Something is killing the birds in a sleepy Auckland suburb. The locals are on a witch hunt. Alexandria Edwards was playing Pokemon Go in her car when she saw the sparrows. Dozens of them were strewn in various states of stupor on the grass nearby. Some had passed out. Others were struggling and failing to fly. Magpies were swooping at the ones who couldn’t get away. She got out to shoo the bigger birds. Help arrived promptly. A call had gone out on the local Facebook community page. Come down, it said. The birds have been poisoned again.

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Today's guest essay is from Kath: It’s a tough time for librarians at the moment. Here in Aotearoa we’ve just recently seen an Auckland library hosting a science performance (about the weather of all things) by a drag king stormed by black shirted thugs instructed by their leader to “shut it down”. The United States is currently facing the highest rate of attempted book bans it has ever faced, even to the attempt to criminalise librarians who loan these books. Libraries around the world are fielding an increasing number of threats, book challenges and ugly behaviour. So it’s understandable librarians are feeling it right now. For context, I have had an almost 30 year career in public libraries in Australia and New Zealand, and a lifetime lurking in them like the massive library nerd that I am. Libraries have always been a sanctuary for me. From when I was a little girl growing up in a violent household, as a teen who was mercilessly bullied at high school, and a young adult when I was feeling lost. It was inevitable that I would end up working in libraries and to become a career librarian. In the last five years, librarians have been facing challenges that were simply not an issue for the first 15-20 years of my career. Librarians have always faced challenges, and I have endless stories I could dine out on.

Today on Webworm I wanted you to share a conversation between two New Zealanders raised by parents who embraced Focus on the Family. Because Focus on the Family travelled far beyond America. It went global — and during the 80s and 90s in particular, millions of kids were raised in the ways of Dr James Dobson. Michael Frost and Shane Meyer-Holt are my friends, and run a podcast called In The Shift, in which they discuss coming to terms with exiting a very certain breed of Christianity. They are still Christians, just not the breed you find at the churches I tend to write about. Hearing them discuss Focus on the Family was fascinating to me, and I hope it’s fascinating to you, too. Something Michael said towards the end really hit me like a tonne of bricks. He talked about what it meant to grow a generation of compliant kids. At what that means when a country like America comes under the leadership of Donald Trump — a man who professes to be a Christian.

An essay from Hayden Donnell arguing that according to the Bible, Donald Trump is definitely the antichrist. Hayden urges us to engage in some heavy duty Hail Marys, because if recent events have taught us anything, it’s that being an irredeemable moron with a repellant personality and the countenance of a salamander wearing human skin is, if anything, an asset when it comes to inflicting misery on a global scale.

See you in the comments at https://www.webworm.co

I was still working for TV3 news and living in New Zealand, but had found myself in LA, working on the final stages of Tickled. I knew Cornell had an upcoming solo show back in New Zealand, so I’d reached out to the music label to see if could get an interview. He said yes. And on a Sunday morning in 2015, on a day off, Chris Cornell drove across town to my hotel and sat down for a 30 minute interview. There was no junket hotel, no label people — just a musician driving out of their way to meet some idiot from a TV station in tiny New Zealand. He had no need to — his upcoming show had already sold out. I’m not quite sure why he did it. But I’m glad he did. I played a few minutes of that clip in Seattle, but I wanted to make the whole thing available for Webworm readers today. I’d found it last year — the unaired long edit — on a digibeta tape I’d saved in a box in New Zealand.

Webworm can report that a man has been charged with “sexual assault by compelling sexual touching” and “public nuisance” in Melbourne, Australia. The charges were laid on Monday. Webworm has been in touch with the latest victim, who outlined an M.O. that sounded all too familiar: A man fell down in front of him, appeared to be having spasms, then asked to be sat on and restrained him. The man has been released on bail and will appear in Court on April 24.

A short film from documentary maker Giorgio Angelini. It’s about Luigi Mangione — but it’s also, really, about everything in America right now.

"I finished making this video essay a couple of days before the fires took over wide swaths of Los Angeles, where I live. And while it might not seem directly connected—the assassination of a healthcare CEO and wildfires ravaging LA — after walking through the wreckage of the Altadena fire to survey the damage of my friend’s home, I couldn’t help but feel all of it was endemic. American carnage.

We have lived through forty-plus years of a culture built on abject greed. We’ve constructed a national ego that has rewarded this individual greed, all at the expense of the collective. We’ve built a perverted moral armature that not only excuses this greed, but convinces us that it is somehow innate or unavoidable. Or that it is good, even.

It is not. It is a choice. And it is a choice we can no longer make. Like so many in our city, I’ve been overwhelmed with emotions. Not only witnessing the unimaginable destruction, but also a feckless regime of entrenched private interests masquerading as public service.

I’ve also seen the best of humanity. Dedicated first responders working tirelessly to prevent further tragedy under unimaginable conditions. I’ve seen communities come together to offer support. And then I’ve seen opportunists, offering emergency housing at ludicrous prices.

It’s going to take a long time to rebuild from here. But also, in this effort there is an opportunity, a choice we must make about what we actually want to build for the future.

More totems to individualism?

More American carnage?

Or do we build community? Real community. Built on a radically reimagined moral grounding, where we recognize our responsibilities to one another. And take up that responsibility with enthusiasm, pride, and generosity."

My friend loaded about a year’s worth of our text history into Google’s AI (privacy, what privacy?) — and instructed the AI to create a podcast about me based on those texts. That’s what today’s podcast is — just a couple of AI people talking to each other about me, based on nothing but a text thread between me and my friend. It’s truly awful and I told Aaron as much. On top of this Joshua Drummond shares his latest big of art around New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.