Bill Morris
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Articles by Bill Morris
Six Warning Signs Your Independent Caribbean Hotel Has Outgrown Its PMS
By Bill Morris A property-management system rarely fails overnight. More often, a hotel gradually outgrows its technology. A spreadsheet gets introduced because the system cannot easily handle a task. Employees develop workarounds. Lines form at the front desk when a flight arrives. Guest requests get passed manually from one department to another. Managers spend time compiling information rather than acting on it. None of these issues alone means it is time for a new hotel PMS.
Ghost town: Nearly 500 new homes in Christchurch CBD but only 50 new residents
Are we building a liveable central city? “That’s not what a thriving inner city looks like.” Christchurch City councillor Nathaniel Hertz Jardine is standing in the residential heart of a rebuilt Christchurch. During the earthquake recovery phase, this, it was promised, would be a place for people – the “most liveable city in New Zealand”. The problem is that most of the time it appears empty. A wide swathe of the centre of Christchurch is now made up of rank upon rank of newly built apartments.
Wilding Pines: Tackling our worst weed Original
By Bill Morris, Frank Film Contorta pine trees were meant to be our friend. Introduced from North America and planted with abandon across Aotearoa for erosion control, timber and shelterbelts, contorta have rapidly adapted to our environment and spread at an alarming rate into farmland and conservation land. They now infest nearly a million hectares of the South Island. As Frank Film discovered, they've become our worst weed. Wilding pines have been described as our generation's rabbit plague.
Talking about Pittsburgh with Michael Chabon
For a long time, I thought of myself as the kind of Michael Chabon completist whose personal and familial story could be told through my “Chabon shelf.” A cousin gifted me Chabon’s nonfiction collection Maps and Legends as a college graduation gift.
Newport Beach International Boat Show
The 2025 Newport Beach International Boat Show will be held May 1 through 4, 2025, in Lido Marina Village, with an invitation-only pre-show May 1, 2025, 2 to 7 p.m., followed by three days of exhibits open to the public, Friday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. More than 200 vessels will be on display, with over 75 of them on the water and many open to the public.
Sam Moore, Half of Dynamic Soul Duo Sam & Dave, Is Dead at 89
Sam & Dave toured in the United States, Europe and Turkey, but their drug abuse had begun to take its toll. Their downward spiral was briefly slowed when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, as the Blues Brothers, recorded a hit version of “Soul Man” in late 1970s, bringing new attention to the original. Sam Moore and Dave Prater performed together for the last time on New Year’s Eve 1981 in San Francisco. After walking offstage, they never spoke to each other again.
Sam Moore, Half of a Dynamic Soul Duo, Is Dead at 89 Original
Sam Moore, the tenor half of the scorching soul duo Sam & Dave - known for indelible hits like "Soul Man," "Hold On, I'm Comin'" and "I Thank You" - died on Friday. He was 89. His death, after surgery at a hospital in Coral Gables, Fla., was confirmed by his wife and longtime manager, Joyce Moore. The exact cause was unclear, she said. At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers.
Six Thousand Years of Controlled Burning, Up in Smoke?
For at least 11,000 years, and likely for much longer, Indigenous Australians deliberately burned forest understories, lowering the risk of catastrophic fire. The arrival of Europeans in the late 18th century brought an end to that age-old practice, and as a result, forests are now ripe for “mega-fires,” new research claims.
Robert Towne, Oscar-winning screenwriter of ‘Chinatown,’ dies
Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89. His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed the death. She did not cite a cause. Towne’s Academy Award was part of a phenomenal run.
Robert Towne, screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and more, dies at 89
By Bill Morris Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89. His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause. Towne’s Oscar was part of a phenomenal run.
Robert Towne, Screenwriter of 'Chinatown' and More, Dies at 89 Original
Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89. His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause. Mr. Towne's Oscar was part of a phenomenal run.
Newport Beach International Boat Show
The 2024 Newport Beach International Boat Show kicks off April 18, with an invitation-only pre-show followed by three days of exhibits open to the public, Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. If you are looking to buy the right boat for inland recreation or coastal cruising, this is your chance to get an up-close look at the latest design concepts in vessels competing to offer you the best combination of speed, safety, fun and comfort on the water.
Lions history: Briggs Stadium, the 49ers, Browns and the '57 championship game
The following chapter, titled "The Last Hurrah," is excerpted from “Miracle in the Motor City,” by Bill Morris. A history of the Detroit Lions since their last championship in 1957, the deeply researched book focuses on the Ford family’s six-decade stewardship of the team, culminating with this season’s playoff run. It will be published later this year by Pegasus Books in New York.
Did we put takahē in the wrong place?
Living World Did we put takahē in the wrong place? Cutting-edge technology has just answered a few long-standing questions about takahē: How did they get here? What happened to them after they arrived? And it raises a new question: Where should they live now? Takahē famously came back from the dead.
The seafloor stores carbon, but trawling releases it
Science & Environment The seafloor stores carbon, but trawling releases it A new study reveals that New Zealand’s huge ocean territory contains two billion tons of carbon, locked in the seafloor. If we want to fight climate change, it might be a good idea to keep it there. More than two billion tons of carbon is buried in the seabed around New Zealand, but human disturbance has the potential to release some of it back to the atmosphere, a new report has found.
A Not-So-Hoppy Future for Beer Drinkers?
Europe is home to prime areas for growing aromatic hops, a flower used in brewing beer. But, as conditions get hotter and drier, hop yields have declined in the continent’s hop-growing heartland, according to a study recently published in Nature Communications. Not only that, but soaring temperatures are also reducing hops’ alpha acid content, the source of beer’s bitter flavor.
Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History
The decorated French writer Éric Vuillard is attempting something audacious: to rewrite the way history gets written. This has won him prizes and plaudits and an international readership. But not everyone is thrilled. Vuillard’s latest book, An Honorable Exit, is what he calls a récit, a slippery French word that can mean many things, including a story, a narrative, or an account in which, crucially, the reader is always aware of the presence of the narrator.
The straight and narrow
Geography The straight and narrow Ploughing—the epitome of the colonial ‘civilising’ of land—is as fundamental to this country’s history as war and rugby. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we make a sport out of it. On competition day, Timaru truck driver and 12-time national ploughing champion Bob Mehrtens wakes early. He pulls his boots on and, with dawn troubling the eastern sky, he’s out among a sleeping herd of tractors, ploughs and utes, corralled behind a line of tape.
A place to stand
Society A place to stand Nō hea koe? Where are you from? In te ao Māori, it’s the first and most important question to ask—because your place, and the place of your people, shapes who you are. A 16-year-old with no great attachment to her hometown of Ngāruawāhia, but who feels at home screaming through the bends at Huntly Speedway on a Saturday night. A budding blacksmith raised on a remote island reserve showing teenagers around land their hapū has been excluded from for 120 years.
How New Zealand’s invasive pigs turned into a cash cow
Approximately 300 miles south of New Zealand, the Auckland Islands lie in a belt of winds known as the Roaring Forties. In the late 19th century, sailing ships departing Australasia would catch a ride back to Europe by plunging deep into the Southern Ocean to ride the westerlies home. But these seas were poorly charted, and weather conditions frequently horrendous. Sometimes, navigators miscalculated the islands’ position and, too late, found their vessels thrown upon the islands’ rocky ramparts.
The Novels Behind This Year's Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Noms
The Novels Behind This Year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Noms At Sunday’s Oscars show, five scripts will be up for Best Adapted Screenplay. Two of them are derivative dogs that have no business being anywhere near the Dolby Theater—Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, both considered “adapted” due to their being sequels—while the others, all of them with literary source material, make for an intriguing three-way race. So let’s focus on those three, shall we?
The Novels Behind This Year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Noms
At Sunday’s Oscars show, five scripts will be up for Best Adapted Screenplay. Two of them are derivative dogs that have no business being anywhere near the Dolby Theater—Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, both considered “adapted” due to their being sequels—while the others, all of them with literary source material, make for an intriguing three-way race. So let’s focus on those three, shall we?
Overseeing Possums Honestly
In case some of you are interested about possums, a possum is a quadrupedal Diprotodont marsupial with fur and long tails. This little rodent is an evening time creature, and that suggests they rest in the day and are dynamic around night time. Possums are generally found in tree hollows in the yard of homes anyway and can similarly propel inside the house. By and by, this is when possums can be unsafe for yourself as well as your home. Since they can do basic damage to the property.
How To Obstruct Possum Section Focuses?
Possums are much of the time considered bothers since they can harm property and spread infection. They are additionally known to assault trash bins and take pet food. How To Obstruct Possum Section Focuses? There are a couple of things you can do to discourage possums from entering your property. One method for preventing possums is to hinder their entrance focuses. This should be possible via fixing off any breaks or openings in your home’s establishment, rooftop, or walls.
A Manual For Introducing A Metal/colorbond Rooftop
Metal material is famous among Australians for its solidness and protection from regular components. In a fire-inclined environment, metal material stands apart from over the rest for its non-flammable nature and capacity to endure outrageous circumstances with negligible harm. Likewise, you can anticipate that your metal rooftop should endure north of 50 years without weighty support. Persuaded?
Why There Is A Need To Focus On Bird Proofing
There is an overall setting where you can truly see the value in the trip of a bird. In their wild and regular environment, there isn’t anything more heavenly than watching a bird coast fluidly tossed the air or looking at a gathering of birds. They approach their everyday practice. Yet, in and around the working environment, birds can become exasperating and undesirable visitors. As they roost and home on your structure or property.
Even at the Bottom of the World, the Ocean Is Belching Plastic
With its small population and remote location, New Zealand might hope to be sheltered from the world’s plastic pollution. But new research shows that’s far from the case. In a recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers report a mist of microplastics is constantly drifting across the country’s largest city.
Literary Deaths of 2022
Literary Deaths of 2022 In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them. With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fiction as well as poetry and comic books.
The Industrial Visions of Precisionist Artists
In the early years of the twentieth century, an eight-year-old girl named Elsie Driggs was traveling by train with her parents from Sharon, Pennsylvania, to New York. She had dozed off by the time the train reached Pittsburgh, but as the writer John Loughery would recount years later in Woman’s Art Journal, her sleep was interrupted: “She was awakened by her father to witness the drama of the black night-sky over Pittsburgh ablaze with soaring flames from the steel plants.
Valley of the whales
Science & Environment Valley of the whales The North Otago limestone country holds one of the world’s most important fossil cetacean records, a coherent story of how whales and dolphins evolved in the Southern Ocean. It’s a story that one small rural community has embraced as its own. Burns Pollock and I stand in the Valley of the Whales, a deep gulch cut by the Awamoko Stream through the North Otago limestone.
Is It So Wrong to Accessorize with Books?
While visiting a friend of a friend in Key West many winters ago, I was smitten by the bookshelves in his living room. The built-in shelves wrapped around a window and ran to the ceiling, obviously the work of an expert craftsman. But from across the room it was the books themselves that dazzled my eye—their spines, meticulously arranged by size and color, made the wall look like a gigantic pointillist painting.
Those Who Left Us: Literary Obits of 2021
This highly selective list of literary lights that were extinguished during the past year ranges from brand names to barely-knowns. Feel free to add your own names to the list in the comments section below. Joan Didion, anyone? Scott Donaldson While working as a newspaper reporter in Virginia in 1988, I got sent to the College of William & Mary to interview Scott Donaldson, a professor who had just published a biography of John Cheever.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned from 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'
If America's most beloved blockhead taught us anything, it's the power of perseverance. Who but Charlie Brown would try (and fail) to kick a football a few hundred times and still dust himself off to try again? If Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang taught fans additional lessons, many of them came by way of the iconic 1965 holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas.
A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling
The first morning of the weekend that it would be 116 degrees in Portland, Oregon I was up early watering the dirt around my plants to see if it would help them survive and listening to Volume 1 of Carbon Ideologies, William Vollmann 's very long effort to make people care about catastrophic climate change.
A Year in Reading: Bill Morris
From the first weeks of this year to the last, I was distracted from news of the plague by news of Donald Trump's nearly successful attempt to annihilate American democracy. Once I went down that rabbit hole, there was no climbing out. I couldn't stop reading about Trump's inflammatory speech on Jan. 6, which led to the storming of the Capitol, the rioting, the killings, the manhunts, the arrests, the trials.
The occupation
Living World The occupation Wallabies may have evolved in Australia, but they’re so well suited to life in New Zealand that they have reached plague numbers for the second time in a century, eating their way through the landscapes of Canterbury and the Bay of Plenty and escaping from the containment zones created to hold them back.
Goodbye, Rush Limbaugh, and Good Riddance
Rise of the Slathering Pit Bull Back in the 1990s, while working as a newspaper columnist in North Carolina, I spent countless hours driving back roads on my way to interview the criminal, the colorful, the obscure and the merely famous. My chariot on those trips through the Piedmont tobacco fields and pine thickets was the paper’s staff car, a bare bones Chevy with no air conditioning and an AM radio that got spotty reception.
The tree hunters
Geography The tree hunters Out there in forest reserves, down remote back roads and tucked away in corners of small towns hide giant tōtara, mataī and rimu. A tiny group of obsessive people, guided by old records and half-remembered stories, regularly hit the road in search of these monsters. Their aim: to bag a champion tree, one whose size, age and majesty will put it at the top of New Zealand’s notable tree register.
Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obits From 2020
Strange. In a year when more than 330,000 Americans died from Covid-19, just one person on this highly selective list of literary obituaries is known to have died after contracting the novel coronavirus. Maybe that’s not so strange. This was, after all, the year when everything stopped making sense. Mary Higgins Clark must have done something right.
On Dreams and Literature
"We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep." - William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611) "A candy-colored clown they call the sandman/tiptoes to my room every night/just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper/'Go to sleep, everything is alright.'" - Roy Orbison, "In Dreams" (1963) Amongst the green-dappled Malvern Hills, where sunlight spools onto spring leaves like puddles of water in autumn, a peasant named Will is imagined to have fallen asleep on a...
A Year in Reading: Bill Morris
This was the year I finally, belatedly, decided to figure out why people make such a fuss about Joy Williams. Since 2015, her career-spanning collection, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, has been staring down from my bookshelf, daring me to find out if Williams’s fiercely dedicated fans know what they’re talking about. They do.
On the Oldest Road: U.S. 1, Robert Kramer, the Buick, and Me
[The only real spoilers for the new series of Sherlock, which concluded last weekend in the United Kingdom, are for the first episode, “The Empty Hearse,” and will be marked as such.] 1. In 1893, after two novels, twenty-four short stories, and wild public acclaim, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes.
Correcting History: On C Pam Zhang's 'How Much of These Hills Is Gold'
1. As a life-long lover of long shots, I was delighted by the news that C Pam Zhang’s stunning debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, made the long list for this year’s Booker Prize. The field was larded with the predictable odds-on favorites, including two-time winner Hilary Mantel (who was up for the third installment in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light), plus the much-decorated thoroughbreds Anne Tyler (Redhead by the Side of the Road) and Colum McCann (Apeirogon).
Living Clichéd Lives: On Hollywood Biopics
How much of a mirror are we willing to let Spring Breakers be? In indulging in a nauseating, exhilarating, and absolutely familiar fantasy of American fun, Harmony Korine might be offering the unflinching depiction of rape culture that our national conversation has been needing.
Where the seabirds go
Living World Where the seabirds go During winter, dozens of seabird species take flight from New Zealand on epic migrations across the planet—and recent advances in tracking technology mean we can now follow them. What we’re learning has upended scientists’ ideas about the lengths animals will go to in order to raise a family. Written by Bill Morris Photographed by Richard Robinson Flesh-footed shearwaters dive for bait in clear waters off Northland.
Kent Russell’s Long March
When Kent Russell published his debut collection of essays back in 2015, I readily enlisted in his growing army of fans. My review of Russell’s book, the unfortunately titled I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, praised his imagery and sentence-making and his empathy with fringe characters, while lamenting his tedious dissection of his relationship with his impossible father. Readers reacted to that review with some foam-at-the-mouth vitriol.
One Way to Cheer Up: Cheer Harder
Research suggests that being a sports fan, even a zealous one, can enhance mental health. March 8, 2013 You probably think rabid sports fans are a bunch of lonely, disoriented souls who try to fill the holes in their lives by attaching themselves to a team. And you’re probably wrong.
Please! Hold Off on That Novel Coronavirus Novel!
Got some bad news for you, on the off chance your bad news supply chain is breaking down. American publishers have gone on a spending spree in hopes of snagging breakout books spawned by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Writing on the Museum Wall: When Artists Channel Writers
“Trouble” (1989) by Christopher Wool, courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum. 1. We tend to think of words as the exclusive raw material of writers. But this has been a season of sparkling reminders that artists from many camps — cubism, conceptualism, minimalism, realism and pop — have used words to fashion some of the most inspired art of the past century. The most loudly trumpeted of these reminders is the Christopher Wool retrospective now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
A Nightingale in the Lion's Den
I first met Kaya Genç at his home in Istanbul. It was 2017, and I lived a short walk away, up and down a few steep, sloping streets in the city's historic core of Beyoglu. The district is a collision course of ideologies, where family grocers and underground factories compete with vegan restaurants and vintage clothiers.
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