David Cohen

In an academic world where scholars regret seeing their cherished theories vanish into the knacker’s yard, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is unusual in wishing people would retire one of his best-known coinages. He may have his work cut out in trying to push back against the popularity of the term he coined in a culture now awash in woozy autistic patter Baron-Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known autism experts, says he now regrets the language of his ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism. He now thinks it may have caused as much bother as good in influencing how people talk about the condition. This is not because of the underlying science, but because the specific words themselves have proved ‘open to misunderstanding’.

A fugitive father who vanished into the rugged bushlands of the Waikato region of New Zealand with his three children has been shot and killed by police. Tom Phillips's death marks the end of a case that has gripped the country for nearly four years. Phillips first disappeared from his small Marokopa community with his homeschooled kids, Jayda, now aged twelve, Maverick, ten, and Ember, nine, in September 2021, but was nabbed by police shortly afterwards and charged with their abduction, apparently stemming from a custody dispute. A member of Phillips’ family later said the episode had to do with the father needing to ‘clear his head’.

Around 35,000 thousand demonstrators descended on the capital of New Zealand this week, many of them adorned in traditional native dress amid a fluttering sea of red, white and black ‘Maori sovereignty’ flags. They were there to decry a bill looking to redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty.  The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced earlier this month by one of the National party-led government’s junior coalition partners, has virtually no chance of becoming law. But the bill’s sponsor, the libertarian ACT party leader David Seymour, insists it offers a ‘certainty and clarity’ long missing in New Zealand. He also wants the country’s constitutional arrangement to have an explicitly democratic basis in law.

‘Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world,’ Hugh Grant famously offered in the heartwarming opening scene of Love, Actually, ‘I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport.’ It’s just as well he doesn’t think about Dunedin airport in New Zealand. The airport’s chief executive, Daniel De Bono, seems not to be a fan of lingering emotion-packed arrivals and departures taking place at his modest transport hub.  While other airport chiefs look for new ways to limit their terminals’ designated smoking areas or swoop on blameless travellers with too many toiletries, De Bono is cracking down on lingering hugs at his terminal here in New Zealand.

New Zealand just lost one tenth of its naval defence fleet. The HMNZS Manawanui – the jewel in the nation’s small military crown – ran aground near Samoa this past weekend after hitting a reef and catching fire.  The £75 million specialist survey vessel sank on Sunday morning off Samoa’s southern coast of Upolu. An order to abandon ship was made the previous evening after it got into trouble. It was only the ship’s third deployment in the southwest Pacific, after the onetime commercial ship was purchased with much political hoopla from Norway in 2019 by the government of former prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

Heading to the UK is a longstanding rite of cultural passage for many Kiwis. People like my youngest son, who will be visiting Britain for the first time this autumn, are a big part of the tradition. But so is returning home again. New migration figures are putting paid to that last bit. Record numbers of New Zealanders appear to be picking up sticks and decamping from the Antipodes, and a lot of them aren’t bothering with return tickets.  It may be that New Zealand’s charms are wearing thin What the ultimate cost of this is for their nation remains something of an open question, but for now the numbers are ‘just phenomenal’, says Brad Olsen, an economist with the Wellington-based company Infometrics.