Jom

15/08/2025

Local firms give workers day off to watch Tamil superstar’s latest release; the art of (really) listening; Malay representation at NDP; hawker woes in the news, again; Singaporeans besotted with Chinese brands; Prabowo government mangles history; things going swimmingly for Sea; and more.

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: https://www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-150825/

Photographs from Jiachen Lin/Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons, Mediacorp/YouTube, Canva and Bukit Canberra Hawker Centre/Facebook

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Local firms give workers day off to watch Tamil superstar’s latest release; the art of (really) listening; Malay representation at NDP; hawker woes in the news, again; Singaporeans besotted with Chinese brands; Prabowo government mangles history; things going swimmingly for Sea; and more.

13/08/2025

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐉𝐨𝐦’𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐉𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐠: bit.ly/jomreadersurvey

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Photographs from Canva

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom (link in bio).

12/08/2025

Just like Singapore in the old days. There’s a nostalgia that grips us when we walk through some Malaysian towns, especially those, like Ipoh and Malacca, with similar shophouse architecture.

Joshua Tan, a postdoc in history at NUS, has a personal connection (no spoilers) to the Zhoushan Islands in the East China Sea. Reading his essay, we learn what the archipelago was like before it was hit with rapid development, which often sought to emulate Singapore: a “green petrochemical industry” in the Garden City, referencing Jurong Island.

If Malaysia’s towns infuse us with urban nostalgia, Joshua’s piece complements with archipelagic, from the ecological to the societal. How did our geographic ancestors relate to each other and the earth in an archipelagic mode of being? It’s an important question to ponder as we celebrate 60 years of the latest myth to capture this little island. Read Joshua’s piece now: https://www.jom.media/the-zhoushan-islands-archipelagic-kinship-across-the-south-seas/

Illustrations by Marie Toh for Jom

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Like Singapore, Zhoushan is slowly becoming unmoored from its archipelagic past, losing the gentle rhythms of its sea-bound worlds to the cacophony of capitalism.

08/08/2025

PAP draws Khairy’s ire; new parliamentarians sit for economics exam; public transport losing steam?; solving childhood education a group project; Singapore’s many pasts and futures; The Projector on the move, again; BlueSG’s shocking suspension; and more.

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-080825/

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

PAP draws Khairy’s ire; new parliamentarians sit for economics exam; public transport losing steam?; solving childhood education a group project; Singapore’s many pasts and futures; The Projector on the move, again; BlueSG’s shocking suspension; and more.

05/08/2025

An executive at an MNC in Singapore hires a Filipino domestic worker who, unbeknownst to her employer, is trapped in debt-bondage. Perhaps she paid an agent illegal fees disguised as “training costs”. What responsibility does the MNC have in ensuring this doesn’t happen here? And what about the MNC’s institutional investors? Many of us might argue that they’re too far removed, that it’s unfair to expect them to get so involved in the nitty-gritty of local employment injustices.

But what if they’ve made public commitments to promote responsible investing and to combat human trafficking? Ah, perhaps that’s when we might call for greater involvement in the problem. This is the crux of the argument by Robert Godden, an advisor for the Domestic Workers Justice Initiative (DWJI), an organisation committed to ending trafficking and exploitation within expatriate communities.

“DWJI has a clear mission: employers of MDWs, particularly foreigners in high-paying roles, need to be made aware of how illegal hiring practices harm domestic workers and understand the role they can play in countering such practices. Moreover, the firms they work for must encourage the use of ethical employment agencies to break the cycle of exploitation.”

Robert’s piece helps us connect the dots on complex “supply chains”: a domestic worker’s labour frees up her employer to do knowledge work for a large multinational, whose performance in turn reaps rewards for its institutional investors. They’re all connected, though the further away one is on the chain, the easier it is to look away. Even if you have little interest in this particular issue, reading the essay might simply allow you to appreciate the complex web of interactions in other fields in your life: https://www.jom.media/a-missed-opportunity-to-tackle-debt-bondage-faced-by-migrant-domestic-workers/

Composite created with photographs from Canva and Shutterstock and photographs from Canva

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Migrant domestic workers who’re trapped in debt-bondage—because of unscrupulous recruitment agencies—are sometimes unwittingly hired by foreign finance executives. The writer urges financial firms and their institutional investors to address this form of modern-day slavery.

01/08/2025

Latest IPS survey a window into minority and elderly lives; Singapore fetes sinkhole heroes; AI, friend or foe?; the newly-opened Bidadari Park; Lui Hock Seng, photographer extraordinaire; Carousell’s reinvention bid; and more.

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-010825/

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Lui Hock Seng, photographer extraordinaire; Singapore fetes sinkhole heroes; AI, friend or foe?; latest IPS survey a window into minority and elderly lives; the newly opened Bidadari Park; Carousell’s bid for reinvention; and more.

29/07/2025

“Much like the Olympics, which promote excellence, respect, and friendship, the Gay Games’s ethos is participation, inclusion, and personal best. To conventional sports like track and field, swimming, or wrestling, the organisers have welcomed non-Olympic sports that reflect local culture, like dodgeball, cheerleading, same-sex dancing, and even rodeo.

It’s supposed to be competitive, but not too serious. The Pink Flamingo is one of the games’ most beloved and flamboyant events: a blend of comedy, drag, and aquatic ballet. Swim teams perform elaborately choreographed and often hilariously campy skits in the water, complete with costumes, props, and plenty of glitter.”

Sports stories are often about adversity, tragedy or triumph, teamwork, and discipline. Rare is the one whose central theme is about creating opportunities and spaces for those excluded from the mainstream. That the Games happened in Hong Kong, under the watchful eye of Beijing, is remarkable. Why not Singapore next? It’s one of many questions that Alfredo prods us to think about.

https://www.jom.media/the-unlikely-triumph-of-the-g**s-at-the-gay-games-soccer-tournament/

Photographs courtesy of Alfredo Molinas and Gay Games Hong Kong, and from Canva

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

A revival. A triumph. And a blossoming of hope that sport can help shatter age-old prejudices, helping build a more inclusive and compassionate society.

25/07/2025

Our cyber sentinels; a potential new vaccine for dengue; recycling woes; the scourge of teenage va**ng; the other Padang; some good news for bookworms; academic institutions trying to prop up sagging venture funding; and more.

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: https://www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-250725/

Photographs from Canva

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Our cyber sentinels; a potential new vaccine for dengue; recycling woes; the scourge of teenage va**ng; the other Padang; some good news for bookworms; academic institutions trying to prop up sagging venture funding; and more.

22/07/2025

One of the great myths about Singapore, the “Smart Nation”, is that we prize data openness and transparency. Far from it. Part of the reason public discourse is crippled is that there isn’t enough freedom of information—say, on inequality, or ethnic breakdowns in universities or prisons. The long-standing suspicion is that politically inconvenient or possibly incendiary data is best kept under lock and key.

Neo Hui Yuan, a PhD candidate at Cornell University and first-time Jom writer, makes a strong argument for why more open data would benefit all parties in Singapore, including the ruling party and policymakers. Her essay opens with the remarkable, and ultimately doomed, six-year quest by Shannon Ang, NTU professor, to obtain basic data from CPF’s Retirement and Health Study.

“Like Kafka’s opaque proceedings, data access in Singapore can sometimes also seem like a black box to outsiders. While the front-end instructions and platforms for data application are clear, transparent, and institutionalised, the back-end processes of decision-making are often obscured.”

Hui Yuan’s research at Cornell examines information and data control in authoritarian regimes. Much of her research has been in Malaysia, whose experience is similar to ours. “The more an issue speaks to the narratives that underpin Malaysia’s socio-political equilibrium—say corruption, cost of living, and racial and religious divides—the harder it is to locate relevant data. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. In fact, my conversations with various data stakeholders and bureaucrats in Malaysia were filled with optimism—data is becoming more accessible and transparent in the country, due in large part to the joint efforts between civil society and the bureaucracy.”

Two states, Penang and Selangor, have already implemented their versions of a freedom of information act (FOIA). To make it a reality here, Hui Yuan says that “civil society needs to come together to champion for data transparency as an encompassing cause.”

Read the essay now: https://www.jom.media/a-turn-towards-transparency-the-case-for-more-open-data-in-singapore/

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

A shift to an open-by-default data governance structure would foster the more participatory society the PAP claims to want

18/07/2025

Marina Bay Sands and the amorality of capital; ST’s past and future; mental health of our primary schoolers; preserving animal species through cryo-conservation; unboxing 19th century Malaya; Amanda Heng in Venice; the rise of eSIMs; and more.

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: https://www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-180725/

Photographs from Canva and Wikimedia Commons

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Marina Bay Sands and the amorality of capital; ST’s past and future; mental health among primary schoolers; preserving animal species through cryo-conservation; unboxing 19th century Malaya; Amanda Heng in Venice; the rise of eSIMs; and more.

15/07/2025

Why did Ho Ching, former boss of Temasek and member of Singapore’s first family, write that bizarre Facebook post belittling Singapore’s pre-1819 significance? We’re not quite sure. One theory has it that there’s a little extended family feud involved. Kwa Chong Guan, nephew of Kwa Geok Choo, Lee Kuan Yew’s wife, is one of the historians behind Singapore: A 700-Year History, whose thesis is one of several that debunk Ho’s preferred narrative.

Whatever her motivations for doing so, it’s offered us all an opportunity to meditate on important concepts about our history, including the notion that the contemporary, territorial nation-state lens is necessarily the one through which we should understand ourselves—and that enigma called “Singapore”.

As Faris Joraimi and Sudhir Vadaketh write in this week's essay,“...the more serious issue is the way we judge the past based on the standards of the present. These are standards laid down by modern, territorial nation-states that were never the default condition of human existence. Even the most thriving port-cities in old South-east Asia were tiny relative to today’s metropolises. Yet for over a thousand years, these little emporia played a vital role in international trade and politics…

But because we live in a time of territorial nation-states, history is often told as the story of how nation-states came to be. The past must always be backward and uneventful until the nation brought us into the bright dawn of history’s stage.”

This piece, then, is less a critique of Ho’s words than a call to reimagine historical concepts and approaches. With less than a month to go before SG60, it’s an appropriate time to read it.

https://www.jom.media/living-with-tumasik-and-temasek-meditations-on-our-national-history/

Photograph licensed by artists Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Debates about Singapore’s pre-1819 significance, sparked by Ho Ching, offer us a chance to question the very notion of a national history

11/07/2025

Understanding South-east Asia; PSP renewal; challenges in a cashless society; teenagers target “paedophiles”; Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s “Nightingale Wards”; Singapore at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; tensions in the gig economy; and more.

Photographs from Canva and Wikimedia Commons

🇸🇬 Read more in “Singapore This Week”, Jom’s weekly, opinionated update on our city-state: https://www.jom.media/singapore-this-week-110725/

We believe the best way to fund deep, meaningful journalism is through our community of readers. This ensures we are accountable primarily to them. If you like our approach, and our work, do subscribe to Jom: jom.media/membership

Understanding South-east Asia; PSP renewal; challenges in a cashless society; teenagers target “paedophiles”; Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s “Nightingale Wards”; Singapore at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; tensions in the gig economy; and more.