Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here: https://singaporeunbound.org/join Gerald Leow, Sticky Rice 1 (2021). Photo credit: Arnuparp Jantakaew Image description: A large woven sculpture in the middle of an empty field. The sculpture is made of bamboo, steel, and Thai sticky rice baskets that are known as ‘Huad’.  SUSPECT is here , our new journal of writing and art! We hope you enjoy the varied offerings of writing, art, and multimedia, covering such topics as folk horror, an escape from the Burmese junta, spiritualities in Singapore, the loss of a sister, and translations of Bhojpuri poems. New articles will be added every Friday, so stick with us as we grow with you into a cherished community of writers and readers, artists and audience. We'd love to hear from you about our content and look. Huge thanks to our brilliant contributors. And to our generous donors, who have made such essential writing and art available to all for ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . What a sorry end to the educational experiment that was Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Just after the new academic year opened in August, the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced that Yale-NUS College and the University Scholars Program would be merged to form a new college. The merger amounted to a closure of Yale-NUS since the college would cease to exist after the current cohort of freshmen graduate in 2025. Last week NUS  announced  that the new college will not feature liberal arts subjects in its core curriculum. Instead of literature, philosophy, and scientific and social inquiry, all part of Yale-NUS College's common curriculum, undergraduates at the new college will be required to take modules with the names of "Thinking and Writing" and "Reasoning with Data." The instrumental view of education in the changes can hardly be clearer, an instrumentalism that is narrowly...

The Tempest (Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition). The play that makes me feel closest to Shakespeare. This superb critical edition provides very useful sources, criticism, and creative responses to the play. An essential tool for teaching the play. Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman .  Caliban speaks and shows that he can do more with the English language than to curse. The Norton Critical Edition has a terrific essay by Kwane Anthony Appiah about the disingenuousness of Soyinka's claim that the play is not about a clash of cultures.  Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction .  An entertainment. When we were young and heroes to ourselves, if to no one else. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man .  Brutally hilarious. The run-in with the Communists is a powerful warning never to allow oneself to become a System man.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . We are living in a new Age of Authoritarianism, and it is incumbent on all of us to fight its oppressive spirit wherever we find it, even when it is within us. Technology has created new tools for state surveillance, mass disinformation, and capitalist exploitation, but it has also given us new means to highlight injustice, organize resistance, and express solidarity. The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar does not concern just the Burmese, but all of us. One year after the military coup against a democratically elected government, if we permit the Burmese dictatorship to legitimize itself, we reinforce the powers of totalitarianism and weaken the forces of liberty everywhere. We need to heed the voices of resistance in this vital anthology,  Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar 1998 – 2021 . The voices are many and various, but they all say,...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . After much deliberation, our team has landed on a name for our new journal of writing, and you're the first to know. SUSPECT, as in "we suspect this work has qualities of greatness." As in looking from the ground up, and not top down. As in "incredulity towards metanarratives" (Lyotard) in favor of microhistories, subversive perspectives, and marginalized identities. We SUSPECT that a SUSPECT like you has something SUSPECT to say. Say it. SUSPECT will be launched in February 2022. We're so excited to share the new writings with you. And art too, as the writings will be beautifully accompanied by images of work by Asian artists. We invite all SUSPECT writers out there to submit work. We seek poetry, literary fiction, essays, and any kind of writings that do not fall into these categories, written or translated into English by authors who identify as Asian. We also publish reviews of b...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In downtown Santa Fe Plaza, surrounded by trees draped with Christmas lights, a plain woooden box squat oddly in the center. Here for the first time, on a short vacation, I found out from a local resident only two days ago what the box had replaced: an obelisk honoring Union soldiers, "heroes," according to the plaque, who died in battle with "savage Indians."  In October 2020, after many peaceful protests and much foot-dragging by the mayor, Native activists and their allies took things into their hands and dragged down the obelisk with ropes and chains. Photo credit: Luis Sanchez Saturno / New Mexican file photo  KRQE I was familiar with the image of the American Civil War as the war to end slavery. I was ignorant of the fact that Union forces consolidated Northern control over New Mexico by massacring its Native peoples and dispossessing them of their homelands. "When is an obelisk no...