Dear reader,
Jom Cakap. 7-9pm, Tuesday, June 24th 2025. The Economist’s Sue-Lin Wong in conversation with Jom’s Corrie Tan about “Scam Inc”.
We’re down to our last 30 tickets. Get yours now. For a taste of what to expect, check out our blurb below on money mules and scams.
- Is the PAP really criticising Israel or is it merely the latest round of wayang?
- Pete Hegseth’s “provocative and often hostile language” at the Shangri-La Dialogue
- Are money mules victims or perpetrators of Scam Inc?
- Singapore’s clinical trials into novel therapies for Parkinson’s
- Opportunities and risks with the ASEAN power grid
- Of mermaids and men, at Cyrene Reef
- Singapore’s theatre groups explore modern masculinity
- Circles.Life’s stellar performance
And more, in our weekly digest. Read it now.
Essay: “Recapturing the reading spirit in Singapore” by Isaac Neo.
“My child doesn’t like to read. They can’t finish a book. What should I do?”
I’ve lost track of how many times concerned parents, when they learn of my profession and love for long-form writing, ask me this. As a Gen Xer who grew up very much in the print world, right around the birth of the personal computer, I don’t have an easy answer. I’ve had to shift my own media consumption and production with each passing year, especially after the introduction of the smartphone. Video has become an essential part of my education, and communication with others. My usual measly offering to parents is that in today’s world, one’s literary and digital diets need to be tended with as much care and deliberation as your nutritional one.
Thankfully, today we have a far more accomplished navigator of these unpredictable and fluctuating times. Isaac Neo was born in 1994, and grew up using both floppy disks and smartphones. He’s also a writer and podcaster. In his second piece for Jom, he takes us from the invention of writing in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish (now in modern-day Iraq) sometime around 3500BC, to the rise of book clubs in Singapore today—an antidote, and resistance, to the forces of digital disruption.
“[T]he smartphone emerged during this period, and it soon displaced the trusty book in my hands wherever I went. Memes on Facebook replaced the adventures of Harry Potter and friends or the fights to the death in The Hunger Games. The fantasy worlds in my head gave way to the doomscrolls of cafe food and holiday destinations on Instagram.
My voluminous bookshelf has grown dustier; the pages of my childhood books have browned in the Singapore humidity. Popular now contains more assessment books and lifestyle peripherals than actual literature, perhaps emblematic of how we’ve come to prioritise reading in this country.”
Isaac has gone through what your child will, and through his empathetic voice, we not only reacquaint ourselves with the many reasons why we should read, but also how we might cultivate that love once again. It may seem a tad self-referential for a long-form publication to be preaching about the virtues of reading, but well, it’s one of the things all of us at Jom will be public, noisy activists for. Nourish yourself with Isaac’s piece now.
Jom baca,
Sudhir Vadaketh
Editor-in-chief, Jom
Behind Jom’s art, with Charmaine Poh
Kimberly Wee’s textured, dream-like visuals make their appearance again, teleporting us, like books do, to a different world. In her reimagined world, reading is central to society. Her colourful crayon sketches recall the uninhibited curiosity of young minds. The representation of this classically tactile, analogue artistic medium in a digital form blurs the distinction in our minds, and thus holds up a mirror to the ways our brain subconsciously switches attention between devices, apps, and pieces of content.
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