News this week included: a year after GE2025, ST examines the performance of new political office holders, and new MPs across both parties; ST analysis on AI as the next potential political battleground between the PAP and the WP; SMU professor’s commentary on whether Singapore’s “protect every worker” doctrine can deal with the AI disruption; some UN member states call on Singapore to end executions, reassess POFMA, and establish a human rights body (and MFA’s response); Tekka.sg, a community-led digital platform to help traditional business sell online; ST comparison of premium BTO projects with private properties; Sheng Siong's facial recognition technology helps nab woman who stole 19 bottles of wine over seven occasions; SCMP on Singapore’s attractiveness as an investment haven amid global uncertainty; ST on the rise of Chinese food brands and restaurants here; female board directorships on the rise, but still much work to be done; chronic kidney disease on the rise; pregnancy loss coach’s commentary on supporting parents who’ve tried and failed to have kids; Yishun 10, Singapore’s first multiplex, is set to be redeveloped; Jho Low seeks Trump pardon; and an investigation by Israel’s Channel 13 finds soldiers operated with shoot-to-kill orders for any male in Gaza, killing an Israeli hostage in the process (and we’ve written many times about Singapore’s complicity in the genocide).

Below are the issues we explore in depth:

Society: Kabel networks

What’s a cable but a bundle of wires sheathed in plastic, ferrying electricity or light. But the word, and its brethren, carries a second life in several languages. In vernacular Malay, pakai kabel—literally “use cables”—describes the leveraging of personal connections to land a job or climb the career ladder. Spanish has enchufe, meaning electrical plug, which doubles as shorthand for the same practice. Thai offers เส้นสาย (sên-sǎai), a word for the body’s connective tissues and pathways, repurposed to describe the invisible networks that open professional doors. The presence of similar metaphors in such varied languages reflects the universal recognition that educational qualifications, work experience, and skills, no matter how impressive, will only get you so far. Who you know and what you’re part of is as important. 

Vincent Chua, an NUS sociologist specialising in social networks, has articulated the importance of social capital in Singapore—resources embedded in our networks—for social mobility and for helping individuals navigate difficult times. What does that mean for communities with limited social capital? In a 2016 paper on the intersecting effects of gender and ethnicity on social capital, Chua and his team found that because Malay men are underrepresented in universities and in senior professional positions, they are less likely to know people in high-status occupations than Malay women and non-Malay men and women. 

Things don’t seem to have changed much in the past decade. A new study by the Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs (RIMA) on intergenerational educational and occupational mobility within Singapore’s Malay community found that social capital deficit remains despite generational improvements in respondents’ education level and self-assessments of financial standing. Over three in four (79 percent) respondents had a higher educational attainment than their parents, and almost three in four (73.4 percent) perceived their financial status to be much better or better. Malays appeared across junior and middle tiers of white-collar work but were scarce in upper management and largely absent from higher-paying sectors like finance and professional services. Even though Malay men exceeded national averages in diploma and professional qualifications by 2020, they remain underrepresented (by nine to 11 percent compared to other ethnicities) in universities—the precise threshold that unlocks the most lucrative tracks. Many reported financial constraints and family responsibilities as hindrances to a university education. 

The other barrier blocking access to upper-tier white collar work appears to be a lack of the kind of social capital Chua wrote about. Respondents described growing up without the informal infrastructure on which professional advancement often depends: networks, mentors, or family members. Existing formal programmes by Yayasan Mendaki and Skillsfuture Singapore help, but only if you already know how to find and access them—insider knowledge that tends to live in families with prior university or professional career experiences. Those who did have such networks navigated their education and careers more effectively, proactively upskilling and adapting to their work environments. Networks expand when the people in them do. Helping more Malays access universities—worryingly, the number for men dipped slightly between 2010 and 2020—and professional environments would mean more nodes, more connections, more pathways for the next generation to eventually pakai kabel.

Society: Explosion in ‘The Spice Islands’

They were there long before we were. From the imposing Himalayas to the majestic peaks of tropical South-east Asia, humans evolved in awe of, and in harmony with, mountains. We mythologised them, as with Meru, centre of the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual universes in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain cosmologies. Gunung adalah rumah para dewa, the mountain is the home of the gods, said Indonesians long before there was an Indonesia, long before we understood tectonic plates, seismic activity, and the interconnectedness of all matter along the Pacific Ring of Fire. With over 130 active volcanoes across their 17,000-odd islands, Indonesians have an innate, intimate understanding of their power. Some much further away have an inkling. When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, artillery-like sounds were heard in Mauritius, almost 5,000km away. Because of fine particles hitting the upper atmosphere and scattering sunlight, sky hues changed as far away as Europe, with blood-red skies reflected in the paintings of that time.

Following the eruption of Dukono on May 8th, M. Guntur Cobobi, a local resident and cultural ecology researcher, wrote about indigenous practice in The Straits Times: “An eruption in the morning did not stop teenagers from planning a climb that same afternoon. The villagers knew the deer-hunting trails winding behind the mountain by heart. Passing near the crater rim was no different from walking the path behind one’s own house…traditional knowledge passed quietly across generations. Do not build settlements near cold lava channels. Do not clear land all the way towards the summit. Do not overexploit the resources at the mountain’s base. These were values the community observed on their own, without needing formal prohibition from any authority.” 

Social media and other digital technologies have laid waste to these traditional forms of being with our planet. Dukono’s majesty and complexity have been compressed into 10 second clips, fodder for businesses and influencers vying for eyeballs. It’s been erupting almost continuously since 1933, with an elevated level of activity since 2008—just in time for all the smartphones and drones that now hover along its edge. There’s everything from a standard close-up of our earth, pregnant and bulging, exploding with ferocity, to the operatic work of Maiyarinjani, showing a woman in a flowing red gown cantering gracefully midway up the mountain, towards mushroom clouds—as if the Ministry of Tourism had hired Kate Bush to film a promo. The video by Kelana Malut, a tour agency, best captures the vertiginous drama that has drawn climbers from around the world. Perched on the edge of a barren cliff’s face, a lemming in a lunar landscape on the Pacific Ocean’s edge, one can peer into the crater as plumes of gorgeous smoke erupt into the air, along with gases, lava, ash and other pyroclasts. Having ascended rock older than humans, one can witness the future of this terrain. The thrill is as much in the watching as in later being watched watching. The home of the gods sees a new social media deity incarnated every day.

On May 8th, Dukono’s eruption killed two Singaporeans, Shahin Muhrez Abdul Hamid and Timothy Heng, and one Indonesian, Angel Krishela Pradita. Criticisms about the hikers ignoring local warnings, as well as the magnetic pull of social media engagement were rejected by Cobobi. “They came to live more fully.” He believes there exists a structural gap in “managing visitor safety” that the Indonesian state must fill. “They deserved better information and better systems.” While true, this is also a moment for introspection about a modern media system that incentivises many others to traipse around the world, parachuting into local communities, without sufficient time to embody their practices, and likely without enough awareness about the power of those before them, those there long before us.

Society: The algorithm needs a disapproving audience

When Kira Peace, a Kiwi singer living in Singapore, boarded a public bus with her guitar and began to perform, she got the exact, expected reaction from a self-policing audience. Decades of civic conditioning treat any deviation from collective orderliness as a minor social emergency. Someone warned others to ignore her. Expressions tightened. Others immediately disengaged. The ambient disapproval was visible and perfectly filmable. 

An MRT carriage and a public bus are not neutral environments. They are reflections of a social contract: minimise yourself as much as possible so that you do not become a disturbance in someone else’s efficient journey home. Singaporean commuters are extraordinarily good at this, which makes them, from a content-creation standpoint, an almost perfect reactionary audience. They do not need to be provoked into anything dramatic. They simply need to visibly disapprove to provide a stark contrast to an artist who does not know the rules. (Peace did not respond to queries about whether she has a busking license.)

What Kira Peace has understood, perhaps instinctively, is that virality is not about talent alone. It is about friction. A busker on a New York subway generates mild interest at best. The performer blends into the city’s accepted emotional texture and the algorithm gets nothing usable. But perform uninvited on a Singapore bus, and the environment does the dramatic work for you. The visible discomfort becomes the catalyst that turns content into a cultural flashpoint. Singapore’s social conformity is, in this sense, a resource being mined. 

In optimising so thoroughly for compliance, Singapore has created a public that reacts to non-compliance in highly legible, highly consistent ways. And legibility, in the attention economy, is currency. Half the audience agrees she was disruptive and inconsiderate. The other half thinks Singaporeans need to relax. Both halves are engaged and sharing. In a media landscape where invisibility is the real threat to an emerging artist, being called a nuisance by a disapproving commuter is, functionally, a PR stunt. 

Inadvertently, Singapore may have become one of the most productive environments in the world for this specific kind of content: risque enough for mild social disapproval that drives engagement, but not so offensive as to trigger the dreaded “Call police”. The more rigorously its public upholds the social contract, the more valuable the content gets.

Earth: More like l’enfant terrible

The town of Chimbote gazes out at the vastness of the Pacific Ocean from the northern reaches of the Peruvian coast. Until a century or so ago, it was a tiny village of 800, subsisting on the silvery shoals of smelly, sumptuous anchovies that teemed in the waters lapping at its shores. Every few Christmases though, the village suffered as the Pacific’s cold waters mysteriously warmed and drove the fish away. Chimbote’s fishermen baptised this curiosity El Niño de Navidad–“the Christmas Child”. An oddly tender moniker for a seemingly baleful God.

By the time Chimbote made Peru the world’s anchovy capital in the 1970s, scientists knew that from time to time, the lusty trade winds that normally blow from South America towards Australasia lose their ardour. Instead of sloshing westward with gusto on these winds, the Pacific’s warm surface waters become lethargic, preventing the nutrient-rich cooler waters from rising. The anchovies leave. Thankfully regional waters are never short of them: South-east Asians might starve without ikan bilis.

Glibness aside, El Niños can have catastrophic effects. Warm water threatens fishing industries along South America’s west coast. Warm water evaporates faster too, leading to more rainfall there and less here, causing floods there, hot weather spells and droughts here, and often, famines everywhere. The strongest El Niño (when winds deviated most from the norm) was recorded in 1877-78 and is estimated to have led to 50 million deaths. A severe El Niño in 1982-83 spawned typhoons that caused destruction up and down the coast of the Americas while triggering drought in Australia. A similar 1997-98 event deepened Indonesia’s economic crisis, hastening Suharto’s ouster and upending an entire order. Singapore residents will remember the terrible haze from Indonesia’s blazing peatlands in 2015, which caused widespread acute respiratory infections and school closures. The overheated waters also killed around 20 percent of our coral reefs. (El Niño’s counterpart is La Niña, which causes wetter conditions on our side of the Pacific; drier on the other).

This year, it seems like we’re headed for a “Godzilla” El Niño. Already, temperatures in the Pacific are well above normal and expected to rise through the year. Earth is warmer than it was a decade ago, so the effects are likely to be more severe and longer-lasting: heatwaves, droughts, flash floods, crop damage, and haze. Poorer regions could face public health crises too. All this at a time when structural strains on energy supplies and prices are mounting because of war. “South-east Asia faces a perfect storm caused by a double whammy of geopolitical developments and climate change,” Grace Fu, minister for sustainability and environment, said last week. Hotter, drier weather—expected to arrive in July—could strain reservoir levels, forcing Singapore to rely more than usual on desalination and NEWater. 

Unlike the mystified fishermen from centuries ago, today’s advance warning systems allow nations to plan earlier, by strengthening food and water security, for instance and—just a thought—making contingency plans for migrant workers and other vulnerable groups. Meanwhile, able individuals can better “heat-proof” themselves too, by improving their cardio endurance, while everyone can be more mindful of their fluid consumption. There is a crumb of solace in that climate science, while incredibly sophisticated, is not yet exact—there have been instances when the direst of El Niño predictions have not come to pass. May the only Godzilla we see this year be in our iced milos.

Arts: The Piano Teacher

If you live in a block of flats, chances are you’ll have woken up to this musical progression. First, the determined march of major and minor scales ascending the black-and-white ivories, filtering up several floors and into your bedroom. If this warm-up wasn’t your weekend alarm clock, you’ll definitely be awake by the main act—tiny fingers taking on Bach, Mozart, Chopin—which you’ll hear repeatedly over the course of the next year. On weekends and after hours, children and teens all across the nation-state will knuckle down in front of their upright pianos, whether a firsthand splurge or a secondhand steal, wedged through narrow corridors and gates and into homes by zealous parents hoping for anything between a child prodigy and an elite secondary school.

Amy Chua became the poster mum for these impossible musical expectations in her controversial memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: “I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner...no birthday parties...When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” In her recent memoir, The Story Game, Singaporean writer Shze-Hui Tjoa describes what she believes were the well-meaning musical aspirations of her parents, believing her a piano protege: “Body’s parents only want the best. This is important to remember, going forward: Body’s parents are ordinary, good-and-bad people. Like most parents, they actively want to benefit their child. They care inordinately for Body’s more visible counterpart: Mind.” Chua’s anecdote ends on a triumphant note of eventual mastery; Tjoa’s on a broken one. She refuses to eat so she’ll be weak enough to skip marathon practice sessions, then gets scoliosis from the hours spent sitting at the piano. 

The scholar Mari Yoshihara, while researching the classical music obsession among middle-class families in East Asia, makes a case for its proliferation in the 20th century both from the postwar mass production of instruments and the development of pedagogy, whether you’re an acolyte of the Suzuki method or the Yamaha music school. But it’s the pursuit of distinction, rather than passion, that’s propelled the job of the piano teacher to the second spot in the 2026 Best Jobs Index for Singapore, according to job search portal Indeed. “Many parents treat piano lessons seriously as a music education and they see the potential of piano teaching as a backup job option,” Julie Tan, president of the Singapore Music Teachers’ Association, told CNA. “This mindset is also boosted by (hopes of) Direct School Admission entry, where certain schools use the graded piano exam levels as an administrative entry yardstick.” 

Singapore has long risked treating leisure as work, where the arts and sport are pursued as part of a broader metric for professional success, not the pleasure of the soul; where music becomes a marker of class and competence, rather than comfort. Piano teachers told CNA that their role “often requires a high degree of emotional intelligence to manage high expectations from parents”, where “any disgruntlement from parents can put their reputation at stake and...affect future business prospects”. These facets of the piano teaching industry, in many ways, rival the unsavoury aspects of Singapore’s multimillion-dollar tuition industry. A chorus of Reddit comments agreed. “As a piano player, I’ve mixed feelings about parents pushing their kids to do this just to get DSA. You get stunted musicians and their music literacy just isn’t great. It’s painfully obvious compared to students who genuinely love music,” went one of them. They added: “Great for piano instructors’ income though. Definitely something I’d consider if I wanted to leave corporate.”

Abhishek Mehrotra, Maria Oshige, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, and Sudhir Vadaketh wrote this week’s issue.

Letters in response to any blurb can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.