Saturday Morning for Saturday 6 November 2021

8.10 Daniel Ellsberg: the patron saint of whistleblowers

Fifty years ago Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. In the wake of leaking the papers to the New York Times Ellsberg became the first person to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. To this day, he insists he should not have been tried under the act, as it is in direct violation of the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Ellsberg is a firm supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has also been charged for violating the Espionage Act. Last week US lawyers launched a fresh attempt to have Assange extradited from Britain, in an effort to get him to face the charges in the States - but Ellsberg argues that Assange should not be extradited nor charged with espionage. 

Ellsberg appears in the new documentary 'The Boys Who Said No' by Oscar-nominated director Judith Erlich, which is available to watch online for three days from this Sunday 7 November. Head here for details.  

8.40 Prof Renate Meyer: decoding signals from the universe

A team led by Professor Renate Meyer from the University of Auckland has received $3 million from the Marsden Fund to further their project deciphering gravitational waves - ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic phenomena such as exploding stars. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1916, but weren’t directly measured until almost 100 years later.

Professor Meyer and her interdisciplinary team are part of an international project working towards the launch of a Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) in 2034. From space, LISA will measure low frequency gravitational waves, increasing the potential for discovering the aspects of the universe that are invisible by other means, like black holes and neutron stars.

Professor Meyer is an applied Bayesian statistician and chair of the NZ Astrostatistics and General Relativity Group.

9.05 Fran Lebowitz: ‘I've always been old at heart’

Quintessential cantankerous New Yorker Fran Lebowitz is finding fame with a new generation of fans thanks to Scorsese-directed docu-series Pretend It’s A City. Lebowitz, who was drawn to the Big Apple from New Jersey as a teen, made her name as a humourist in the 1970s with her column in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine.

Lebowitz went on to publish two best-selling collections of essays, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), which have been gathered together in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, showcasing her views on all manner of subjects, from children to landlords.

9.40 Danyl McLauchlan: Is Ardern an Elene Ferrante character?

Writer Danyl McLauchlan returns to tackle life's big questions, ideas and thinkers. This week: in the 2010s readers devoured the four-book series known as the Neapolitan Novels, written under the pseudonym Elene Ferrante. The books are deeply political, and Danyl McLauchlan has been reading them and pondering our own politics — wondering whether Ferrante’s novels explain it all. 

Ferrante portrays a political left that appears radical in its views but conservative in its action, revealing a hypocrisy in the actions of what have been dubbed the 'professional managerial class'. Might our slowness to act on everything from the housing crisis to climate change be a condition of our culture? 

McLauchlan writes on this topic for his latest essay on The Spinoff.

10.05 Rafia Zakaria: recentering feminism around women of colour

Rafia Zakaria’s latest book of essays Against White Feminism bills itself as a counter-manifesto to “white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals”. Seeking to restructure our view of feminism, it puts women of colour at its centre, founded in Zakaria’s own experience as a Muslim women who came to the United States from Pakistan at age 17. 

 An attorney, writer and human rights activist Zakaria has worked on behalf of victims of domestic violence around the world. She is a columnist for Al Jazeera America, Ms., Dissent, and Dawn — Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper. 

10.35 Renée: 92-year-old playwright on how reading changed her life

Otaki-based playwright Renée has many feathers in her cap, having written numerous plays and nine fiction novels — the latest being her first venture into crime writing, The Wild Card, which she published in 2018 at age 90. Renée, who received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement that same year, credits her mother Rose with her lifelong love affair with the written word.

Now aged 92, Renée is delivering the annual pānui for Read NZ at the National Library on Wednesday 10 November. Her talk, If you don’t get your head out of a book, my girl, you’ll end up on Queer Street, is about the way that reading changed her life, having been taught by her mother at a young age.

While the pānui event is at capacity, there will be a free ebook of the work available for download here afterwards.

11.05 Luit Bieringa: director turns lens on problematic artist Theo Schoon

Never shy of dealing with controversy, Luit Bieringa has often tackled complex and flawed New Zealand cultural figures in his films. As an art historian, filmmaker, and former National Art Gallery director, Bieringa’s subjects have included the late art dealer Peter McLeavey, photographer and fellow Dutch emigrant Ans Westra and art educator Gordon Tovey. 

In his new film, Signed, Theo Schoon, Bieringa turns his attention to another problematic trailblazer. A 2019 survey exhibition of Schoon, Split Level View Finder, was subject to protests over racism and cultural appropriation. Signed, Theo Schoon addresses the protests but also Schoon’s relationship with Māori art and communities, told in his own words and firsthand accounts by others.

Signed, Theo Schoon is screening as part of NZIFF. Head over here for details.

11.40 Dr Matt Baker: DNA robots and tuskless elephants

Sydney-based New Zealander Dr Matt Baker returns for a chat about some of the latest science news. This week we revisit the topic of pachyderms, following a recent study published in Science suggesting that severe ivory poaching in parts of Mozambique has led to the evolution of tuskless elephants. Dr Baker will also be discussing some of his own research around so-called DNA robots.

Dr Baker and his colleague Dr Shelley Wickham co-led a study that discovered the best way to design and build DNA ‘nanostructures’ to effectively manipulate synthetic liposomes — tiny bubbles which have been traditionally used to deliver drugs for cancer and other diseases. The study paves the way for the creation of ‘mini biological computers’ in droplets that have potential uses in biosensing and mRNA vaccines. 

Books mentioned in this show:

The Fran Lebowitz Reader
By Fran Lebowitz
ISBN: 9780349015880
Publisher: Hachette

Neapolitan Quartet: Four Books Set
By Elena Ferrante
ISBN: 1787702693
Publisher: Europa Editions

Against White Feminism
By Rafia Zakaria
ISBN:978-1-324-00661-9
Publisher: Norton

The Wild Card
By Renée
ISBN: 978-1-98-859503-0
Publisher: The Cuba Press