Saturday Morning for Saturday 2 October 2021

8.10 Prof Jason Young: the domino effect of Evergrande's debt crisis

Heavily indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande hit headlines last week as the world waited to see if the company would cause China’s ‘Lehman moment’. And while that now looks unlikely, observers say the situation marks a turning point in China's rapid growth model.

Professor Jason Young says the Chinese economy is transitioning, but what shape it will take is unknown - with some parties pushing a neo-Maoist line, while others for a more standard socialist economy. Whatever the case, Professor Young says we should be paying close attention.

Professor Young is the director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre and Associate Professor in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington.

8.35  Jonathan Drori: cultivating coffee and saving sequoias

Author, plant lover and former BBC documentary maker Jonathan Drori joins the show for a chat about some of the latest botanical news.

This week, Drori will be discussing the discovery of six new coffee species found in Madagascar, and while they probably won’t be cultivated for commercial use anytime soon it’s a remarkable find for a plant under threat due to climate change and a lack of genetic diversity. Also, the fight is on to save giant sequoia trees from California wildfires, including the world’s largest tree by volume, General Sherman, which is estimated to be around 2300-2700 years old.

Drori is the author of Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World in 80 Plants.

9.05 Joanna Scanlan: electrifying short film showcases new Ma Larkin

English actor Joanna Scanlan stars alongside Peter Mullan (My Name is Joe, Top of the Lake) in new short film Don vs Lightning, in which an elderly Scottish grump finds himself the victim of multiple lightning strikes. The charming comedy is one of 75 hand-selected short films from around the globe being screened as part of the Show Me Shorts Festival kicking off this month.

Scanlan will also be popping up on our screens in the near future in The Larkins, a reboot of popular 90s British comedy The Darling Buds of May which was based on the H.E. Bates books of the same name. The Larkins will be screening on TVNZ 1 soon.

9.35  Frank Stark: bringing creative life to the historic suburb of Gonville 

As former director of the Whanganui Regional Museum, Frank Stark is familiar with the eclectic architectural heritage of the river city. And when he and partner Emma Bugden bought the historic swimming baths in the suburb of Gonville, part of the package turned out to be a former fire station and out-of-use town hall, remnants of Gonville’s brief time as a separate borough. 

Stark has created the Gonville Centre for Urban Research, a place “for the study and practical application of micro urbanism”. It has a fellowship programme - current fellows are locals musician Anthonie Tonnon and designer Natalie Bradburn.

Stark and Bugden have a history of taking on interesting buildings - earlier in the year they sold a former Wellington rifle range and their house in Gonville was built in 1950 from seven concrete water tanks. Stark previously founded Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand's archive of film, television and sound.

10.05 Anthony Doerr: Pulitzer winning author on Cloud Cuckoo Land

Cloud Cuckoo Land is the new book from Idaho-based author Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See. Like his last offering, Doerr’s new book is a complex interweaving of several storylines - some centuries apart - with the protagonists almost all children. Among them is Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls of Constantinople during its 1453 siege. 

Dedicated to “librarians then, now, and in the years to come”, Cloud Cuckoo Land has been called a "paean to these nameless people" who have played such an important role in the transmission of ancient texts and preserved the tales they tell.

10.35 Dr Ryan Salter: making difficult decisions when rationing medical care 

Ryan Salter knows first-hand what it looks like when a health system is under extreme pressure because of Covid-19. Dr Salter has recently returned from the UK, where he was a consulting anaesthetist at Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge during the first and second Covid waves. 

Royal Papworth is the UK’s leading heart and lung hospital and patients are referred there for last-resort treatment on ECMO, a heart and lung bypass machine that draws blood from the patient and oxygenates it before pumping it back in. Normally the hospital would treat about 40 people a year on ECMO. They are now getting around 350 people referred a month - but there aren't enough resources to treat everyone, which means making hard decisions around who will receive treatment and who won’t. 

11.05 Max Chafkin: what makes tech billionaire Peter Thiel tick?

Elusive venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel has been thrust under the microscope in new biography The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. Author Max Chafkin, who is a features editor and tech reporter for Businessweek Bloomsburg, spoke to former colleagues, friends, and people who knew Thiel when he was younger to paint a picture of the notoriously private billionaire, who is a New Zealand citizen and owns a large property on the shores of Lake Wanaka.

In the book Chafkin aims to pull apart the mythology of Thiel, which he says cuts both ways -  the left-leaning media portrays Thiel as a supervillian behind every evil thing that Donald Trump or any tech company has ever done, but that is counterbalanced by a superhero story in tech circles which see Thiel as a great investor, builder and intellectual. Chafkin says both stories have kernels of truth, but neither gets to the core of Thiel and his motivations.

 

11.35 Dr Emma Carroll: following Bill, the whale that crossed three oceans

A satellite tag which unexpectedly kept working for a year has followed the journey of one tohorā southern right whale as he ventured 15,000km from the Auckland Islands across three oceans.

Bill - as he’s referred to - chalked up the longest southern right whale migration ever recorded, giving scientists the first ever glimpse into a full year in the life of a southern right whale. Until now almost nothing was known about where tohorā went outside the breeding season. 

Tohorā were almost wiped out by 19th century whaling, but their population grew from an estimated 30-40 in 1920 to 2000 in 2009. Carroll and her team returned to the Auckland Islands last July, placing satellite tags on 12 more whales. You can track their progress and find out more here.

Dr Emma Carroll is a molecular ecologist at the University of Auckland.

Books mentioned in this show:

Cloud Cuckoo Land
By Anthony Doerr
ISBN: 9780008478650
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
By Max Chafkin
ISBN: 9781526619556
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing

 

Songs featured on this show:

Wairunga Blues
Fat Freddy's Drop
Played at 8.30am

Cloudbusting
Kate Bush
Played at 10.35am