i6huge239w A New York University alumni friend of mine told me about a controversy brewing at his alma mater. It stems from a larger controversy, far away on the small island nation of Singapore. Dr. Thio Li-Ann, law professor at the National University of Singapore, has been appointed as a visiting scholar on human rights to NYU’s law school beginning this fall. But Thio’s track-record on human rights is in question.
Posts with the Singapore tag
This Week: Singapore in the news
When I lived in Singapore I stayed in Bukit Timah, on the west of the island near a large nature reserve and beneath the city-state’s tallest peak, which is not the grandest mountain at just over 530 ft. Bukit Timah is just south of the bridge that crosses into the Malaysian border town of Johor […]
queuing for movies
They all said the Pusan International Film Festival is the premiere festival in Asia. I’m no Asia film scholar, but it certainly is a big deal here. I’ve never seen teenagers wake up so early to get movie tickets before. On the third day of the festival, we also woke up early to get tickets […]
random updates: writing about Singapore, teaching in Cambodia and watching movies in Korea
I had a little bit of an epiphany about my writing life in Singapore a while ago. And I promised I would write more about the country where I live. So, a few months later, I am true to my word and am posting for Global Voices. Will work my way up to longer, reported […]
Orientalism or chinoiserie?
Marketing material for the 1926 Milan premeire of Turandot on the left, and for the 2008 Singapore staging on the right.Like most people, I don’t know where I first heard the famous aria Nessun Dorma of Puccini’s Turandot. But my interest in the opera has certainly been revived several times recently. Maybe it was Pavarotti’s […]
the other self-censorship story
The front page of the Sunday Times (the Sunday edition of the Straits Times) on July 20 had a big graphic about a really sensational story of two “warring” bloggers. One is suing the other for defamation. Here’s a follow-up that’s free on the Straits Times website. No, I have not fallen into the black […]
the scales of justice
I haven’t written much about Singapore. As I approach my last few months here, I’m starting to ask myself why. Perhaps it’s because I live here — sometimes it’s easier to observe things when you are a complete outsider. That doesn’t seem satisfactory though. I’m a curious and inquisitive person by nature, wherever I am. […]
ways to cross a border
These are kids in Myanmar, also known as Burma. They live in a town called Tachilek, on the border of Thailand. I met them in a mosque — a very small mosque on a sidestreet in the town. There is a lot of dispute about the position and treatment of Muslims in Myanmar, a predominantly […]
sweet revenge
This weekend I got my first full-length taste of kabuki and, boy, was it delicious. This form of Japanese theater is fantastic and fascinating to watch — for its dramatic acting, stylized makeup and simple, effectual music — but it’s even better when you have some sense of what people are saying. Lucky for me, […]
this is what they think
Traveling around Southeast Asia is a joy. The variety of the people, the familiar things that are somehow different, the mixes of cultures — it really makes every turn a surprise. It’s fun also to tell people that I live in Singapore. I can relate to Singapore this way: it’s kind of the odd little […]