News this week included: Nepal floods, nine Singaporeans remain uncontactable; Air India seeks S$1.5bn from SIA as losses mount (and WP MP Kenneth Tiong responds); scam losses continue to drop; MOM taps volunteer networks, app to make it easier for migrant workers to highlight workplace issues; more parental support (including for children of unwed parents), but workplace attitudes must change too; Shopee and TikTok sellers call out auto-generated AI ads that mislead customers; Malay/Muslim youth value meaningful work, relationships, faith over job titles; reactions to Lawrence Wong’s call for Singaporeans to learn Malay; SG fashion label turns old saris into shirts; accidents involving cyclists at four-year high; four-day coffee festival in Tanjong Pagar next week; more youths investigated for shop theft; parents launch non-profit to combat childhood brain cancer; NUS researchers find drug that turns off “master switch” in aggressive breast cancer; Quah swimming siblings will not feature at Asian Games, for the first time since 2006, because they’re focussing on studies; and if you spot a horseshoe crab in our waters, researchers want to know.

Below are the issues we explore in depth: 

Society: Jangan laut dihilang makna

The last of four themes at 2026’s National Day Rally was building a “Future Ready Singapore”. This will be partly fulfilled by connecting smaller islands around Jurong Island to form a new Western Island for industrial and defense needs. In announcing this, Lawrence Wong, prime minister, channelled the spirit of his predecessors, and their mastery over nature. He celebrated “the Singapore way” of planning “50, 70, even 100 years ahead”.

Land reclamation is an old friend. Since independence, Singapore has effectively expanded by 22 percent in land mass, justified by population growth. In the 1960s, with the post-independence Total Fertility Rate (TFR) at 4.662, the so-called “Great Reclamation” created the East Coast area, where the government built homes for some 100,000 people. Yet even in 2026, with a TFR of 0.87, they claim to be “planning with every Singaporean — born and not yet born — in mind”. Immigrants will make up the shortfall. Singapore plans to welcome as many new citizens annually as there are births. So, no change to an economic growth model premised on ever more humans. 

But what is the cost of progress beyond what the eye can see? Consider the word “reclamation”—re-clamation. As if the sea owed us this land, as if it was ours to begin with, lost somewhere, and it is simply reclaimed by us. Reclamation has Latin roots, meaning “to cry out against”, or to “protest”. Before the modern connotation of land reclamation, reclaim also meant, in Old French, calling a hawk back to the glove—to tame. When the government says it will “reclaim” the islands, it is describing an old, quiet arrogance: that nature is ours to appropriate whenever we want more of it, and, never mind the precious ecosystems we’ll sacrifice in the process. 

People too. The Orang Laut community faces the risk of displacement first from Semakau, and now from this. The descendants of the community are just a generation or two removed from a kampong that is now a landfill and potentially a future industrial estate. They hold on to a “Jiwa Laut”, a spirit of the sea, despite the gargantuan efforts of a government raring to tame the environment. In response, Orang Laut SG published an Instagram post, warning about the sea losing its meaning (this blurb’s title). They were not consulted in this decision. It is not a simple reclamation of land from the sea. It is a forceful reclamation of a way of life of a community that has been here far longer than Singapore has been independent. 

Ironically, at the recent National Day Parade, the government for the first time chose to platform an Orang Laut artist. Asnida Daud sang “Aok Diko” (“Yes of course!”), which celebrates Singapore’s connection to the sea. This absurdity—tokenism followed quickly by disenfranchisement—will, like all the others in our country’s history, soon be buried and forgotten, much like the terumbu (coral reefs), seagrass beds, mangroves, intertidal shores, fishing grounds and waterways between the lines on that map. 

Some further reading: In “The fight for Singapore’s wild spaces”, Choo Yi Feng explores ecology, land use, and environmental activism in Singapore.

In “Singapore is not AI: technonature and agentic ecologies”, Charmaine Poh interrogates the notion of the “Garden City”.

Society: Pipe dreams

“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day,” said the 19th-century American intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson. Presumably, Emerson could hand out wise aphorisms because he didn’t have to worry about life’s basic needs like shelter, food, and water. And plumbing. Imagine trying to come up with something profound that literary magazines would quote over a century later when there’s a clogged toilet or leaking sink in the house.

Despite its centrality to the most noble of human endeavours, plumbing and other trades that prize both agility of mind and dexterity of hand are considered inferior to desk-bound office jobs. Singaporeans seem more susceptible to this snobbery than most. Compared to 13 percent globally, some 18-57 percent of local respondents feel that skilled trades have a “stigma” attached to them. The variance is likely down to survey design; suffice to say large numbers of Singaporeans look askance at the trades or think others do—which is revealing in itself.

The reasons for this distaste are many. As education spread more broadly and deeply, academic qualifications greasing entry into the global economy first became prized and then fetishised. The trades, meanwhile, have traditionally placed more weight on practical training and experience than on paper credentials. Besides, “[S]killed trades are sometimes still viewed as dirty, physically demanding or lower-status work,” Richard Tock, a plumber and gas service worker, told The Straits Times (ST). The abundance of regional labour that can do this “dirty” work has allowed us to shun it. Of the 186,000 tradespeople here in 2023, more than two-thirds were foreigners. This may explain the sluggish growth in trades wages. Since the turn of the century, median income for resident non-PMETs (Professionals, Managers, Executives, and Technicians), to which these trades belong, has increased only by 80 percent, compared to a 142 percent increase in overall resident median income.

One consequence of an overreliance on foreign tradespeople is the way it widens the gap between our daily lives and the systems and people who keep it running. Another invites the question: if a society regards certain jobs as dirty, what does it think of the people doing them? There are practical implications too, as Covid-19 painfully showed. Even so, “it would not be realistic to aim to grow the Singapore core in every single occupation,” Tan See Leng, then Manpower Minister, told Parliament in 2022, responding to a question from the Workers’ Party’s Pritam Singh on nurturing more local electricians and plumbers.

The recent push to flip the narrative surrounding the trades comes as fears rise about AI’s impact on white-collar jobs and the need to shepherd the resident labour force into areas beyond its immediate reach. Ironically, electricians, plumbers, and others are needed to sustain AI itself—someone has to lay the power cables feeding data centres and install the pipes carrying the water that cools them. The government is drawing up plans for more structured pathways because youngsters in a society used to looking down on, or at least away from, the skilled trades, will take them up only if they “offer visible career progression, competitive remuneration, recognised credentials and opportunities to work with technology,” said Eric Cheung, senior director at the Institute of Technical Education. 

Even so, there’s no guarantee the push will succeed. Germany, long looked upon as a tradesperson’s paradise, is suffering from an acute shortage as older tradespeople retire with fewer youngsters to replace them, a problem exacerbated by changing attitudes towards vocational work. The US, another country where the trades pay well, is staring at a projected shortfall in the millions and economic losses orders of magnitude higher. Given this, the task facing Singapore may well feel Sisyphean—sweaty, dirty, and thankless. Sound familiar?

Society: The male condition

When did this current backlash against feminism begin? The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial in 2022, which the former won amidst widespread social-media-fuelled mockery of the latter, was a milestone. The New Yorker, in “What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?”, framed the wave of retaliatory defamation lawsuits against survivors by referencing a 1990s model, darvo: deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender. Last year Joe Rogan, manosphere idol with over 14m followers on Spotify and 20m on YouTube, said that he was “on Harvey Weinstein’s side”. 

And in a recent piece on masculinism, “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men”, The Atlantic described the chilling range of what it called the single most important force uniting the American right. “At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse…and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.”

Singapore’s manosphere may not have the ideological diversity, the rambunctious personas, or the flowery vocabulary of the US’s, but important new work by AWARE reveals parallels. The introduction to its “Survey on Men’s Attitudes to Gender, Family and Society in Singapore” references everything from online misogyny and rising incidences of rape to “how expectations of stoicism continue to shape men’s experiences.”

The survey of over 1,000 men bear witness to this. Victim-blaming is rampant: over half of respondents believe a woman who dresses provocatively is partly to blame if she is then harassed; and over two-thirds believe a woman who flirts bears at least some responsibility if she’s later harassed. Sexual entitlement is also at worrying levels: over a third of respondents believe men “cannot control themselves” when sexually aroused; and 37 percent believe men cannot be expected to stop sexual activity if a partner changes her mind. Assuming their responses reflect their own behaviour, one in three Singaporean men, if aroused, are on a one-way train.

Perhaps most sobering for our atomised, hyper-efficient, no-time-for-poetry society are the findings around emotional restraint. Over half of men believe that showing emotion makes them appear weak, and a whopping 70 percent say they hide emotions such as sadness, fear, anxiety, or stress. It would appear like the cottage industry of male executives discussing vulnerability on LinkedIn has hardly made a dent. By contrast, beliefs around family dynamics are far more encouraging, with roughly three-quarters of respondents saying that childcare, and also housework, should be shared between men and women.

To address this male malaise, AWARE recommends: integrating emotional literacy and mental wellbeing support into national institutions such as schools and National Service; expanding gender and consent education; fostering workplace cultures that support shared caregiving and reduce masculine pressure; reforming family policies to boost uptake of paternity leave; gender-sensitive and responsible media representation; and building community-based support systems tailored to men’s diverse life stages.

In our view, the establishment’s assault on “wokeism” has also been unhelpful for all minority rights, the push for which is too easily denigrated as mimicking Western leftist overreach. “If this had happened in the eighties, they probably would have thrown it out,” Rogan said in reference to Weinstein. “But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt.” Many Singaporean conservatives also fantasise about some idealised past where disputatious minorities just accepted the “natural” order of things. The sooner we all get with the programme, the better.

Culture: Leek for leaks

“Ah shit, here we go again”, said exhausted Carl “CJ” Johnson in the opening cutscene of the “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”, released in 2004. CJ had returned to the fictional city of Los Santos after years, only for corrupt police officers to dump him into a rival gang’s territory. The one-liner remains a cultural touchstone, recognised even by non-gamers. 

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is an open world action-adventure video game series in which you can carry out missions as part of a criminal syndicate, steal cars, or mindlessly explore massive detailed maps. It was developed by British development house Rockstar North, co-founded by Samuel and Daniel Houser, and published by its American parent company, Rockstar Games. The game was first released in 1997, but shot to fame in 2001 with GTA III, which sold 14.5m copies worldwide on the back of its three-dimensional gaming environment.

Subsequent releases include 2002 “GTA: Vice City” and the 2003 “GTA: San Andreas”—iconic for their speaking protagonists, storytelling, carefully curated radio music, and 60,000 recorded lines of dialogue by non-playable characters (NPCs). The game’s most recent version came out thirteen years ago, making GTA VI, the newest one slated to drop on November 19th, one of the most anticipated releases of all time. 

Part of GTA’s success lies in its publisher’s crafty courting of controversy and outrage, leaning into sexist and racist stereotypes, sexually explicit content, and violence. But this time, the furore has spilled over from content to practice, with Rockstar North under fire for “crunch time”—excessive unpaid overtime leading up to a new launch. “Crunch time” isn’t new, having been considered a rite of passage conferring insider status on all those go through it. For long, the framing elides what it undeniably is: pure exploitation. But when Dan Houser described working 100-hour weeks in 2018, in the lead-up to Red Dead Redemption 2, another blockbuster game, the admission provoked media investigations into the company’s working culture. Similar concerns resurfaced in February 2024, when employees were ordered to return to the office five days a week as GTA VI entered the last stage of development. Then, last October, Rockstar North dismissed 31 employees in the UK, supposedly for sharing confidential information about upcoming titles in a public forum. The sacked group claimed it was punished for discussing working conditions and plans to unionise in a private Discord server. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain called the dismissals a “ruthless act of union-busting”. The case will go before a tribunal next month.

Consumers, too, appear to be growing increasingly critical of the gaming industry’s exploitative practices. One example is CyberLeek, an unidentified person or group represented by a pixelated, tactical-gear-wearing leek. They released “democratised leaks” of GTA VI, requiring users to vote and purchase a cryptocurrency meme coin in support of three “commandments”: no digital preorders, no paid single-player add-ons, and an offline fallback for all single-player modes. The response has been mixed. Some welcomed the leaks as a form of resistance; others dismissed them as another cryptocurrency scam. 

The allure of working in one of the world’s shiniest gaming development companies should not normalise its detrimental work environment. And a great gaming experience should not distract from predatory practices. These considerations are ironic given the games themselves often feature anti-capitalist messaging and the unfulfilling pursuit of the American dream. 

Gaming itself remains one of the world’s most beloved pursuits, but as labour and consumers find themselves being squeezed, some may be justified in feeling that the industry is emulating others by embracing capitalism’s worst tendencies. As CJ might say: Ah shit, here we go again.

Arts: Dialectical reasoning

Shantou, 1993. A young woman hunched over a piece of paper, trying to straighten wobbly lines of Chinese characters. She was penning a letter to long-lost relatives in South-east Asia on behalf of her father, who’d been left behind in the mass migration of the early 20th century, and grew up under the care of another family. He could not write, so she did. The handwritten letter arrived in the hands of a woman in Malaysia who could not read. She had her teenage niece, Jasmine Goh-Chew, write a letter back. The correspondence between the two branches of the family—one in the landlocked mainland, the other in a sprawling archipelago—ended there. 

Or so they thought. Earlier this year, 51-year-old Goh-Chew boarded a plane for Chaozhou with her husband, parents, and in-laws, and the letter her family had received over three decades ago. The diasporic Teochews chanced upon a cafe doubling as a living archive of qiaopi—remittance letters dating back to the 1930s—that served as both financial support and emotional anchor to families cleft by distance and language. There, they met Zeng Jianpeng, the cofounder of a volunteer network of over 3,000 dedicated to reuniting families dispersed by war, migration, and time. And reunite this family they did, after poring over genealogical records and combing through multiple villages with the same names. “I heard that Madam Goh-Chew wanted to find relatives in three different places and wondered why one person was searching for three hometowns. It was only when I met the family that I realised she was searching on behalf of three different branches of the family,” Zeng told ST. “The reunion didn’t simply reconnect two families. It reconstructed their family tree.” The Chews were treated to an extravagant meal in their ancestral hometown. Then the reunited families went to a local cinema and watched the budget-movie-turned-blockbuster that has since sent hundreds of Singaporeans (and even more Malaysians) back to Southern China to search for their roots: “Dear You”.

It’s the little film that could: nudged a typically impervious state into budging just a little bit over a decades-old language policy. Wong announced at the National Day Rally that it would ease restrictions on what we call “dialects” (though linguists would call them non-Mandarin Chinese languages) on movies and subscription TV. From next month, these screenings will no longer be capped, so long as a dubbed Mandarin version is available. There won’t be any changes to free-to-air broadcasts, though that’s what many lobbied the state into shifting its stance over as the “Dear You” and dialect debate was roiling earlier this year, and thousands packed out special screenings or crossed the border into Johor Bahru to watch the movie in its original Teochew. 

In fact, Wong seems to have doubled down on Mandarin: “Most Chinese Singaporeans know Mandarin but use English more often. The challenge now is to encourage those comfortable in English to speak more Mandarin. The more we use Mandarin, the better we will get at it.” He argued that Singapore must protect the “hard-won gains” of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, yet this linguistic tradeoff has been one of the hardest cultural losses weathered by generations of ethnic Chinese here. It has made many “cultural orphans”, a term coined by the late Kuo Pao Kun, the prolific playwright and godfather of contemporary Singapore theatre. And it has spawned a generation of younger artists and theatremakers determined to reacquaint themselves with their razed roots, whether that’s Salty Ng Xi Jie’s “Ancestral Tongues” with fellow artist Suhui Hee “Anise”, which explored the vocal memories of descendants and culminated in a set of scores for a citizen choir; or jee chan’s “harbor”, a movement-based homage to a displaced grandmother who survived a war. “In trying to reduce the significance of Chinese ‘dialects’, the policy may have inadvertently increased their mystique,” Tan Ying Ying, linguistics professor, wrote about our grief for languages lost in her commentary for Channel NewsAsia. “The very success of the policy helped create the conditions for the nostalgia we see today. It has, in this sense, engineered the very obsession it was meant to prevent.”

Foong Yue Qian, Abhishek Mehrotra, 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.

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