Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I asked Henry Abelove who were his intellectual guiding lights in his youth, and he cited Paul Goodman. What a surprise! I found Paul Goodman at Sarah Lawrence and consumed his poetry and essays on education. After hearing HA's answer, I bought Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals . The most striking aspect of this book is how Goodman manages to be both so logical and so imaginative. Whether he is discussing pornography, writer's block, making pacifist films, or banning cars from Manhattan, he is both persuasive and surprising. His imagination is not bounded by logic, and his logic is not softened by imagination. Some of the essays here are outdated, but the thinking behind them remains fresh and interesting. About advance-guard writing in America (and how commonsensical is the use of the English expression, instead of its pretentious French counterpart), Goodman writes as a committed writer himself: "An artists does not know that he is advance-guard, h...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A sociologist, a political scientist, a media studies professor, and two economists meet in a webinar to talk about Singapore beyond the pandemic. The sociologist emphasizes the social inequities surfaced by the pandemic. The political scientist urges a mindset change from profit calculation to moral reasoning in the formulation of public policy. The media studies professor warns of the dangers of fanning nationalistic rhetoric. One of the two economists argues that efficiency pursued to the detriment of social justice actually becomes inefficient. The other economist wants Singapore to change its input-based development model because it has not been working for the country for years before the present crisis. Although the webinar is not about hawker food or getting ahead in school, it attracts scores of people, partly because the speakers have strong social-media followings, and partly because it is so refr...