In which the failure to afford a cucumber makes an expat dad kick the habit. What is a new country but a life sentence for your kids? Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe

Antonia Murphy has one of the wildest US/NZ stories I’ve heard yet. The San Francisco native founded and ran The Bach, a self-consciously ethical brothel in the small North Island city of Whangārei. (This is 100 percent legal in New Zealand!) Her memoir of those years, Madam, is an admirably frank depiction of sex work as work—joyful and frustrating, honorable and complicated—and it’s now an international television show starring Rachel Griffiths. Antonia and I had a great conversation about all of it, including the office dynamics of sex work, US vs NZ entrepreneurship, and her lingering “dark feelings” about her time in the industry.And welcome to the american.nz podcast! I’ve been writing these letters for a year or so, and now I’m hungry to talk to all kinds of folks. More episodes to come (and more letters, too.) Holler anytime at [email protected] notes:01:40 | Why do Kiwis have more sex? Or do they?03:06 | Founded by Puritans, but fascinated by “boobies and bottoms.”07:30 | Decriminalized, but still stigmatized.10:25 | “Our legal name was Tui Auto.”11:30 | The abusive American client—and why he’s not American in the book16:40 | “The vast majority are just normal guys.”19:30 | Expat privilege, Kiwi values, and the American Dream20:45 | Americans as “temporarily strapped billionaires”24:50 | Professional boundaries in Brothel HR29:30 | “Is what you did in Whangārei a net benefit to the people in the community?”32:30 | Dark feelings. Practical Thoughts.37:30 | Staying in New Zealand, isolation and all.The study we discussed is here: Average Number of Sexual Partners by Country 2025. The theme music is “Winds in the Wellington Trees” by Anton Hughes. I shot the intro outside Greytown, with no wind at all. Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe

Thanks to everyone who joined my live chat this morning with Gregory Garretson of Living Elsewhere! We had a great turnout. This was the first livestream for us both—wow, what cool energy out there!Gregory and I had a blast haggling through some big questions: the flexibility of national identity, the search for home, and the complicated Americanness of leaving America. With shoutouts to fellow seekers Elizabeth, Lucy Pepper, Kirsten Powers, Walt Whitman, Paul Theroux quoting Henry James, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. The time stamps:* 03:45 | What does it mean to be an American?* 13:30 | On a scale of 0-100, how Portuguese does Gregory feel? * 15:00 | “I came out of the airport and I inhaled and said, ‘Oh yeah, this is Sweden.’”* 25:00 | Can we decide whether we’re American?* 32:00 | Would you retire in Mexico?* 35:50 | “The most American thing in the world is to say that the most American thing in the world is to leave America.”* 36:00 | Will we die as Americans?* 47:30 | “Maybe you don’t need to decide, with finality, what you are.”* 48:00 | The rightward shifts in NZ and Portuguese politics.* 55:00 | Cosmopolitanism, food, and your life’s total of good margaritas.Hope you enjoy! Too much fun, y’all. Next time we’ll get that new American Pope. // Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe

A letter from Anzac Day. How do Americans mourn this country's honored dead? With biplanes, suppressed tears, Benedict Anderson, and a pint down at the Workies. Read the letter at american.nz. Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe

Hey y’all! Thought I’d read last week’s letter aloud and fire it off as a podcast, just for kicks. I plan to do more in this space in the days ahead—call this a soft launch as I figure out all the tricks. Click the button above to listen, or find it on Spotify. Hope you enjoy! I welcome any feedback.Big thanks to the NZ Department of Conservation for the birdsong intro. They’ve got a great library you can download for free. Spoiler alert: the podcast bird is not a kiwi, but it’s the coolest NZ bird I can actually hear from my desk. Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe

When it’s sunny in New Zealand, it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. Today, in fact, is one of those days: every window open, the wild summer light, fat birds stealing ripe plums in the yard. When it rains, though—and reader, it rains a lot—my sense of geographical destiny blows clean away.There’s rain on my windowsill, I sing on those wet July days. There’s a storm blowing past my door, I cry as I set up the clothes tree under the heat pump, while my heart wanders away over the cold sea. I write it down in this letter to America.The Warratahs’ great NZ-to-US lament, written by frontman and Kiwi music icon Barry Saunders, has been my go-to homesick jam for years now. For a certain lonesome that’s beyond homesick, too, on the grey afternoons when you realize the rain is yours now. Y’are where y’are for a reason, even if you can’t always pin it down.Saunders has effortlessly packed in all these feels in a few short lines: the eternally weird inversion of the seasons, the resigned nod to NZ’s seat at the edge of the party, the loved ones whose entire hemisphere you might never cross again. The song tells no story, and offers no resolution. There’s only the missing and the rain and the ticking clock. It’s pure middle-aged antipodal blues, built of an E minor chord, a crying fiddle, and Saunders’ brakeman wail and rumbling worry: Meanwhile back in winter / Daddy’s burning time…Meanwhile, back in summer, Saunders lives here in Greytown. He’s down the block from my daughter’s old kindy, living for a couple decades now in what’s quietly the coolest settler cottage in town. On a hot, still afternoon I rode my bike over to chat.american.nz is a letter to America AND a letter to Aotearoa. Read it weekly for free.“It was written from the couch in Mount Victoria where I was living, in the middle of winter,” Barry explained. We sat on couches now ourselves, with guitars lying about. “My son was living in New York City. We used to talk all the time. It's just a very simple idea, a simple thought. He had this life in New York, and I was sitting on the couch in Mount Victoria, with rain coming past the window, and wasting time.”A dagger, this was! I’d had the song pegged as your standard romantic affair, with the ‘daddy’ just kool-kat slang. But all along I’d been singing the words of a lonely father. For this prodigal son it felt a little too on the nose.I pressed on to the second verse: Haven’t heard from the old girl in a while / Starting to believe that I never will. Barry laughed. “There’s all sorts of other things in there,” he said, taking the gentleman’s route. “Probably best to leave that out.”Whoever he’s missing, Saunders is working within a long tradition of country lonesome. Feeling sad and watching the skies? That’s Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which is itself nearly Tang Dynasty poetry. Wishing you were at the cool kids’ table? That’s Tom T. Hall’s “Spokane Motel Blues.” Feeling far away? Saunders is working with a scale that makes Dwight Yoakum’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” a mere Sunday drive.Now listen closer. Li Bai and Hank Williams are outside under the moon. Tom T. Hall is stuck in a motel. Dwight shot that music video on top of a freight train. What makes “Letter to America” a great song all its own—what makes it a great New Zealand country song—is that Saunders is home and dry. That’s his window. That’s his door. The rain is outside. Inside, he’ll write the letter and moan the blues, but he ain’t leaving to fix ‘em. New Zealand’s got a distance you just can’t fix. On The Warratahs’ recording (see below), Nik Brown’s fiddle begins the track brave as a train whistle, but by the last chorus has broken down into a single tear. We’re both too stubborn and stupid to change anymore / Still that’s not telling you anything / That’s OK. The shrug is everything. Being home is its own resolution. Enough moaning, let’s get on with it. If this were a Kiwi novel, he’d finish the song and go boil the jug.Saunders’ son would be about my own age. He lives in Germany now, about two thousand miles farther from NZ than he was in New York. Does he know the song’s about him? “Yeah, he does,” Saunders said. His eyes crinkle up in pride. “He doesn’t take much notice of what I do. I like it that way, too.”Then he kindly played me “Letter to America” while sitting right there on his Greytown couch. We bid goodbye and I walked my bike up the drive, the cicadas singing and the handsome cottage vanishing once more into its high-summer garden.That night at home I played back the video to learn the chords. My six-year-old daughter, who’s heard the song on a loop this week, heard my fumbling and looked up from her dolls. My Kiwi daughter, whose American passport we’ve just applied to renew.That’s one by the singer you met! she said. Did you tell him I love the song?I’m telling him now, sweetie. // Get full access to american.nz at www.american.nz/subscribe