Dear reader,
Hello from Chiang Mai! Abhishek, Charmaine and I are here for the annual Splice Beta media festival. The organisers invited Jom to speak about our ongoing efforts to build a sustainable independent media firm. Still some way to go, but we’re grateful for the opportunity. Thank you to the almost 6,000 of you who’ve been part of this two-year journey. And if any of you are in Chiang Mai on Saturday and want to hang for a bit, reply and let us know!
Letters. Thanks, Bobby Jay, for your vehement defence of the US of A in response to Nigel Li’s essay last week, “Postcard from Washington DC: American decline?” In a week when many around the world are trying to understand how another Trump term might affect their countries or industries, it’s encouraging to hear about the secular strengths of the union.
“Singapore This Week”. In our weekly digest, we discuss a new documentary about Hougang by the Workers’ Party; Li Hongyi’s apparent resignation as director of Singpass; migrant workers on a fashion shoot; a UNESCO bid for Chingay, the annual street parade held around the Lunar New Year; M1’s break-up with the Fringe Festival; Singapore’s effective ban on “Small Hours of the Night”, a new film; and more.
“Essay”. Thiyaghessan Poongundranar has today published his second essay for us, “What made LKY a peerless orator? A computational analysis”. Thiya is a data scientist and occasional journalist whose work relies on computational analysis of large sets of data. Some of you may remember his earlier essay, “Forever alone: HardwareZone’s BBFAs”, which scraped over 500,000 posts from the feisty online forum to assess the activity and prevalence of the Singaporean equivalent of incels.
Today’s piece begins with a little family political debate familiar to many Singaporeans: Thiya arguing with his dad about whether today’s leaders can match up to LKY.
“Are our current leaders uniquely uncharismatic compared to Lee? And are they becoming increasingly similar and consequently boring? Is the popularity of Tharman Shanmugaratnam partially explainable due to his superior oratory? Advances in computational analysis can help us answer these questions.”
Thiya analyses almost 6,500 speeches sourced from the National Archives of Singapore. His explanations about methodology can get a little technical, but I hope you persevere, aided perhaps by the glossary at the end. There’s a pay-off in understanding why exactly LKY’s rhetoric was so unique.
When I started working as a journalist, some two decades ago, these were the sorts of questions I found fascinating, but all we could do then was pontificate subjectively. It’s cool that we now have the computational tools to do so with more analytical rigour. Read it now.
Jom fikir,
Sudhir Vadaketh
Editor-in-chief, Jom
Behind Jom’s art, with Charmaine Poh
Using the classic mediums of pastel and charcoal, Shenna’s artwork showcases the timelessness of charisma and the important role that the non-verbal plays in galvanising the masses. Replace the newspapers with mobile phones, and the same applies. A speech is far more than factual information; it conveys a sense of power and persona that has potentially far-reaching implications, even if we as viewers aren’t always able to immediately articulate how. How are we being led? What, really, are the messages we are receiving?
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