What if your favourite packet of Maggi isn’t just comfort food, but a mirror of global capitalism, cultural loss, and nostalgia? The writer unpacks how a Swiss invention became a South-east Asian staple; redefining taste, memory, and the meaning of home in just two minutes.
In the 1970s, as female flight attendants in the West were fighting gender discrimination, Singapore Airlines and Thai Airways were building brands around their sexualised female icons. Are we willing to accept sexism when it subsidises “the nation”?
The practice of farming in Singapore has gone through several waves of transformation. What are today’s urban farmers trying to achieve?
The traditional Malay music produced by a British company in the 1960s and 1970s is an aural guide to history, tradition and the meaning of change.
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.
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.
