Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "The prison sits at the nexus of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism," begins Judy Luo in her essay, a summary of her study of carcerality and freedom at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. If, like me, you need a précis of current thinking about prison abolition and its antecedents, you can do worse than read Judy's thoughtful argument about the convergences of criminality, immigration, care work, and property rights. The American immigration system is broken, and here to cast a new and personal light on the problem is poet Jan-Henry Gray, the very first feature of the new season of our Second Saturdays Reading Series. His award-winning book Documents is rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, and maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. You can read ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . At my NYC private school, my department is engaged in an exercise to re-envision our mission in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement. I've undergone such exercises in the past, in both Singapore and New York, and have found them mostly useless. This time is different. The work with a thoughtful facilitator and willing colleagues has opened up a space for self-reflection. As part of the exercise, we were asked to write down our assumptions in teaching literature, and I'd like to share with you my contribution in the hope of dialogue. After writing down, and reviewing, my ideas, I discovered that most of my assumptions have remained steady through the years, but not all. My Assumptions Underlying My Teaching of Secondary-School English 1. Content   Great works of literature are worth studying both for themselves and for their potential impact on the individual and society. They a...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I'm writing to you from a log cabin we rented in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Usually, at this time of the year, to celebrate GH's birthday, we would be traveling abroad, in Asia or Europe on alternate years. This year the pandemic forced us to cancel plans to visit, first, India, then, Montreal-Toronto, then, Nova Scotia, then, even Maine. We settled for a short vacation in our own state. It would be a respite from the city's August temperatures and a change in our pandemic routine. Thanks to GH's assiduous research, we've found a charming temporary home, artistically designed and decorated. We've read in the wide hammock, played croquet in the weedy lawn, grilled hamburgers outdoor, and stared into the reverse meteors flying up from the fire pit. We've also paid a visit to "India," or rather the nearby town of Delhi, pronounced DEL-hy alas, an...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Every year, in the run-up to Singapore's National Day on August 9, we announce the results of our annual Singapore Poetry Contest. Open to everyone who is NOT a Singaporean citizen, the annual contest seeks poems that use the word “Singapore” or its variants in a creative and significant way. It is our way of building imaginative connections of all kinds—integral, tangential, plural—between Singapore and the rest of the world. This year, the connections were greatly multiplied. We received a total of 432 poems, 337 more poems than last year, so you can imagine that this year’s contest was much more competitive, with many strong entries. The poems came from 32 countries around the world, 11 more than last year. Nigeria leads with 159 entries, followed by the USA 74, India 29, the Philippines 28, the UK 23, Singapore 13, Zimbabwe 11, South Africa 9, Canada 8, Malaysia 7, Australia 5, Ireland 5, P...

A deeply depressing novel in many ways, as its characters, black and white, try to love, or just simply care, across racial and gender lines, and fail. And yet its despair is somehow bracing, because it tells the truth about the difficulties, and embodies it in characters drawn from so deep within that one has to marvel at Baldwin's ability to get under the skin of not just the black characters but the white ones as well.