BTO piling. Jets thundering above. MRTs thudding and clanking through the tunnels. The cacophony of crowds. We’re inundated by noise every day. Here are our recommendations to help you power through it all.
Note: staff bios are on our team page.
Abhishek, head of content
When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi (2016)
I can’t believe Paul Kalanithi was 36 when he wrote When Breath Becomes Air. But write it he did, just before dying of lung cancer—a bildungsroman and a philosophy treatise paced like a potboiler. Kalanithi considers beauty, truth, and duty in prose that’s somehow both poetic and limpid. Bonus: the Fulke Greville epigraph that gives the book its name: “You that seek what life is in death, / Now find it air that once was breath…”
“The Day the Dinosaurs Died”, Douglas Preston (2019)
I read this at least once every year. How can anyone not? Set in a place called Hell Creek, it’s a real-life mystery from prehistory that unfolds over 24 hours; spans geology, archaeology, astronomy, and biology; and is inhabited by dinosaurs (duh), asteroids, floods, and scientists with just the right amount of kooky. Even if that does nothing for you, the story throws our struggles with ambient noise into stark relief: the dinosaurs see your piddly piledrivers and raise you shrieking, deathly space boulders. Perspective, people.
Charmaine, co-founder and head of visual culture and media
“Gone Home” (2013)
Set in 1995, “Gone Home” is a first-person walking simulator video game in which the protagonist, a college student, returns to her Oregon home to find everyone gone. It is only by exploring each room that she begins to piece together narratives about her family members that have been withheld even to one another. Heralded as an experimental indie game that eschewed linearity in favour of an autonomous experience, “Gone Home” is a classic for those who wish to explore worlds at their own pace.
“Monster” (2023)
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s coming-of-age drama gently peels apart the secret lives of children, revealing the kernels of worlds unknown to, and diminished by, the adults around them.The film swept the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay awards at Cannes, and with good reason: its charismatic leads, moving soundtrack by the impeccable Ryuichi Sakamoto, and delicate cinematography combine to form a powerful ode to the depths of desire and freedom.
Corrie, arts editor
“LUX”, Rosalía (2025)
Rosalía conjures a feminism of the sublime in this incantatory classical pop album. Who needs men when you have God? She’s built a vaulted cathedral of arias, requiems and waltzes (in 13 languages!), housing her raw, delicate soprano alongside serrated violins from the London Symphony Orchestra. This is an immersive offering that rewards the devotee with flashes of the divine in the everyday; every rolling thrum of the drums on “Divinize” cleaves my ribcage wide open, the way the sun might crack a thicket of clouds.
The poetry of Andrea Gibson (1975-2025)
Gibson convinced me that poetry was meant to be heard. The spoken word legend died of cancer in July, and the verse they left us is a reminder of how pocket-sized poems—potent in their portrayals of queerness, trauma, mortality—can contain galaxies. But it’s their unvarnished, glistening love poetry that’s lingered with me. Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” Watch Gibson reading “Love Letter from the Afterlife” to their wife, now widow, and find yourself in tears.
Faris, history editor
“SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure” (2025)
This cooperative cooking game is a palate-cleanser for South-east Asians squabbling over food online. The setting: a fantasy archipelago resembling ours, with few references to modern-day borders. The challenge: prepare familiar regional dishes while fending off monsters, beasts, and plant-spirits. Produced by Singaporean developer kopiforge, “SEDAP!” delights in sharing our neighbour’s lunch, not stealing it.
“Pentiment” (2022)
I’ve gotten over historical games indulging command-and-conquer fantasies, preferring those that explore the instability of choices and timelines. As the Protestant Reformation overturns ideas about God and the universe, play as a manuscript artist in 16th-century Bavaria caught in a mystery involving peasants, aristocrats, and the Church. Its meditations on truth and power may say something for our current information crisis.
Saki, head of research and social media
“i wouldn’t stop this feeling”, beansclub (2025)
beansclub is a local, genre-bending producer/DJ whose experimental music blends hard-hitting bass lines with Y2K sounds and hypnotic, pitched-up vocals. In “i wouldn’t stop the feeling”, he pierces the gnarly mix of thumping base and hi-hats with lyrics that professes his infatuation and spellbound state. Louder than loud, the 6min 33s-track is great for rager parties, or going through the noisy bends of the Thomson-East Coast Line.
“Steve” (2025)
This film adaptation of Shy by Max Porter is set in mid-90s’ England. Cillian Murphy plays Steve, the passionate head teacher of a reform school. The institution is severely understaffed and underfunded, with teachers juggling several responsibilities at a time. While managing the school, Steve has to negotiate his personal mental health issues. The film features a DnB/jungle track, an iconic genre born out of the UK’s working-class rave scene, where for one protagonist, the rapid breakbeats provide a temporary respite that hushes the “weather in his head to be kind”.
Stephen, strategy advisor
“The Harder They Come (original soundtrack recording)”, Jimmy Cliff (1972)
I was in high-school when my sister brought me a Jimmy Cliff tape from a trip to Jamaica. The soundtrack is credited with bringing reggae to America and ushering in a revolution that influenced music globally. He doesn’t get the same recognition as Bob Marley, but I find Cliff’s vocals and songwriting equally powerful. He died in November, so I re-listened to the album recently. “Many Rivers to Cross” is my favorite—a song about resilience, struggle and displacement.
Watchmen (1987)
I received this graphic novel as a present recently. As a comic book fan, I love the format and deeply layered storytelling. It’s partly set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war and the cold war. It features superheroes who are deeply flawed. It’s not really clear who the good guys and bad guys are. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but whenever I pick it up, I’m immediately lost in another world.
Sudhir, co-founder and editor-in-chief
“Philosophize This”. Episode #235. The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han (2025)
BCH’s work mediated by an unassuming, former warehouse worker turned podcast philosopher? Yes. “The Burnout Society” (2010) is refracted through his 2002 treatise on Zen Buddhism, to show how Western conceptions of self and God contribute to burnout. Liberation awaits, for in each moment your experience is complete—you are enough, as you are. “I wish to live like drifting clouds with a heart that dwells nowhere; procure for me only things I need not cling to.” There’s a lot in here, and repeated listens are rewarding.
“Be my own boyfriend”, Olivia Dean (2021)
The song “Dive” (2023) put Olivia on my playlist, and her sophomore album “The Art of Loving” (2025) is fab, but this tune soothed the loss of Amy Winehouse (a key influence of hers). Self-love can be clichéd, but this is bursting with Olivia’s sass and wit. Her control and range are evident in an octave jump, best heard in the acoustic version: “Lately, I've been just what I need.” Feel yourself, and the star you’re co-constituting, in that moment. And then let it go.
Waye, co-founder
Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik (2024)
Journalist Lili Anolik met artist-author Eve Babitz in 2012 and developed a “fetishistic” preoccupation with her, culminating in 2019’s Hollywood’s Eve. That might’ve ended Anolik’s obsession had she not later stumbled upon an unsent letter to Joan Didion among Babitz’s papers; a “lovers’ quarrel” she surmised. The find shaped a story of two contrasting, enigmatic women, who moved in the same literary circles of 60s-70s’ Los Angeles. Both were instrumental in chronicling a rebellious and disillusioned America. Fascinating and provocative. An escape to bygone days.
“The Great Beauty”, Paolo Sorrentino (2013)
To discover Rome through Sorrentino’s swooping lens is to drift between the glorious and the grotesque, the delicate and the wretched; civilisation’s beauties and beasts. To discover it through the acute sensibility of protagonist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a charismatic man-about-town newly 65, is to confront one’s mortality. Jep saunters across his beloved city, offering wry meditations on love and loss. This act of walking reanimates the clamour of his past, within which he finds, as did this viewer, the silent inevitability of the beyond.
Zaid, community manager
Adab al-Mufrad, Hadith 479
The world felt this year like it’s ending in different ways every day. Personal grief, irreversible ecological damage, ongoing genocides…loss is all around. Throughout the year, I found myself returning to this prophetic wisdom: if the Final Hour comes & you have in your hands a sapling, plant that seed. The world hasn’t (yet) ended. But even if we hear that final call blasting? We’ll keep planting anyway.
Maintenance of Everything: Part One, Stewart Brand (2024)
Maintenance of Everything is a beautifully mundane, multi-volume book in progress. There was something about owning a motorcycle this year that got me thinking about maintenance (an entire chapter here is about this—so not just me). But maintenance also feels like resistance; against the noise of new and shiny, against breakdowns, against the extremes of hustle culture, and lying flat. So as 2026 comes, say it with me: maintain ah bro.
