Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . On Tuesday, we announced the first annual Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures. The awards aim to encourage the teaching and study of Singapore literature at college level and the cultivation of general appreciation for the character and achievements of Singapore literature. Three awards of USD250.00 each are given to written works of literary criticism that illuminate their chosen topics for the general reader. Essay topics may include studies of a single author or a single work. The topics may also be of a comparative nature, that is, the essays may compare an author/work with another author/work. The second author/work may be non-Singaporean. Because of the ...

 I'm a fan of Martina Evans, and this latest collection gives many different pleasures. The shorter lyrics offer a wealth of local and personal detail that seduce a reader with the childhood world of Cork and the adult one of London. Even when she is writing about her job in radiography, she is not so much writing about the work as the people: their fears, their waywardness, their idiosyncracies. The poetic sequences, whether they are about shoes or cats, offer the delights of variations on a theme. The long narrative "Mountainy Men" is yet another triumph of narrative skill. It reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, not her religious intensity, but her deep ambivalence towards Gothic grotesquerie. Evans is enraptured not by transcendence, but by the here and now, the there and then. 

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore will soon take another step towards becoming a totalitarian state with the introduction of the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Bill, or FICA, in Parliament last Monday. Independent Singaporean journalist Kirsten Han analyzes the problems with the bill effectively here . As she summarizes, "The official narrative is that this law will protect Singapore from foreign meddling in our domestic affairs and governance. We’re told that it’s about safeguarding our political sovereignty. FICA, like the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), will take on hostile information campaigns, so that Singaporeans can decide on Singaporean issues without the sneaky intervention or sabotage of outsiders. The reality, though, is that FICA is yet another vaguely worded piece of legislation, designed to give the authorities maximum discretion to cast a wide net over all so...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Dale Peck, the author of Hatchet Jobs , strikes again. And again. At the gay Republican journo and pundit Andrew Sullivan, whose self-hating screeds supporting the traditional family, compassionate conservatism, and other such mythical beasts deserve buckets of vitriol but receives at Peck's hand the scalpel of savage, and very funny, wit. Here's how the review of Sullivan's Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021 (Simon & Schuster) begins: "Andrew Sullivan first showed up on my radar in 1991, an innocuous blip that gave no indication of the full-frontal assault about to be launched on the American left. I was working for OutWeek at the time, and I’d been tasked with proofing an interview between a seraphically beautiful young journalist named Maer Roshan and the recently appointed editor in chief of The New Republic (who, if I’m being completely honest, wasn’t so bad-looking...