The Line, Ep. 13: Are We Slave Drivers?
Is the way we treat our domestic help morally defensible? We put three tai tais on the hot seat.
The Line Podcast
The Line Podcast
The Line, Ep. 12: Ageing in Asia
How to be filial in an unfilial age?
The City
Hygiene and the City
The modern metropolis: a heady cocktail of sex, technology and high finance, with an undertone of sewage.
The Jungle
Trop Picks: The Sex Life of Bananas
Oh yes, I’m going there, and it’s not what you think.
The City
The Generic City
The Generic City is a city free of context, history and identity. It is a blank slate, allowing its inhabitants to make of themselves what they will.
The Jungle
An Elephant Named Indira
Before panda diplomacy, there was elephant diplomacy.
The Jungle
Zootopia
Why are native fauna given the short shrift at institutions supposedly dedicated to conservation and “edutainment”?
Immaterial Culture
Body Language
In Asia, our hands speak another language.
Grobalization
The Wrestler
Cherished national symbols often have international origins, blurring the lines between what’s local/ traditional and what’s not.
Bad Gals/ Boys
Yayoi Kusama: An Artist for the Anthropocene
To step into an Infinity Mirror Room is to lose one’s finite self in infinite reflections. It is also to experience reality as Kusama sees it: the self as a part of the environment, not apart from it.
Immaterial Culture
Passions of the Cut Sleeve
Above all, Emperor Ai of Han (who ruled from 6 B.C.E.-1 C.E.) loved his retainer Dong Xian, whose father was a respected censor in…
The Jungle
Trop Picks: Orientalist Science
The line between scientific and unscientific thinking is finer than we think.
Grobalization
Something in the Air?
Talk of communism is suddenly springing up in the most unexpected quarters.
The Jungle
The Sacred Grove
Whatever Thoreauvian notions you might harbor about nature in the tropics, the truth is that the impact of human intervention is everywhere, and what you encounter is not quite natural.