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Elio Mikoi  the woman in black begged me to take her husband / she was a gentle figure of horror / and so i did. / i exist as her husband’s darkest secret / i’m not even back in black yet. / rough bites and cuts / swollen lips and bruised wrists / bodies swelling with pride. / his body is unforgiving, / and i am no priest to forgive such vindication.  inhabit me, instill jealousy and love within me / his skin leaves me delirious / his hands leave me hungry, breathless. / and i chant in the midnight air, / i will be her. / but nights like this / make my body swell with shapes of darkness / i could not make anyone —myself included— understand. / i am hungry for touch / i am begging for love / i am craving for desire / and i am ashamed to be looked at.  i exist to show someone their shame / nonetheless, i am embarrassed to be desired, / where the low, aching hum of life’s greatest horrors / has become the base of my despair, where my wings have remained at the greatest length of time. / say shame has left a permanent scarlet mark, / say my disgrace has been the world’s obsession, / say i roam for days until a body meets a body / burn my tongue. / my body is being crucified with the sins of her husband / he made a river of wine out of me / and a pomegranate out of my rib / he took seven pomegranate seeds / and now he can never leave. / she knew he was not pure. / she knew he was tainted. / she his nightly secrets, where his limbs tangled / with the graves of his sins and his blooming lungs. / she called for me to fix him / she demanded for his insides to be shown, / cast in marble, an exhibit to the shame of the world. / she wanted him to be hated, / and i wanted to be wanted.  he turned my body into a cathedral, him the lone worshiper, / with his knees on the ground, / his lips all over my body. / and he prayed, please keep me safe . / how could i not listen to his prayer, him with scraped knees? / so i drank the wine from the cup of his hand. / here is / where my body was illuminated with blinding light / and five angels came down from where they are / a hand on my throat, a hand on my wrist, / one on my waist, / two on my shoulders, / two on my thighs, / one cupping the back of my head / one in my eyes / and one inside the fleshy heart of my body. / the center of my body / a river of dionysus, / where anyone could drink and their prayers will be heard, / he drank and drank, a parched sinner. / when the last drop brushed over his lips like the last pomegranate seed, / i felt like crying.  the scene unfolded like a vision in his wife’s dream, and i heard her scream / from miles away, tears of blood flowing, tip-tapping across her cheeks. / you / i want to melt you with the stars until you can no longer withstand your light. / you / i want to fill your river with acid, burn a parched tongue / i want to bite / you / out of the fruit / you / i, cursed to sink without a sound into the sea of my despair. / but darling, dearest, you could never do that / the nightmare that you’ve created. / his hands on my feet, my hands on his, / his hands on my heart, my hands on his eyes, / his hands on my life, and mine on his death / or his hands on my glory, and mine to his shame. / burn me in the stars until i am filled with feverish dust / fill me with acid,  my ribs will remain / bite me from the fruit, my seeds will linger in my heart / sink me into my sea of despair, i am addicted to it. i have been a homesick angel, i haven’t seen my wings in a while. / but when his hands caressed the scars on my back, / i found my home within his touch. / his sins will become stars, which i will extinguish / my angels will weep, but my river will comfort their hearts / my mouth will burn as i kiss the taint from him. / i never wanted to be the cleanser of their sins. / but i never tried to be untainted, nor pure. / they ask for offerings, they ask for  sacrifice, / they ask for my answer and when i bring my existence / they curse me for my oppugnant decisions. / they only wanted me to exist in a way that comforted them / never mind my unease. / and the only time i felt comfort was in the hands of my sinner.  if my angels knew that my curse is everywhere / even in the river of my own creation, / where my sinner weeps with forgiveness, endlessly blooming at the centre / doing this with every ounce of desperation, / to be forgiven / to be clean, to be new — / i swept him off of his feet, scraped knees and bloodied achilles’ heels, / his murmured prayers from his lips to mine, / then i stopped feeling raw, blue, half-eaten, rotting from the endless dream to be / loved and wanted / the curtains fell from heaven. Author Bio:  Elio Mikoi is a poet, essayist, author, and frustrated creative in a STEM field. They write queer, myth-drenched prose and poetry where desire, shame, Asian experiences, and devotion move as one. Their poems are published on Instagram (@eliomikoi) and Substack (philtatos).

Phoebe Robertson Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington introduced two new international scholarships in 2025, offering $15,000 for undergraduate students and $10,000 for postgraduate students. The University confirmed the scholarships were launched in September 2025 for students enrolling from Trimester 3, 2025, positioning them as an upfront financial incentive at the point of acceptance rather than a later academic award. Nine students received the undergraduate award and 47 received the postgraduate award in the scheme’s first year.  According to the University’s scholarship pages, the VUW Undergraduate International Scholarship is valued at $15,000 for one year and is available to new international students entering their first year of a Bachelor’s degree.  The VUW Postgraduate International Scholarship is valued at $10,000 for one year and applies to new international students entering a Master’s degree or Postgraduate Diploma.  Both scholarships are described by the University’s website as “partial fee-based” awards that are credited directly towards tuition fees. Because the scholarships are automatically assessed and applied as a tuition credit rather than awarded through a competitive application process, they function structurally as a fixed reduction in first-year international tuition fees for eligible new students.  Students do not submit a separate scholarship application. Instead, they are automatically assessed when applying for their programme, and recipients are notified of the award in their Offer of Place.   The awards are available only to new international students paying full international fees who hold a conditional or unconditional Offer of Place. Returning students, study abroad and exchange students, students with credit transfer, government-sponsored students, and those with domestic status are ineligible.  Students can see the tuition reduction in their Offer of Place and in their Pūaha fees information, but not in academic transcript records. The University did not provide a percentage of recipients, stating it does not collect data on ineligible applicants. Recipients who withdraw after the scholarship has been formally awarded may be required to repay some or all of the value at the University’s discretion.  Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Students) Dr Logan Bannister said the scholarships “help the University attract high calibre students at a time when affordability and value are key considerations for learners and their families.”  The University also stated that even with the scholarship applied, recipients still contribute more in tuition fees than the cost of the award, and that the scholarships are projected to deliver a positive financial return. The awards are expected to contribute to the long-term stability of international revenue by encouraging increased enrolments. Bannister added that “the majority of applicants who meet the criteria receive an award.” And that the university “intentionally structured this programme to be accessible rather than competitive” Enrolment figures provided by the University show that in 2025 there were 2,666 students categorised as “Other Funding (including International students)” out of a total of 21,143 students. Based on the University’s figures, 56 of these International students received one of the two international scholarships that year.    Te Herenga Waka said it was not yet in a position to provide the 2026 numbers until early March. By contrast, the University of Auckland—the only New Zealand university that provided comparable 2026 enrolment data by deadline—supplied current figures. As of 12 February 2026, the University of Auckland had 9,527 overseas resident students enrolled (headcount), up from 8,129 at the same time in 2025. Auckland’s 2025 overseas headcount alone was more than three times Te Herenga Waka’s entire 2025 “Other Funding (including International students)” cohort of 2,666. Furthermore, Auckland’s year-on-year increase in overseas residents—1,398 additional students—amounts to more than half of Te Herenga Waka’s total 2025 international cohort. Against this backdrop, Te Herenga Waka’s newly introduced international scholarships—automatically assessed, tuition-credited, and projected to deliver a positive financial return—sit within a broader effort to attract and secure international enrolments.  Structured to reach most eligible applicants and applied at the point of enrolment, they function less as selective awards and more as a standardised pricing adjustment in a competitive sector where scale still appears to favour larger institutions.

Dan Moskovitz  Student Health is planning to introduce free ADHD (Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder) diagnoses and prescriptions for students from trimester two—in a move it says could remove a major financial barrier to care.  ADHD symptoms include inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, which can make sustained academic work difficult and leave university students particularly affected.  Until recently, only psychologists and psychiatrists could diagnose ADHD and prescribe medication. Rule changes now allow trained general practitioners (GPs) and nurse practitioners to do so—but just because they legally can, doesn’t mean they know how.  “Our doctors and nurse practitioners have to undertake specific training to learn how to diagnose and prescribe ADHD medication safely,” Student Health Director Kevin Rowlatt said.  “It still takes four to five hours per patient to diagnose, prescribe, and follow up effectively.”  Rowlatt said he is aiming for the service to begin in trimester two while Mauri Ora ensured the clinic can absorb demand without extending wait times for other appointments. That will likely require additional staff, which has yet to be funded, though Rowlatt said he is confident of securing it.  Equally, Mauri Ora is intending to provide the service for free, which could save students thousands of dollars.  Law and sociology student Karmyn Gunn said her diagnosis required a referral from a friend, a six-month wait, and about $1200, wiping out her savings in the process.  But she says the medication changed her ability to study.  “My whole schooling life, I had been thinking there was something wrong with me,” Gunn said.  “It’s like trying to hold slime in your hands when everyone else has a container to hold it in. Ok, why isn’t this staying there? Why does everyone else have a container?”  Rowlatt compared ADHD diagnoses to gender-affirming healthcare, saying both produce “fantastic” wellbeing outcomes when accessible. “I think it will be a really positive change for students to be able to access an [ADHD] assessment in primary care. We know a referral to a psychiatrist may have significant wait times,” he said. “Furthermore, if students can access it here, through someone they know, they don’t have to repeat their story to a stranger. “Primary care welcomes this change and is quite excited that we’re able to do this. It’s just going to take time to set up and we want to ask for a bit of patience because we want it to be safe.”  Outside tertiary study, ADHD assessments typically still cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. When asked by Salient if there had been any consideration of funding ADHD assessments, the Ministry of Health did not directly respond.  “By creating opportunities for more clinicians to offer this service, we expect availability to increase over time and for patients to have more choice in the market,” a spokesperson said.

An Insider’s Guide to the Wellington Fringe Festival Rebecca Stirling It's that time of year again. Boosted campaigns stalk your social feeds, posters multiply across campus, and theatre students begin materialising in your first lectures, eager—desperate, even—to tell you about their shows. Ah yes: the New Zealand Fringe Festival (just Fringe is fine) is nearly upon us.  For one month a year, artists truly run rampant across Wellington, transforming the city into a low-level state of creative chaos. More than 150 shows will pop up in theatres, bars, basements, and any other space with a power outlet and a tolerant landlord. With the festival kicking off on February 13, here are my top tips for making the most of Fringe 2026.  Tip 1: Get a Booklet  The Fringe booklet is your first and most faithful companion. It tells you what’s on, where it’s happening , and—crucially—how to begin pretending you have a carefully curated cultural calendar. You can highlight shows, tick off the ones you’ve seen, and even get it signed by the artists. It’s one of the most helpful guides throughout the festival and gives you something to look back at after it’s over.  You’ll find booklets at the Fringe Box Office on Allen Street, or in pretty much any theater that you pop your head into. Just be wary that a few shows were submitted just too late to make the print deadline, which leads us to tip number two.  Tip 2: Check the Fringe Website  If the booklet is your map, the Fringe website is your live GPS. This is the place to plan out what you’ll see, buy some tickets, and check whether events are still on. This is the most updated information you’ll find on every show. Bookmark it on your phone. You’ll thank yourself later, probably while standing on a street corner frantically checking whether the show you’re about to see still exists. Tip 3: Cuba Street Fringe Summer Series  During fringe season, the city is a pretty exciting place to be. If you’ve completed tips one & two and are still thinking, But Becca, what should I actually see?  look no further than the Fringe Summer Series on Cuba Street.  On Sunday, February 23, artists will take over Cuba Street for the Fringe Summer Series. Free taster performances from festival shows will appear all along the strip, providing bite-sized previews of what’s on offer. It’s the perfect place to see what you like and what you don’t, and there’s even a box office on site in case something really takes your fancy.  Tip 4: Free and Koha Shows Exist!  Want to see some incredible live shows, but don’t really have it in the budget to pay $15-$30 a ticket? Welcome to the broke student life, my friend—this is the place to look. There are some awesome free or pay-what-you-can shows in the festival this year that you are sure to love.  This year’s offerings range from clowning ( The Fools ) to Shakespeare ( As You Like It ), bands ( The Rocking Rainbows ), and even comedy ( Liar Liar Pants on Fire ). Fringe has something for everyone, even those who spent all their money on booze during O-Week.  Tip 5: See some international talent  Fringe makes it possible for artists from overseas to bring their work to Aotearoa audiences. If they've gone through all this effort to get here, you may as well go and see their shows! Some highlights for me are overseas comedy acts ( Booze and Craic: A Night of Scottish and Irish Comedy, or A Scottish Bald Man Sings Rhianna ) and circus performances ( The Fijian Flying Circus ). Come and see their award-winning nonsense, it may be your only chance.  Tip 6: Support Current Vic Theatre Students and Lecturers  There are so many sick up-and-coming artists, producers, and creatives coming out of Victoria University, and it's so exciting to see the works they’ve created. With Fringe being an open entry festival, it really provides a space for newer creatives to experiment, create, and test their craft.  Even our lecturers are getting involved! Our very own Dr James Wenley from the Theatre Department has created a Fringe show based on his current research, delving into Aspec lives and identities in We’re weird for other reasons.  Below is a small (curated and researched, you’re welcome) selection of Fringe shows made by Vic students this year. If you can, go see them.  ● Ecz-asth-perated Fever  ● Phobia  ● Yours Truly  ● Amid the Summer’s Malice  ● As You Like It  ● New and MMMproved  ● Horizon  ● OneTwo ● The Lizards Lie Within: A Lizardmen Movie Play Musical  ● Pōneke Gangster  ● Last Straight Man on Earth  Wellington likes to call itself the arts capital of New Zealand, but living here can make it surprisingly easy to forget to actually attend anything. Life gets busy. Uni piles up. It's hard to get involved or get along to watch performances. Fringe makes theatre accessible for new artists, but also for audiences who want to see more of the arts without needing prior knowledge, deep pockets, or an encyclopedic understanding of contemporary performance. As someone who once had to seek out these shows on their own, I hope that this helps. And as the festival founder Vanessa Stacey puts it: Happy Fringe-ing!

Ali Cook  When I told my family I was moving from America to Aotearoa for university, they reacted as if I’d announced plans to join a cult—or worse, a megachurch. My uncle swore I’d lose all my rights, my guns first, though I had to remind him that I do not, in fact, own any. He warned me that I’d wake up each morning to fetch water from a river with my bare hands, presumably before churning butter and writing letters by candlelight.     He asked if I even spoke the language. Fair question. I do need to improve my te   reo , though I suspect that wasn’t the language he meant. He asked whether New Zealand was near Germany. I said yes. It felt easier.     Needless to say, he does not own a passport. I do. Geography is relative, I suppose.    But despite his best efforts to preserve his all-American, football-watching niece in her natural habitat, I left for Aotearoa in April 2022.   The flight was long enough to interrogate my own optimism. But when I finally landed and climbed into a taxi bound for Capital Hall, something in me loosened. I was welcomed with what would become my least-favourite meal in halls: a Sunday roast that somehow tasted faintly of cannabis and cat food. It felt experimental, but it was fine. It was dinner. And no one was trying to sell it to me as revolutionary.   The next morning, much to my uncle’s imagined disappointment, I walked ten steps down the hall and filled my water bottle from a tap. Clean water. On demand. I hear they’ve even added an ice machine.  The first real shock arrived not in deprivation, but in proportion.  America does not simply build stores. It builds environments. Retail spaces that feel more like constrained weather systems—floresent, endless, humming with abundance.  At The Warehouse, I wandered to the duvet inners and blinked at the tiny selection. Where are all the options?  I muttered to myself.  There were perhaps two of each size, each in a different material. In the United States, I could have spent an entire afternoon choosing between down, microfiber, bamboo, hypoallergenic blends, or temperature regulating fibres allegedly developed by former NASA engineers. Ten brands per shelf, each promising identical sleep in slightly differentiated packaging. A marketplace engineered to transform rest into a core feature of my personality.    Here, I was confronted with the unsettling possibility that I might simply choose one and go home.    I stood there longer than necessary, feeling oddly deprived. Not of comfort—I had the exact duvet I needed—but of spectacle. Of comparison. Of the small, performative rush that comes from believing you are making a meaningful decision between nearly identical things.     The supermarket extended the lesson. Where were the thirty-five brands of almond milk? The seventy-five million varieties of milk generally? The cereals colonising isles? The chips, the pickles in flavours I didn’t even know existed? In the States, even if I bought the store brand, I enjoyed the theatre of considering otherwise. Abundance was part of the ritual.   In Aotearoa, I picked one of the three available oat milks and moved on with my life. It was liberating.     The food itself felt like an upgrade.  I hadn’t realised how aggressively my American tastebuds had been trained. When something isn’t engineered to survive an apocalypse—it tastes cleaner. Less like it was formulated in a lab next to a missile prototype.     I slowly settled into my Kiwi routine. There were bumps—learning (the hard way) that speed and red light cameras exist here. In America, there’s often a small window to cry your way out of a ticket. Here? The camera does not care about your backstory. The fine arrives by mail. How efficient!     Efficiency appears elsewhere, too. I have never filed my own taxes in New Zealand. You still need an IRD number and all the official bits, but Inland Revenue simply…does it. For you. No TurboTax. No frantic Googling at 11:57 p.m. on the night before returns are due. No wondering whether a minor clerical error will result in federal prison.  Over time, I relaxed. My nervous system relaxed. I didn’t know how tightly I’d been wound until I wasn’t.    The first time I returned home—to Charlotte, North Carolina, the summer after my first year—the shock arrived all at once.  Moving from the U.S. to Aotearoa had felt like stepping into fresh air. Returning felt like walking into a wind tunnel.  America was louder. Bigger. Vast in a way that felt simultaneously architectural and psychological. The highways stretched into abstractions. The parking lots could be quantified as municipalities. Stores rose from asphalt like aircraft hangers, glowing late into the night. Everything appeared scaled for a population perpetually in motion.     At Christmas, my mom and I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Target. It felt less like a store and more like a stage set—the lights, the abundance, the endless aisles. Everyone I had ever known seemed to be there, steering identical red carts through identical brightness, each basket layered with objects that would be unremarkable by morning.     And then there were the guns.  Men casually open-carrying assault rifles while picking up wrapping paper and stocking stuffers. I had forgotten people do that. Or perhaps, in America,  I’d trained myself not to notice. After living in Aotearoa, seeing it again felt jarring. Not political. Not theoretical. Just terrifying.    In Pōneke, safety isn’t something I consciously think about; it’s the baseline. The background setting. In my hometown Target, I found myself begging my mom to let me wait in the car.   The scale of America is not just physical. It is emotional. It hums at a higher, insistant, frequency.    While I was home, I paid attention to my dad. He works for a bank, though it feels more accurate to say he belongs to one. The glow of his laptop spills across the living room long after midnight. There are weeks when sleep becomes an interruption.    We sit down to dinner, and his phone vibrates against the wood. He answers before it stops. The voice on the other end is polite, measured. He is back at work before he finishes his plate.    The pace I’d felt in shopping centers and on highways wasn’t confined to those places. It followed him home. It sat between us at dinner. It lived in the ring of his phone and in the way he already returned to his office chair, planning ahead.    Being back made me anxious in a way I struggled to articulate. My chest felt tighter. Even the food tasted louder—saltier, sweeter, sharper. Everything seemed to demand attention all at once.      All I could think about was leaving.  Eventually, it was time to return to Aotearoa. I expected excitement. What I felt was relief.  When I landed and boarded the airport bus, I sensed it before I could even name it. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. My breathing slowed.     I looked around at the other passengers. No one was pacing. No one was conducting business at full volume. No one was signalling importance. A woman stared out the window, unhurried. A man scrolled lazily on his phone. Someone boarded in jandals despite the weather.   As the bus wound along the motorway, I pressed my forehead lightly to the cool glass and watched the hills roll by—impossibly green, but not the manicured, hyper-saturated green of suburban America. This was a softer green. A lived-in one. The sky felt wider here, less crowded somehow. Even the sun seemed gentler.     There were no billboards screaming for attention. No giant flag flapping aggressively in the wind. The buildings sat low, tucked into the landscape instead of towering over it.    When I got back to my flat, I dropped my bag by the door and sat at the kitchen table while my flatmates made tea.The kettle clicked off. Someone opened a window. Late afternoon light pooled across the bench, catching in the steam.    I told them about the trip—the noise, the malls, my dad’s phone that never seemed to stop ringing.    One of them just got home from work. She listened, chin in her hand, hair still slightly damp from a shower. She looked rested. Not in a vacation way. Just… rested.    My other flatmate leaned back in his chair and mentioned taking time off to visit his family down south. He said it casually, as if it required no explanation. As if it had simply been available to him.    Time off.     The phrase lingered, unremarkable to everyone but me. Outside, someone walked past on the footpath. A car door shut. The evening moved forward at its own pace.    The kettle cooled on the bench, and we stayed there a little while longer.

Hunk Unc: How do I know my friendships are good and healthy? Most people don’t realise a friendship’s off because something bad  happens. They realise because something small keeps happening. You catch the bus home and feel oddly flat. You lie in bed replaying a conversation. You feel more tired after hanging out than you did before—that’s usually the first sign. Good friendships don’t leave you feeling like you’ve just done a full-body session you didn’t consent to. I had a mate I used to train with three mornings a week at CityFitness. Same time, same rack. On paper, perfect. But every session turned into him unloading—his flat, his ex, his job, how nothing ever quite worked out for him. I’d nod between sets, spot him, hype him up, then walk out feeling absolutely cooked. Not physically—emotionally. Took me months to realise I was never actually sharing anything myself. I was just there to spot him while he talked.  A healthy friendship lets you be a bit useless sometimes. Not charmingly useless—actually flat. Quiet. Low-energy. If you always feel like you have to be “on,” that’s a warning sign. Some of my best friendships are the ones where we can sit on opposite ends of the couch, scrolling our phones, half-watching whatever’s on, eating toast straight off the bench because no one could be bothered finding plates.  Pay attention to what happens when you say no. Not the dramatic nos—the boring ones. “Can’t afford it this week.” “Not drinking tonight.” “Need an early one.” A good mate might give you a bit of grief, but they’ll drop it. They won’t guilt you. They won’t keep a mental tally. Anyone who only likes you when you’re available, agreeable, and useful isn’t your friend—they just like the version of you that fits their schedule. Friendships should also survive change, because you will  change. You’ll start caring about sleep. You’ll stop going out three nights in a row. You’ll get into running, or lifting properly, or therapy, or all three. Some people won’t like that. They’ll say you’re “different now”. The good ones adjust. They ask questions. They find new ways to hang out. They don’t try to drag you back to who you were just because it was more convenient for them. I lost touch with a few mates when I stopped hitting the pub five nights a week. It hurt more than I expected. But the ones who stayed? They’re still here. They ask how my knee’s holding up. They ask what I’m training for. They show up, even when it’s boring or uncomfortable. Moving flats. Hospital waiting rooms.  Here’s the bit people hate admitting: you don’t actually need that many close friends. Two or three proper ones will carry you further than a massive group chat where your message gets seen-zoned and forgotten. “Quality over quantity” sounds like a fridge magnet, sure—but in real life, it’s how you maintain the best friendships.  So how do you know your friendships are good and healthy? When they’ve got your back. When they’re willing to give you a spot and listen to your problems, not just spill theirs.

Jackson McCarthy New True Romance  Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights looks to the past to find a future  “Can I speak to you privately for a moment? / I just want to explain”. So begins Charli xcx’s ninth studio album, in a huskily-voiced spoken-word piece by John Cale (The Velvet Underground). But that opening track, ‘House’, with its creep and crescendo, its screams and distortions, is about as dark as Wuthering Heights gets.  Though it’s been conceived of as a companion piece to the new Emerald Fennell film, and though some of its material is used there, Charli’s new album is not exactly a soundtrack. Nor is it explicitly narrative, relaying the doomed romance and reckoning of Emily Brontë’s original 1847 novel.  Instead, the record seems to use Wuthering Heights as a premise, one that allows the artist to turn away from the sound of her 2024 breakout brat. On it, she finds reprieve in a lush, techo-gothic soundscape, replete with real string players (!), crafted alongside frequent collaborator Finn Keane, himself rebranded (he previously went by EasyFun) as a real-deal, first-name-last-name producer.  brat was undeniably massive—and not just by Charli’s standards, who’d been making waves (and the occasional critical splash) as a sly pop-auteur since at least as early as 2017. brat was an iconic kind of massive; a merch-making, profile pic-changing, feud-resolving, era-defining kind of massive. And then it steamrolled into a remix album whose list of features read like the contents page of a future history of 21st-century music. And then, just when you thought it was over, it found one final hit in Charli's much-overlooked pandemic album how i'm feeling now : the yearning ‘party 4 u’.  But like anything so popular that even the Hallenstein's boys were frat-flicking to it at Laneway, there was always the risk that brat ’s nervous, twitchy take on dance music—a take that, mind you, was deeply rooted in the UK’s queer and experimental scenes in the early ‘10s—would curdle into something uncool. It makes sense that Charli’s turned away from the brat -green limelight to seek something different on Wuthering Heights . So what about that “techno-gothic soundscape”? Well, it’s a soundscape that has, by comparison to the first impression that ‘House’ gives us, surprising moments of beauty, ease, and levity.  Take ‘Chains of Love’, one of the lead singles, for example, which recalls for me the chordal, anthemic sound of her 2013 debut True Romance —just as the loopy, rhythmic chorus on ‘Dying for You’ brings to mind deep cuts like ‘detonate’ from the aforementioned how i’m feeling now .  Or take ‘Altars’, which might just be the finest thing on here, and its riff on a line of Harry Nilsson's: “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do”. His is a song of despair after a breakup. But Charli’s take? “One is not the loneliest number / Won’t keep putting all my faith in you”. Charli hopes we’ll hear the tragic implication of these lines—when your boyfriend makes you feel like your “mind is torturing [your] body”, as she tells us elsewhere in the song, one really isn't the loneliest number: it's two. I don’t mean to over-egg it here, but this is both incredible and incredibly simple phrasemaking. Charli's never been a verse-chorus-bridge kind of songwriter, but her lyrics do have that light, aphoristic touch—more Robyn than Nilsson, thankfully—of someone who can distil experience into a tiny string of words.  Tiny is the operative word, though: all of the album’s twelve tracks clock in at the two- or three-minute mark for a total runtime of thirty-four minutes. It is, if you’ll permit me the indulgence, a ‘suite’ of ‘miniatures’. If you won’t permit me the indulgence, the album might feel like a bit of a genre exercise; just too light for an artist of this calibre. But then there’s a flourish from those gorgeous strings, double-stopping and sliding through the sparky electronics. If it’s a gimmick, it’s at least got the guts to be convincing through its admittedly-short duration.  As I hope is obvious, the tortured love songs on this record have as much to do with doubt, distance, and desire in the abstract as they do with the Wuthering Heights of either Bronte’s or Fennell’s conception. And, likewise, the framing of the album as a movie tie-in doubles as the cover under which Charli makes her escape from such a massive album as brat . Wuthering Heights is something of a statement for Charli—a statement about who she was, where she’s at, and where she’s headed. Yet the record’s brilliance (and this has always been Charli’s brilliance) is that it comes off as under stated; effortless.  This is Your Legacy  Mārama brings Māori gothic to the big screen  Minor spoilers ahead.  All the usual gothic markers are there: a lone woman in a strange place; sudden visions of violence; disembodied sounds and voices; false reflections in mirrors; rooms one mustn't enter; heavy footsteps at night—there’s even a gorgeous red gown, tensed for wear in a big finale. We know something’s up, we just don’t know exactly what.  Like any thriller worth the price of its ticket, writer-director Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama clocks in at a tight ninety minutes, knowingly riffing all the while on these familiar tropes and cliches. What might be less expected, however, is the Aotearoa flavour his film brings to the genre. The orphaned Mārama “Mary” Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) arrives in Yorkshire in 1859 to learn about her whakapapa. But after a boat journey of seventy-two days, the man who initially summoned her has died. Welcoming her in his place is the charming Nathanial Cole (Toby Stevens), who kindly invites her to stay in his manor.  What follows is a genuinely thrilling albeit usual procedure as Mārama’s visions become more and more intense; as she, alongside us viewers, slowly pieces together the cruelty her tūpuna suffered at the hands of their colonists. Horror as a genre often works best when its gory theatrics keep us occupied with gasping and tensing—meanwhile its creators subtly raise the action from the literal to the figurative register. Just notice how, during a pivotal scene in which Mārama confronts Cole, the latter replies, “This is your legacy.” It’s a chilly line, devastatingly true, that resonates both with her character’s history and Aotearoa’s. history at large. We can’t erase the past—but just how do we deal with the violent legacy we have all inherited on colonised land? (As an aside, Mārama certainly has its Get Out moments, too, as Cole’s mansion, adorned with stolen taonga, displays his out-of-touch, culturally-insensitive ‘respect’ for our heroine’s people.)  Thus, a conflict of ideas plays out through the instantiation of character, and vice versa: as we’re absorbed in character and plot, squealing and flinching at the moment-by-moment action, this dark, gothic period drama is thinking out larger ideas. It’s an unbeatable formula, because it has its cake and eats it, too—and it’s a special pleasure to see it in action so close to home. But I’d be remiss here not to mention David Ballantyne’s unbelievable, extraordinary, somehow-forgotten 1968 novel, Sydney Bridge Upside Down , which is, to my mind, something of a tupuna to any artwork operating in the genre of Māori gothic.  That novel is full of powerful moments of indeterminacy and doubt. What’s different about Mārama , then, is its surefire confidence. Ariāna Osborne is pitch-perfect in the lead role: at first shocked, then cold, then humiliated—then, finally, furious. But the film is not mere revenge fantasy; it’s a channeling of outrage, an outrage rooted in the real historical horrors its narrative is drawn from. And Mārama ’s moral is a simple one: colonisers cannot be redeemed, only disposed of.

Connections Answers: First Connection Te Ao Māori Food Related Terms: Kai, Puku, Waha, Matira Second Connection Plant Structure: Branch, Root, Stem, Bank Third Connection Types of Strikes: Punch, Kick, Jab, Sock Fourth Connection Culinary Herbs: Mint, Basil, Sage, Thyme

Phoebe Robertson When Charlie Faulks talks about animation, it’s with a kind of unstudied inevitability. “It was just always there,” he says. “I didn’t have to force myself to like it. It was just this passion that formed very quickly.” That passion—half instinct, half obsession—led to Bloke of the Apocalypse , the animated series that snagged him NZ On Air funding at just twenty years old. “It was a strike of lightning,” he says. “Something that I was really passionate about, and the idea was very personal, but it was also very Kiwi.” He describes meeting producers Ben Powdrell and Francesca Carney at a pitching festival in Wellington. “Everyone was in the same room,” he says. “It was very Wellington. We were all trying to make stuff.” They became collaborators, mentors, and eventually partners in turning his student project into a funded series. “It was the perfect mixture of the idea, and then them funnelling it into this proper pitch deck,” Charlie says. “Because I didn’t know how to appeal to funding bodies. I didn’t know the language.” The series itself is simple enough: a father and son trying to survive an apocalypse. But underneath that, it’s a study of masculinity—the blokey, stoic, faintly absurd kind that defines so much of small-town New Zealand. “It’s based off the character of my dad,” Charlie says, “and the sort of macho bloke of New Zealand and the trappings of that stereotype.” He laughs when I ask how it felt to put someone so close to him into an animation. “It makes it easier to write, because I know my dad so well. I know his demeanour, and the demeanour of that sort of person. I’m not trying to demoralise the folks—they’re great. They just have these hang ups about things, and they can be quite stubborn.” By the end of writing the show, he says, “I think I understood Dad a little bit more. That sounds corny, but it just made it so easy to write the character. The stereotypical macho bloke is just inherently funny—they’re so belligerent and casual about everything.” When Charlie’s dad watched the first episode, he wasn’t there to see it. “Apparently he sort of welled up a little bit, which was quite sweet,” Charlie says. “Who knows if it’s true, but that’s what Mum said.” The show’s origins stretch back to high school, where the concept began as a farm-set father–son story. The apocalypse came later, “something to really stress them out,” Charlie says. “To create this awful environment for them, to cause conflict, to make their different ideologies clash.” The apocalypse also gave him an excuse to play. He and his flatmate Jack Marlin—who became the secret voice of Bloke—spent late nights working on the project in their student halls. “It was so much fun,” Charlie says. “Every choice seemed very natural, and it culminated in something that felt homegrown and fun.” He still talks about that early process with the giddy affection of someone describing a first band or zine. “It’s always more fun to improvise,” he says. “Especially when you’re working with a friend and you’re very close and living together. It’s easy to build on each other’s ideas.” But he was serious, too. “I was really getting into writing at that time,” he says. “I wanted to write the scripts and even practice just the skill of writing and the structure of it.” The funding came during his second year at Massey. “Third year really ramped up,” he says. “That made it quite tough to balance study and this sudden full-time job.” His lecturers were forgiving; he scrapped his original pilot project and turned his coursework into a research project about animation production. “It fit into the production itself, which was really lovely,” he says. “That third year went so quick. I kind of miss it now—the frenzy of everything going on.” He remembers exactly where he was when the funding call came through. “I was still working at Three Wise Men at the Wellington Airport,” he says. “It was a Sunday, I’d gotten up at 5:30, and I was just sizing up suits for [clients] when Fran, my producer, called me. She took so long to get to the point. I was like, just tell me—and then we got it.” He laughs. “I had to suppress my excitement for the rest of the shift.” Since then, Bloke of the Apocalypse  has grown beyond his imagination. It premieres at the Terror-Fi Film Festival this month. “It’s pretty scary,” he admits. “But I’m really excited for the premiere.” The show itself, he says, balances comedy, drama, and even horror. “That’s normally done in live action,” he says. “It was sort of a tall task to play around with that in animation. But I like shows that balance those tones.” He calls it “very comedy-forward,” with “jokes every ten seconds” but also moments “where you do see these characters crack.” Animation, Charlie points out, is expensive—and misunderstood. “Even the style we’re working in is very rare to see in New Zealand,” he says. “This really unappealing, sort of Nickelodeon–Cartoon Network style. It’s nice to see animation stepping into people’s radar a little bit more.” He grew up on Adventure Time , Regular Show , and a strange little series called The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack . “It was so weird,” he says, laughing. “I think that show had a specific bite to it. It’s bubbly one moment, then it cuts to this awful close-up of a guy with moles and hair sticking out everywhere. I like that. We’ve tried to do that in Bloke .” As for what comes next, he’s cautious but hopeful. “Maybe this is the moment where I can be like—please, New Zealand, can we have another season?” he says. But in the meantime, he’s keeping busy. “We’re shooting a feature film right now—just me and my mates, very independent, no money behind it. It’s nice flipping between something big and public and something tiny that’s just ours.” He shrugs when I ask if the publicity and funding pressure ever intimidated him. “I have so much faith in the project,” he says. “The only thing is just how publicised it was when we got it. The numbers between the budget and my age created a shocking headline.” Still, he seems remarkably unshaken. “It’s got a sense of humour that will appeal to people,” he says. “It makes me laugh, and it makes the crew laugh, and that’s the best we can do.” And maybe that’s the real secret behind Bloke of the Apocalypse : the end of the world isn’t scary when you’re laughing through it with your mates. Bloke of the Apocalypse premiers at the Terror-Fi Film Festival in Wellington on the 30 November. The show will be released on YouTube Friday 31 October 2025. You can view it from the link here .

For Ali It was something about it,  Just sitting there — cat curled into a comma against my thighs,  fridge humming softly in the background.  You said you’re sorry for upsetting me.  And I replied,  I’m only upset because I— care.  Really care.  Too much, maybe.  And if you told me to run,  to throw myself from the overpass on State Highway 1,   because you needed me at the bottom— I would go. No hesitation.  I would do anything you wanted.

Colden Sapir (they/them) Voters’ enrolment records are disappearing into thin air. The Electoral commission claims that they are being procedurally moved to the ‘dormant role’; Te Pāti Māori are pursuing investigation and legal action against the commission. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer echoes the suspicion of many: "This is not a mistake. It's voter suppression."  Since July, social media has erupted with angry reports of missing enrolment records, enough that even the mainstream media published a few articles.  Alarmingly, a large chunk of the missing enrolments belong on the Māori roll. Even within a single household, those enrolled on the Māori roll have had to renew their enrolment, while whānau on the general roll are unaffected.  Voters enrolled in advance of the election period should receive a voting pack and postal ballot to assist them in voting. If you haven’t yet received your voting pack for the local body elections, chances are that your enrolment has silently fallen on the chopping block.  Anusha Guler, the Deputy Chief Executive of Operations at the Electoral Commission, suggests that the missing records have been moved to something called the ‘dormant roll’:  “If we lose touch with you—for example if we get returned mail from an old address—we will try to contact you by email or text to ask you to update your details. If we can't contact you or don't hear back from you, you may be put on the dormant roll.”  For all intents and purposes, the dormant roll is rubbish that hasn’t been taken out yet. Although you won’t receive a postal ballot, the dormant roll enables you to vote at in-person polling stations—but as long as you meet voting requirements, you can do that regardless.  However, under recent and widely condemned changes to electorate law, voters will now need to be enrolled at least two weeks in advance of election day. Perhaps those registering on voting day aren’t “dropkicks”, as David Seymour suggests, but rather the victims of data mismanagement within an increasingly overworked, decreasingly democratic government.  So why the sudden mass migration of voters to the dormant roll? Why are people who have not moved house in years being affected? And if the Electoral Commission was doing their due diligence in making contact, why are so many of us confused?  It’s not my place to make your speculations for you. But seeing as Te Pāti Māori are already pursuing investigation and legal action against the Crown, the main thing we can do is make sure our friends and whānau are aware of the possibility that their enrolment, whether from the last few months or decades ago, has gone AWOL.

CW:  Self Harm, Revenge Porn When first-term ACT MP Laura McClure stood in Parliament and held up a blurred, nude AI-generated image of herself, the stunt landed with a jolt. She had deepfaked her own likeness, she says, to force colleagues to confront how easily such images can be made—and how New Zealand law hasn’t kept pace. McClure did not imagine a career in politics. After university she trained as a pharmacy technician, then spent nearly two decades in her family’s health-and-safety business, gravitating to ACT over time on small-business issues and the End of Life Choice debate. “It wasn’t a chosen career path,” she says.  Deepfakes entered her world through school visits in her education portfolio, where principals and parents began flagging cases. One, she says, involved a Year 9 girl in Auckland—just 13—who was deepfaked and later attempted suicide. The gendered nature of the abuse, she adds, is unmistakable. “Someone has to do something.”  Her members’ bill aims to make it explicitly illegal to create or distribute synthetic sexual images intended to harm a person—closing what she describes as a glaring hole in the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA). Sharing real intimate images without consent is already a crime; using someone’s face to fabricate them, she argues, can be “far more damaging,” yet is not clearly outlawed. To her knowledge, there have been no successful prosecutions under the current framework for deepfakes. Rather than chase the technology, McClure borrowed from South Korea’s behaviour-based approach. Regulating the tech is “whack-a-mole,” she says; the image she showed MPs took minutes to make on a free site with a couple of clicks. “Are you 18? Do you have consent? Done.” The bill, therefore, targets the act of weaponising synthetic images, not the tools themselves.  Getting any members’ bill heard is a lottery—literally. Proposals sit in a “biscuit tin” and rely on the ballot to be drawn. McClure says she deepfaked herself to attract attention across the House. It worked, but it wasn’t easy: “I’m pretty new… it was terrifying,” she says of showing the image in the chamber.  Since then, she’s found unusual allies. McClure says MPs from multiple parties reacted with surprise that the conduct isn’t clearly illegal and expressed willingness to act. The Greens, she says, nearly co-signed before stepping back; Te Pāti Māori has been supportive. “This isn’t political. Anyone can be affected,” she says. Her lobbying pitch stresses urgency and asks colleagues to prioritise this bill over their own in the ballot—no small ask in a system where backing one bill can mean sidelining another. What about ACT’s free-speech instincts? McClure argues the line is bright. “We already criminalise sharing someone’s nudes without consent,” she says. “Saying it’s okay because it was made with technology makes no sense.” She insists the bill protects legitimate, creative uses of AI by focusing on malicious behaviour: “We want to protect people who use it for good.” With a maximum penalty around two years, criminalisation would principally send a signal and unlock support pathways. Schools that have dealt with cases lack consistent victim services precisely because the conduct isn’t clearly a crime, she argues. Naming it as such enables police, victim support and other agencies to act coherently. “It says to young people: this is serious.”  McClure places her bill within a broader, overdue update of the HDCA, which she notes is roughly a decade old. Technology will keep moving—today’s deepfake will be tomorrow’s something-else—so she favors faster, periodic reviews to close new loopholes before harms metastasise.  For students, the call-to-action is immediate: email MPs and lend your name to petitions urging the Government to add the issue to its work program, McClure says. And if you’re targeted, do not go it alone—contact Netsafe for takedowns and support, and talk to police. Even under current law, some remedies are available. “Please reach out,” she says. McClure’s gambit—using a fabricated image of herself to argue for a real law—captured attention because it compressed the issue into a single, unsettling truth: if an MP can be deepfaked in minutes, so can anyone else. Her bet is that Parliament won’t wait for catastrophe to prove the point.