Archive

The True Cost of Ethical Consumption: A Trial R

Posted 10:17pm Sunday 27th April 2025 by Adam Stitely

Inspired by a rewatch of Food, Inc. (2009), the god-given right to shit on Nestlé, and an attempt to offset years of Fatty Lane-sponsored staff meals, Critic Te Ārohi spent five days living as an Ethical Consumer – cutting out anything even vaguely unethically sourced. Despite our Read more...

Locally Produced David Attenboroughs: A Guide

Posted 10:06pm Sunday 27th April 2025 by Jodie Evans

Looking for your next Attenborough fix but want something local? Check out the babies of Otago Science Communication grads and alumni. With a cheeky behind-the-scenes “brought to you by” to let you in on the highs and lows of bringing science to the people. If Nina’s editorial is a Read more...

ANIMALS?!?!?!? How to have pets as a student. Kind of.

Posted 9:14pm Sunday 27th April 2025 by Tilly Rumball-Smith

Kiwis own more pets per household than almost anyone else in the world, so it comes as a bit of a culture shock to leave that behind for studenthood. Many of us grew up with household pets who, unfortunately, remained in the household when we moved out. Without us realising, our final year of high Read more...

Life Lessons from my Dead Pet Snail

Posted 9:12pm Sunday 27th April 2025 by Lotto Ramsay

This is a story about one Snegma “Sneg” Ramsay (Snegory to my parents).  Once a snail fell from the sky and it taught me about love. “Fell from the sky” is a fanciful way of saying that I dropped him by mistake when I found him in my kitchen sink. I thought that he Read more...

Backyard Ecology: A Semi-Scientific Journey into the World of Moss

Posted 9:06pm Sunday 27th April 2025 by Isabella Simoni

Bryology: The study of mosses and liverworts Did you know that camels have three testicles? Well, if you did, you’d be wrong – and anyway, this article is about moss. That green stuff that grows on trees, rocks, and those trolls from Frozen. The stuff that goes unnoticed most of the Read more...

Flat Authoritarianism

Posted 11:43pm Sunday 13th April 2025 by Ellie Bennett

Flatting is a delicate balance of personalities, habits, and passive aggressiveness. For the first time, you get to experience life free from the watchful eye of parents or RAs – and that usually means 2-minute noodles for every second meal, putting off your washing to the last minute, and, Read more...

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...

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...