M J Wright

There’s a new writing scam doing the rounds just now. Authors are being stalked online by strangers purporting to represent a ‘book club’, or who are ‘affiliated’ with large-scale promotional groups, or who can offer book reviews on the major platforms. Sometimes the ‘book club’ is real, though of course the connection is not. I’ve fielded a range of unsolicited approaches lately via my website,…

It’s been a funny old year, this 2025. For a start there’s been the ease with which it’s possible to make sentences that include the words ‘dumpster fire’ and ‘the Earth’. Or sentences involving the words ‘collapse’, ‘end-game’ and similar terms. A beautiful picture of Earth from 1.6 million km sunwards. NASA, public domain. History tells me this isn’t the first time civilisation has faced such…

I discover that a while back some of my published work was appropriated by Meta and fed into their AI system. I was never approached for licensing, never paid – they just took my IP without permission and used it for their own commercial gain. To me that alone is reason enough to never use AI. But I won’t use it anyway. I like writing – the act of creating material is one of the main reasons I…

Mention the name Ernest Rutherford and you might think about splitting atoms, something the straight-talking physicist from Nelson first did during his spare time in 1917-18, blasting particles out of the nucleus of a nitrogen atom. He named these nuclear particles ‘protons’, after chemist Charles Prout. That was a pivotal moment in world history, but there were other reasons why Einstein called…

In the past ten days or so I’ve been involved with a rapid-fire series of interviews and bookshop talks featuring my new book, Ernest Rutherford and the birth of modern physics. It’s out now in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, and is due to be released in the United States on 11 November. One of the questions I fielded was predictable. It’s a while since I wrote a science book – the last was…

“If you know nothing more about Rutherford than his existence as the man on the hundred dollar note,and some nebulous idea about ‘splitting the atom’, strap in!” – Benjamin R. Dickson, New Zealand Science Review, Vol. 80, 2025. I’ve had a packed week. My book Ernest Rutherford and the birth of modern physics was released in New Zealand by Oratia Books, and the hard work put in by my New Zealand…

My latest book is being published next week in the United States, Britain, Australia by Scribe and in New Zealand by Oratia. Ernest Rutherford and the birth of modern physics explores the way our current view of physics emerged over a generation from the late nineteenth century – in turn opening doors for today’s technology. Indeed, some of that technology is directly derived from laboratory…

It’s September, and this is my first blog post for 2025. Why? Because reasons. My priority this year has been book writing. And I’m delighted to say that my latest book is being released worldwide in a few weeks by Scribe, and in New Zealand by Oratia Books. It’s a hardback in the UK and paperback elsewhere. That also means it’ll be available in all good bookshops from the UK to the US, Australia…

Here we are at the end of 2024 already. Blink, and the year’s gone, it seems. For me it’s been a very busy year – so busy, in fact, that I’ve had no time for blogging and very little for any sort of social media. This year I’ve published three books: (1) the 330,000 word history of the Royal New Zealand Armoured Corps I’ve been working on full time since 2019, (2) a corporate history, my second…

My long-standing history of Hawke’s Bay is out this month in new edition. It’s been in print and selling steadily since 2017. This new edition is in full colour, with full revision of everything from the 1950s onwards and a major update covering the cyclone that devastated Hawke’s Bay in February 2023 New colour pictures of Hawke’s Bay from the 1950s onwards include a selection that have never…

I have not blogged much in the past couple of years. Why? Many reasons, including workload. There’s also the inescapable social fact that written long-form blogs are well past their heyday. But more crucially the problem has been what Cory Doctorow calls the ‘enshittification’ of internet services. Let me go through all those, starting with workload. I write full time for a living. It’s hard,…

My next major book, Those Who Have the Courage, the history of the Royal New Zealand Armoured Corps and predecessor forces, is being released on 3 April by my publishers, Oratia Books. At 648 pages and 350,000-odd words backed by 3,320 endnotes it’s the largest book I have written. It is also my 64th book. I’ve been working on it full-time since late 2019 after a trust established by former…

I visited my home town of Napier a few weeks back and was stunned by the obvious poverty now evident across the place – this in the past twelve months, since a disastrous cyclone. This much poverty hasn’t generated that quickly, but it’s as if the cyclone made it visible. There are homeless people trying to live on the Marine Parade beach where I used to kick around as a kid. It didn’t feel safe…

This week’s obscure English word is gazump. It’s generically used to mean an action by one person that defeats the action of another, usually in business. It has a particular meaning, though, from real estate practises. Specifically, it describes the act of cheating a buyer after an agreed price has been reached, usually by accepting a higher offer from elsewhere. To me it highlights the fact…

This week’s obscure English word is gelastic. It’s got an origin in Greek and means something that causes laughter. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2024

The Treaty of Waitangi was signed 184 years ago and remains a key founding document of New Zealand, establishing a legal basis for the state and contractually defining race relations between a colonial power and the people who had been colonised. It is a vital document, an important document, and a necessary document for New Zealand. Further, the meanings have evolved over time, and necessarily…

There is no doubt that 2024 will be a watershed year for world democracy. The United States appears to be well on track to voting an end to the great democratic experiment begun 250 years ago by Messrs Jefferson & co. There’s been a ‘lurch to the right’ elsewhere: the Netherlands, for instance, are organising a coalition government dominated by an ultra-nationalist who’s been banned from entering…