The manosphere is an easy demon, ridiculous to the point where we’d be tempted to dismiss it from discourse here. 11 years ago, my son Kai and I were invited to participate in an episode of Talking Point, the long-running CNA show hosted by Steven Chia. The episode talked about the role of fathers in […]

   

Just as my parents feared, I got left behind in the conventional Singaporean sense. In the 30-odd years since school and uni, the country's regular kids are now the most credentialed and also STEM-fluent in Asia. The bet was that these useful studies would lead to useful careers. We rhymed engineer with security, accountancy with home, law with prestige, literature with "got future meh?"

   

I had so much fun sipping the yappuccino with Professor Farish Noor at the International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) in June that it’s hard to believe that this episode of Majulah Presents Tea Sessions was the first we had met. We talk about online spaces and how urgently we need to address the divisiveness […]

   

Sell the sizzle. That’s what the Grab driver said to me last month as my hopes of a quiet ride to work evaporated with his earnest conversation starter: “Oh, so what do you do for work?” I obliged, as I often do, because PHV driving can be lonely, and you can only connect so much […]

   

Recently my son came of enough age to have to register for his first NRIC — a simple and efficient process involving a parent logging into the ICA system, uploading a recent photograph, confirming his personal details, and gaodim, you’d have made an appointment to go and collect the physical thing. Now, if you were […]