By Lee Chor Pharn I’ve been thinking how we should think about our changing world as move into the algorithmic-climate-security-weird era, and what is the “correct” state-society response to it. To my surprise, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shazili’s concept of shoggoths (that’s one up there) helped. Now shoggoths are fictional…

By Jeanette Kwek “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — Winston Churchill If you have ever watched any episode of popular children’s cartoon Paw Patrol, you would tend to agree with Churchill. On any given day in Adventure Bay, one of its hapless citizens…

By Isabelle Liew From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo protests, identity-based social justice movements are proliferating throughout the Anglo-Saxon world with America at its epicentre. Lumped under the umbrella term ‘woke’, some laud these movements as a force for much-needed reform [1] while others decry it as a destabilising force shaking the…

By Zulhaqem Bin Zulkifli With the COVID-19 pandemic, the push to adopt digital platforms and technologies in the arts and cultural sector has accelerated. New ways of imagining and producing art and culture have been emerging and they pose thought-provoking questions in many aspects, such as the meaning of the…

By Maverick Teo The rise of co-living will shift our notions of home ownership and the way we live. THE CO-LIVING LANDSCAPE IN SINGAPORE Within the last few years, co-living has expanded dramatically in Singapore. Today, there are more than 25 co-living companies in Singapore, up from just three in…

By Peter Ho THE FEAR FACTOR The COVID-19 pandemic belongs to a category of risk that is called “dread risk”. Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German psychologist who studies risk, describes dread risk as a low probability, high-damage event. …

By Gurubaran Subramaniam New “green” death options as viable eco-friendly alteratives to traditional post-death practices. When most people die, their bodies are either buried underground after being filled with potentially toxic chemicals, possibly contaminating the soil and groundwater, or burned for several hours at temperatures approaching 1000 degrees Celsius, an…

By Liana Tang In December 2019, news of a deadly virus was trickling out of Wuhan, China. The world took some time to process the reality and severity of the virus as it spread rapidly: our global interconnectedness spurred exponential spread across the globe, sparing few countries. In March 2020…

By Angel Chew Being prepared for a volatile and uncertain world may involve not just learning about what faces us ahead, but also relearning — or unlearning — lessons of old. Physicist Stephen Hawking said that the 21st century would be the “century of complexity”.[1] The shifting global balance of…