Never shy of dealing with controversy, Luit Bieringa has often tackled complex and flawed New Zealand cultural figures in his films. In his new film, Signed, Theo Schoon, Bieringa turns his attention to another problematic trailblazer.

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 panui for Read NZ at the National Library on Wednesday 10 November.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Fifty years ago Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Ellsberg is a firm supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has also been charged for violating the Espionage Act.

Listener feedback for 30 October 2021.

Award-winning journalist Steve Braunias has spent many years sifting through op shops to amass a collection of New Zealand pressed records that provide a fascinating window into our culture of the time.

When filmmaker Jan Oliver Lucks (aka Ollie) and his girlfriend got engaged, they decided to do away with the tradition of monogamy and take the plunge into an open relationship. But things didn't quite go to plan.