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 free. If you like wh

 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