Archive

The Castle Street Baby

Posted 11:33pm Sunday 13th April 2025 by Tilly Rumball-Smith

CW: Violence  Critic Te Ārohi gave a (fake) baby to a five man Castle Street flat to take care of from Thursday to Sunday. There were only three rules:  Don’t lose the baby. You must bring the baby with you everywhere.  You must keep a diary of your adventures Read more...

The Great Cone Game

Posted 10:40pm Sunday 13th April 2025 by Connor Moffat

You may have heard of the Chicken Chase, a daring drinking game involving a horde of bros and baes drinking their way along the rainbow (pubs) to find the pot of gold (a mate dressed as a chicken in an undisclosed pub, drinking their way through a collective tab). Critic Te Ārohi played our own Read more...

Tell Us How You Really Feel: 100 Years of Hate Mail

Posted 10:25pm Sunday 6th April 2025 by Critic

Critic’s had haters in our inbox right from day dot. Within the first few issues in 1925 there were letters predicting Critic’s downfall. Now in our 100th year, let’s have a toast for the douchebags, assholes, scumbags and jerk-offs who’ve penned objectively hilarious and Read more...

Te Ārohi: A “Critic” in Name Only

Posted 10:05pm Sunday 6th April 2025 by Nā Heeni Koero Te Rerenoa (Sky)

This piece was pitched as ‘100 years of Critic’s Māori coverage’. That would’ve been disingenuous. It’s not a centenary for all of us, because for most of that time, we weren’t here.  One hundred years of Critic, and only twenty-nine of Te Ārohi. Read more...

40 Ways Critic is the Worst Student Magazine in the World

Posted 9:40pm Sunday 6th April 2025 by Critic

40 Ways was Critic’s weekly listicle, popular in the early 2000s and maybe even the 1990s – the halcyon days when men were men, women were women, men were also women, women were also gender constructs, and introductory blurbs were worth reading. Critic is the school lunch programme Read more...

Opinion: Chlöe Swarbrick is still a politician

Posted 10:40pm Sunday 23rd March 2025 by Jordan Irvine

As a child, my parents were Labour voters and to me that seemed like the moral choice. John Key’s National government at the time did not have their best interests at heart as they prioritised wealth over wellbeing. New Zealand First, headed at the time by an old Winston Peters, appealed more Read more...

Which Academically Overwhelmed Rat Are You?

Posted 9:35pm Sunday 23rd March 2025 by Molly Smith-Soppet

1. You've rolled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen. What are you having for the most important meal of the day? Porridge. It’s filling, homely, and makes you feel like one of the grandparents from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory It's pretty much lunch time, so may as Read more...

Tall Etiquette: Reaching new heights in allyship at concerts

Posted 9:30pm Sunday 23rd March 2025 by Jonathan McCabe

If you’ve attended Electric Ave, Six60 or one of the first few Pint Nights, you would have noticed some pretty appalling crowd etiquette. You don’t need to part a friend group like the Red Sea to get to the front. In a mosh situation, tall people must act very carefully. Sometimes you Read more...

Lecture Theatre Bingo

Posted 9:25pm Sunday 23rd March 2025 by Zoe Eckhoff

Lectures can be fucking boring. This could be because you’re doing a degree you hate, your lecturer has the worst voice in the world or says “um” too much. Or it could just be a ceebs that day. Critic Te Ārohi has now invented a solution for when you have run out of Cool Maths Read more...

$40, 14 Arcade Games, Weeded-Up

Posted 5:46pm Sunday 16th March 2025 by Zoe Eckhoff

Dolphins get high off pufferfish and wallabies ransack opium from the poppy fields. So what did we do? We tapped into our innate animalistic tendencies and got high to play arcade games. Sober or no, the arcade is an iconic spot.  For the purposes of this article and accurate retelling, Read more...

Withdrawing from Yourself

Posted 4:58pm Sunday 16th March 2025 by Jordan Irvine

Content warning: Mentions of suicidal thoughts I have been taking antidepressants for nearly five years now, and though they’re infamous for their side effects there is just one thing I can’t get over. Weirdly enough, I’ve made my peace with the weight gain, mood swings and Read more...

Weird Cones 2: Electric Bongaloo

Posted 4:52pm Sunday 16th March 2025 by Critic Staff

The idea of doing a sequel to one of our favourite articles ever, ‘I tried to rip bongs through household ingredients’, has been floating around the writers’ room for years now like a cloud of questionable smoke. The original included bongs of raw eggs, sardines, and instant Read more...

Reviewing Literal Shitholes: The Best Places to Shit on Campus

Posted 11:52pm Sunday 9th March 2025 by Gryffin Blockley

Stomach churning, palms sweating, panic creeping in. You’re sitting in a lecture, when suddenly *that* feeling hits. Guaranteed to get you down in the dumps for the rest of the day, it’s a fight that you know you can’t win: You have to take a shit on campus, outside the safety of Read more...

Whebruary Wrapped

Posted 11:47pm Sunday 9th March 2025 by Nā Heeni Koero Te Rerenoa (Sky)

While the world recovers from New Year’s sluggishness, Māoridom hits the ground running – protesting, performing, protecting, and proving that mana Māori is as relentless as ever. For Māori, February isn’t just the second month of the year; it’s a battleground, Read more...

The Call of The Wild: A Bush Doof Epic

Posted 11:00pm Sunday 9th March 2025 by Ella Grayson

I had always heard of bush doofs, and honestly, it sounded like some proper hippy shit. But when my name spawned in a mysterious meta server promoting an addy-to-be-confirmed neck-of-the-woods DNB-electro-psych doof to end all doofs, I knew something temptingly chaotic was on the horizon. My native Read more...

We Snuck Into Toga Party as 4th and 5th Years and Had The Best Night of Our Lives

Posted 8:28pm Sunday 2nd March 2025 by Abby Wallace

At a certain point of your university life, you stop feeling like a student and start feeling like an anthropologist observing student behaviour in the wild. The only time you set foot on Castle Street is to cut through to the Botans. The only people you recognise in Central are the librarians. You Read more...

The Critic Pie Review

Posted 8:14pm Sunday 2nd March 2025 by Adam Stitely

The pie. It’s simple, it’s working class. Like L&P and DIY, it’s in our DNA, and just like pavlova, Aussies just don't do it the same. The pie is the go-to meal from any petrol station, dairy or else any other place the marginally cooked food gives you a 50-50 chance of Read more...

Breatha’s Got Talent

Posted 7:46pm Sunday 2nd March 2025 by Bianca Prujean

There’s hardly anything more alluring than a free box on a night out. But nothing worthwhile comes easy. To earn such a coveted prize, members of the crowd gathered on Castle and Howe for Frat Night at Feisty Goat would have to prove that their talents lay beyond sinking piss. And they’d Read more...

The Green Solo Alternative

Posted 8:31pm Sunday 23rd February 2025 by Zoe Eckhoff

The Dunedin slander is something I’ve grown used to as one of the few Otago Uni students actually from here. I’m used to the complaints from outsiders and locals about this city and its apparent lack of interesting activities outside of getting pissed on Castle Street. With such a strong Read more...

Fresher Checklist

Posted 6:53pm Sunday 23rd February 2025 by Stella Weston

Meet a minimum of nine aspiring DJs (they’re actually the real deal – they played at Carousel) Trek to Night n’ Day viciously hungover and wearing pajamas, purchase a steak and cheese pie and a purple Powerade, realise you can, in fact, be observed in this state  Beg a Read more...