting achievement.

For years, New Zealand tourism businesses worried about where they appeared on Google. Now the Government is spending $800,000 making sure that when somebody asks an AI where to go on holiday, we turn up in the answer.

Ljubljana has opened the world’s first museum dedicated to Balkan humour, complete with hundreds of jokes, everyday absurdities and enough material left over to fill the place many times again. Beneath the obvious gag is something better: a museum about the way people learn to laugh at themselves when history has given them plenty not to laugh about.

One of the world’s longest-running studies of wild mammals was running out of money, so the scientists did the obvious thing and put the marmots on OnlyFans. A few months, thousands of dollars and one completely unexpected meme coin later, the research has enough money to keep going.

The new Sydney Fish Market in Blackwattle Bay is a high-design architectural triumph, but the best part remains the guy in gumboots hose-downing the deck at five in the morning.

Norfolk Island was handed its own web extension in 1996, but instead of selling out to tech startups or AI hype, it quietly priced almost everyone out.

New Zealand has reportedly overtaken Indonesia as the leading overseas destination for Australian travellers. After years of us moving there for better pay, the Australians are finally returning the favour by coming here and buying expensive dinners.

Whittaker’s new limited-edition block combines white chocolate, bubblegum flavour and five kinds of gumdrop. It sounds like something designed during a school-holiday sugar rush, which is probably why New Zealand will take it extremely seriously.

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.

Tucked beside Ellerslie and easy to miss, Bianca served one of those dinners where the room is small, the staff have actual personality and the potatoes nearly steal the whole night. I went for a birthday with five others and left with an 8.5 out of 10 and a very clear plan to go back.

David Seymour wants New Zealand to offer companies a permanent pathway for testing emerging technology under temporarily relaxed rules. The idea could make us faster, richer and more useful, provided “test market” does not become a polite term for “guinea pig”.

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.

A portrait missing from public view for more than a century has reappeared with a $420,000 price tag and a very awkward question attached: is it actually a Goldie?

A University of Auckland team has won New Zealand’s top science prize for a treatment that has prevented death and severe disability in thousands of newborn babies. The treatment sounds simple. Reaching it took around 30 years.

DOC thought a group of mohua released into Arthur’s Pass had quietly disappeared. Then a retired vet walking home at dusk heard five of them singing beside the track.

Young Maa-speaking artists in Kenya are blending traditional songs with contemporary beats and finding audiences through TikTok, YouTube and WhatsApp. For once, the internet is not making everything sound the same.

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.

The Box in Plymouth has just won the UK’s biggest museum prize. Good. The best museums are not always the ones trying to look important. Sometimes they are the ones that know exactly who they are for.

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.

KFC is testing a new restaurant with table service, a more open room and a bit more hospitality. Fair enough. Fast food got very good at speed, but somewhere along the way it forgot that people still like sitting down.

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.

A surgeon in London just operated on a patient in Gibraltar without ever leaving the room. It turns out the hardest part of remote surgery isn't the technology; it's trusting that a fiber-optic cable won't blink at the wrong moment.

New Zealand’s first MICHELIN Guide could have been another night of fine-dining theatre, full of nervous chefs and expensive lighting. Then Tala got a star, and suddenly the better story was not about prestige at all, but about specificity.

While gridlocked traffic slows paramedics to a crawl, a network of autonomous drones is buzzing across Sydney skies to drop defibrillators into suburban backyards. It turns out the next phase of emergency medicine requires you to play paramedic.

Palmerston North Hospital losing its last gastroenterologist sounds like a local health story until you think about what it really means. A system does not have to fail everywhere to fail people badly; sometimes it only takes one empty specialist role for an entire region to feel the gap.

One NZ is getting a new boss, but the more interesting story is not corporate musical chairs. It is that telcos might be the most complained-about essential infrastructure in New Zealand: boring when they work, unforgivable when they don’t, and suddenly very important when the country needs to stay connected.

While deep space telescopes obsess over galaxies millions of light years away, a team of Sydney astrophysicists is building a remarkably tiny satellite to spy on our closest neighbors. It turns out the best place to find a second Earth is right across the fence.

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.

The tech billionaire class wants us to believe that humanoid robots will be pouring our flat whites by next week, while sceptics claim they will never survive the Australian landscape. The truth is far more exciting: they are absolutely coming, but they will have to learn how to live like locals first.

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.

New Zealand’s first MICHELIN Guide ceremony is not just a fancy dinner with better PR. It is a strange, useful moment where the country’s food scene gets the kind of outside attention it has never really needed, but probably deserves.

Reddit is not exactly community, and maybe that is the point. It is more like the internet’s worst-lit waiting room: depressing, useful, strangely addictive, and full of people saying the quiet part before anyone has had a chance to make it brand-safe.

Aucklanders love complaining about public transport, partly because complaining is one of the city’s last affordable hobbies. But somewhere between fare caps, better buses, ferries that feel like cheating, and the City Rail Link about to change the whole map, the system has become far more usable than we like admitting.

AI music is not scary because it might write the next perfect song. It is scary because it can make endless almost-music, flooding platforms with tracks that sound finished enough to exist and empty enough to say nothing.

Startup culture has become one of New Zealand’s strangest performances: part ambition, part theatre, part group project with better shoes. The interesting bit is not that founders are pitching bigger, but that they now have to build the company and the mythology at the same time.

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.

Reading was meant to be the quiet thing people did alone while pretending they had not checked their phone in six minutes. Now book festivals, author talks and reading groups are starting to look less like homework and more like a social life with better sentences.

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.

New Zealand is very good at producing ambitious people, then acting surprised when they leave. The better story is not the brain drain, but the founders, artists, designers and operators who stay anyway and try to build something here before the country has decided they matter.

New Zealand hospitality is having a rough year, but the better story is not another closure. It is the people still signing leases, building rooms and betting that a good table can survive an economy telling everyone to stay home.

The end of Splore is not just another festival collapsing under costs. It points to a quieter problem in New Zealand culture: the spaces between tiny venues and big tours, where local artists, odd crowds and half-formed scenes used to find each other.

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.