Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Facebook's refusal to take down Trump's false ads has generated great controversy and backlash. Its own employees have just published an open letter urging Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider his policy towards political ads. While thinking about this question, I recalled vaguely some slogan that went like "the solution to bad speech is more speech." Looking it up on the internet sent me on a crash course on U.S. law on free speech. The debate on free speech and its limits is of long standing, but the course of the development of U.S. law has clearly been towards the expansion of free speech against arbitrary limits. In the 19th century, the common practice was called prior restraint, defined as censorship imposed by a government or institution that prohibits particular instances of expression. To give an example from a different jurisdiction, the Singapore government's ban of Tan Pin Pin...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Yale Faculty Senate meets today to discuss, among other matters, the cancellation of the "dissent" learning module at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Big thanks to everyone who wrote to Yale. I hope the Senate discussion at today's meeting will not expend itself on general questions about academic freedom at Yale's satellite campus, as this Yale Daily News report did. Obviously there is academic freedom for most topics and most people at Yale-NUS. Singapore is not yet a Stalinist state. It is, however, an extremely sophisticated practitioner of the dark arts of (self-)censorship. Instead, the Senate meeting could examine the analysis of Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal, which casts serious doubts on the Yale Report on the module cancellation. The Yale Report was written without taking into account the emails and text messages between Yale-NUS and the module instructor Alfian Sa'at. The seni...

Last night, watched Pain and Glory directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar, with GH, WL, and CC. The Spanish title Dolor y gloria sounds so much better and fitting. The film is a rich meditation on love, desire, family, and the creative process. How much do you really love your lover if you won't abandon your Madrid-centered artistic ambition to help him cure his drug addiction? How much do you really love your mother if you won't stay in her village of caves? After the success, will there be time to make it up to lover and mother? Is the failure to make it up to them related to one's creative crisis? Antonio Banderas was superbly subtle as the aging filmmaker Salvador Mallo. Penelope Cruz and Julieta Serrano were wonderful too as the mother at different ages. César Vicente was the dishy young man who was the director's first desire, when as a boy he was first awakening to the world of men. César Vicente with the director Pedro Almodóvar

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   I thought my grandfather's smell would never leave me. Years ago, my father's father had left his wife and children for another woman and her family. In his old age, when the other family could not take care of him any longer, my grandfather returned to his original set of children, as to a stone wall, because none would take him back. Except for my father, himself dead now just slightly more than a year ago, who turfed me out of my room to make room for my grandfather. I could not bear the smell hanging on him like a wreath. He smelled of rotting pork rubbed with Tiger Balm ointment, but drier, dustier. I am reminded of my grandfather by the granddaughter of J. B. Jeyaretnam. The Yale freshman has just published a beautiful essay about her grandfather who is, was, famous in Singapore for being the first opposition politician to be elected into Parliament after almost three decades of People's Act...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I wrote to Yale's president after Alfian Sa'at shared his version of events about the cancellation of his "dissent" module at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Please consider writing to Yale's president to ask for the re-opening of the inquiry with an unbiased representative, now that there is fresh and convincing evidence that the Yale report is wrong. His email is president@yale.edu. Please feel free to share my letter with friends and media contacts.  Dear Yale President Peter Salovey: I hope it has come to your attention that the narrative and analysis of the Yale report on the cancellation of the Yale-NUS learning module "Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore" has been refuted by the instructor concerned, playwright Alfian Sa'at. According to the administrative leadership of Yale-NUS, the learning module was cancelled because of (1) insufficient academic rigor and (2) the legal ri...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In a previous column in this newsletter, I asked readers to write to the President of Yale University to support a fact-finding mission regarding the cancellation of a learning module titled "Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore" at Yale-NUS College. The Yale report, published on September 29, finds that "the decision to cancel the module was made internally and without government interference in the academic independence of the College.... [And] the evidence does not suggest any violations of academic freedom or open inquiry." However, the instructor of the module, playwright Alfian Sa'at, in a Facebook note published yesterday, charged that some members of Yale-NUS College "have been lying." He has "detailed emails and Whatsapp messages that will definitively prove that the allegations [of defiance, recklessness, and incompetence against him] are false and defamatory." He...