Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In the recent Committee of Supply Debate, Workers' Party MP Jamus Lim called for smaller class sizes in Singapore's schools . Class sizes now average 33 pupils. MP Lim proposed a cap of 23 pupils. As he argued in his Facebook post, "It all depends on what we think the purpose of the classroom is. Is it to simply deliver the material in the prescribed syllabus, leaving the onus of understanding to the student? Or is it to foster genuine learning, ensuring no child is left in the dark? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the first position. In fact, that’s what often happens at the tertiary level; the student is expected to take ownership of their education. But if it is the latter, especially the lower levels, then I think our system falls short." It is a mistake to view education as "delivering the material in the prescribed syllabus" at any level of the system. As the o...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore has every reason to be proud of Asymptote , the outstanding journal of literary translation with a monthly global readership of 55,000 for the 1,603 translations published and archived in its ten years of existence. In 2015, Asymptote became the first magazine to receive the London Book Fair Award for International Literary Translation Initiative. The Guardian hosted its high-profile weekly showcases between the period of 2015-2017, winning it and the newspaper even more readers for literary translations. Yet Singapore's National Arts Council has never provided any long-term funding for Asymptote, which is founded and headed by LEE Yew Leong, a Singaporean, and incorporated in Singapore. It is not for the lack of trying on the part of Asymptote. The journal made two major attempts, in 2016, after the London Book Fair Award, and in 2020, to ask for the kind of funding that would susta...

The Budapest Festival Orchestra was stupendous yesterday afternoon. Under the baton of its founder-conductor Iván Fischer, it rollicked through Shostakovich's "Selections from Suite for variety orchestra in eight parts" (1950), finessed Bernstein's "Serenade" (with replacement Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman) and rendered Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 its fulsome due. I thought the first movement of the Rachmaninov was a little sluggish, but the rest of the symphony was played with such  emotional conviction that I fell in love with the music all over again. I had to rush off, abandoning AH, to meet EN for dinner before the NYC launch of the journal Asymptote. We had a good soto ayam at the Noodle Bar on Orchard Street, and then walked over to the Living Theater for the launch. It was lovely to meet Yew Leong's friends, poet and translator Yu Yan Chen and contributing editor Dylan Suher. Of all the readers, I particularly enjoyed hearing Cole Sw...