Afternoons

While the showdown between the All Blacks and the Springboks has led to lots of great sporting moments .. it's also created a whole lot of chat about fly overs. Last weekend two jets flew over Cape Town's Stadium ahead of the match, and many thought they were way too low. Now South Africa's aviation regulator is analyzing black box data from the planes .. and the planned flyover for this weekend's game has been binned. Vaughn Davis is a former Royal New Zealand Air Force pilot as well as an experienced commercial and display pilot, is with Jesse to discuss.

We're starting today's show looking at a new apartment development in the Auckland suburb of Morningside. Nothing new about apartments in Auckland you might think .. but this will have 332 apartments and 78 carparks available for residents. So is this a step towards a car free city with strong, reliable public transport .. or a show of hubris by developers Simplicity Living? To find out, Simplicity Living managing director Shane Brealey joins Jesse.

Afternoons Group Chat is our chance to talk about the topics that might not be in the news but could be all over your chats and feeds. Joining Jesse in Auckland studio are Culture 101's Perlina Lau, Kate Rodger and Afternoons' senior producer Olivia Wilson.

Afternoons critic Bill Hastings joins Jesse to discuss what he's been reading - Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-and the American Revolution-Transformed Britain by Danielle Allen, The Language-Lover's Lexipedia by Joshua Blackburn.

Wednesday means a chance to talk food here on Afternoons .. we call it Easy Eats .. and each week Kelly Gibney joins me to share a recipe. This week it's Mexican-inspired beef and black bean burgers. Click HERE for the recipe.

Time for our weekly travel feature, Heading Off, where we hear all about your travel tales. If you have a story that's worth telling, we'd love to hear from you - 2101 on text or [email protected] via email. Today we're joined by Peter Coldicott who sailed a small yacht across the notorious Drake Passage, which is nearly 1000 kilometre of open sea reknown for its rough conditions, to make it to Antartica.

The biggest kakapo breeding season on record has come to an end which means it's time to find out how many chicks made it to the milestone of 150 days old - and whether the kakapo population has managed to increase to more than 300. Alison Ballance host of the podcast the Kakapo Files shares the latest.

Penrhyn - a remote atoll in the Cook Islands - is set to get a brand new deep sea port, thanks to a collaboration between us and the USA.

The US State Department will put 84 million NZ Dollars into the development, another 17.5 million NZ dollars will come from New Zealand.

The commitment was announced yesterday by Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown, Winston Peters and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau

It comes as the Pacific is seeing China and the USA increasingly compete for influence in the region. 

RNZ pacific journalist Kaya Selby chats to Jesse. 

ity Associate Professor Anna Powles specialises in geopolitical dynamics in the Pacific. She joins Jesse.

A lot of the advice about sleep focuses on our "body clock", and making sure you get up at the same time every morning. But if you don't have kids' sport to get to, there is nothing better than a cheeky weekend lie in. And in good news, at a recent conference for the European Society of Cardiology, new research was presented that suggests a solid sleep-in could actually be beneficial. To offer her perspective Jesse is joined by Associate Professor Dr Karyn O'Keeffe from Massey University's Sleep/Wake Research Centre, who has over 25 years of experience in sleep research.

Earlier this week, Steve Braunais, Newsroom's literary editor, got in touch to tell me that a poem by Whanganui author Airini Beautrais' is going off on the Newsroom website. So of course, we wanted to know more. The five thousand word poem is called Cancer Moon:Poet Life and is from Airini's latest poetry collection Salt Quilt. Airini joins Jesse now to share some of the poem and talk about why it's resonating.