RNZ: Saturday Morning

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Kim Hill was nervous to meet Jemaine Clement as he famously doesn't like interviews. They meet for a sometimes excruciating, sometimes funny conversation about, among other things, his new TV show Wellington Supernatural.

Kate De Goldi is a fiction writer and book reviewer. Her most recent novel, From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle, won the Esther Glen Medal at the 2016 NZ Children's and Young Adult Book Awards, and last year she published ANNUAL 2 with Susan Paris, a miscellany for 9-to-12 year olds. She will review Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans (David Fickling Books) and The Mapmakers' Race by Eirlys Hunter (Gecko Press).

In her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison lays bare her own recovery from alcoholism and delves into the drinking and recovery stories of other writers and artists whose lives and work were shaped by their dependence and addiction. The book also looks at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill. Jamison teaches nonfiction at the Columbia University MFA programme, where she also leads the Marian House Project. She has written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in places including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. For several years she was also a columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

Andy Deere and Ryan Heron have been friends since childhood, and they both work in advertising. In addition, they've been making their own film projects together for a decade, including a short film Return, which was accepted into competition at numerous international festivals and won best screenplay at the 2015 Show Me Shorts festival. A short film pitch created by the pair, called Bludgeon and chronicling a NZ national medieval combat competition, was selected to be made into a Loading Docs short documentary in 2016, and from that, a feature-length documentary by the same name (Bludgeon: Orcas of the Land) developed, and will play at the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival, details here.

Automation and digital technology are changing the world of work and threatening to hugely change, or overtake, many traditional jobs and professions. A new book, Don't Worry about the Robots, by Dr Jo Cribb and David Glover, investigates how our lives will be disrupted - and how we can learn to make the most of this disruption. Cribb is a consultant and chief executive of the New Zealand Book Council. She is a former chief executive of the Ministry for Women and a former Deputy Children's Commissioner. Cribb is a graduate of Cambridge University and has a PhD in public policy from Victoria University.

Sir Peter Gluckman originally trained as a paediatrician with an interest in endocrinology. After a short stint as a doctor he followed a research route, both in New Zealand and in the US, at one point as Assistant Professor at the University of California in San Francisco. Back in New Zealand, he spent 17 years researching developmental endocrinology and neuroscience and in 1991 was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Auckland University. In 2001, Sir Peter set up the Liggins Institute to further determine how a poor start to life impacts on health throughout life. Knighted in 2015, he was appointed as Chief Science Advisor in 2009, and will step down from the role in the coming week.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and is one of the world's leading legal philosophers. She is visiting Aotearoa as a guest of Victoria University of Wellington Law School where, this week, she delivered the 2018 Borrin Lecture, entitled Anger, Powerlessness, and the Politics of Blame. She talks to Kim about the climate of simmering anger in modern democracies, and the search for targets to blame. Nussbaum has authored 22 books, including the recent Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice, and edited a further 21. She has previously taught at Harvard University, Brown University, and Oxford University.

Violinist Stefan Jackiw, now 33, began playing the violin at the age of four. He was just 12 when he was invited to perform for the opening night of Boston Pops; at age 14 he made his European debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Considered one of the 'wunderkids' of a new generation of classical musicians, Jackiw, who has a Korean mother and Ukrainian father, is in Aotearoa for the first time. He joins the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for Brahms & Tchaikovsky concerts in Auckland and Wellington, which will see him perform Brahms' Violin Concerto in a concert also featuring Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, and the world premiere of New Zealand composer Gareth Farr's He iwi tahi tatou.

Dr Douglas Vakoch is President of METI, a nonprofit research and educational organisation dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. He is an elected member of the International Institute for Space Law, and he serves as chair of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Study Group on Active SETI: Scientific, Technical, Societal, and Legal Dimensions. Prior to founding METI, for 16 years Vakoch worked at the SETI Institute, where he was Director of Interstellar Message Composition. He is the editor of over a dozen books, including Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2011). His work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, Nature, Science, and Der Spiegel, and broadcast media.

Typeface designer Kris Sowersby founded Klim Type Foundry (Klim) in 2005. He studied at Whanganui School of Design and worked briefly as a graphic designer before starting Klim. Since releasing his first retail typeface, Feijoa, in 2005, Sowersby has received numerous awards and accolades, including a Certificate of Excellence from the New York Type Directors Club for his second typeface, National, in 2008. The National typeface is the subject of a new exhibition opening this week at the Ponsonby-based public craft and design gallery Objectspace. 'There is no such thing as a New Zealand typeface' (June 29 - August 4) explores whether a typeface or font can have a 'regional accent'.

Seymour M. Hersh has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times. He established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism in 1970 when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam. Since then he has received the National Magazine Award for Public Interest twice, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orwell Prize, and dozens of other awards. Hersh has just released his memoir Reporter, which includes previously unreported information about some of his biggest scoops, including My Lai and the horrors at Abu Ghraib.

In 2014 the Sea Shepherd marine conservation ship, Bob Barker, embarked from Antarctic waters on a chase across thousands of kilometres of open sea. Its target - Thunder, an illegal fishing ship wanted by Interpol. The captain of the Bob Barker, Peter Hammarstedt, joins Kim from Stockholm to talk about what became the world's longest sea chase - the trail uncovering crime, corruption, slavery, the destruction of ocean habitats, and the battle for endangered species. Hammarstedt's story is told in Catching Thunder: The true story of the world's longest sea chase, by Eskil Engdal & Kjetil Saeter.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.