Category: Think-pieces

The game screen turns black, an intermittent pause before the credits start rolling. At the bottom of the screen, the male hero Mario is standing next to Princess Peach. Playing as Mario, you have successfully rescued the princess! Your journey complete, and you venture forth into the next world.

The question repeats….

It is a cliché that we live in an interconnected world. What is less obvious is that, historically, interconnection is not the exception but rather the rule. In our modern urge to demarcate and celebrate ethnic identities and national characters, we often lose sight that humans have been interacting, creating, and trading across dividing lines since time immemorial. From a Greek-influenced Buddha head of the 4th century to a truly global patchwork of the 18th, we here at The Diacritic have partnered with Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum to showcase three artefacts that best exemplify this fact….

Written by Ashley Chin and Alston Ng, edited by Danan Lee. With contributions from Ashley Tan, James Ham, and Kriti Andhare. Cover photo by Joshua Vargas. On the morning of August 27th, students and faculty at the University Scholars Programme (USP) and Yale-NUS College tuned in to a Zoom town hall meeting which was abruptly…

My modest proposal is that we jettison “identity”, and move towards articulating and practicing a politics of multiplicity, indeterminacy, and singular-plural being. I focus here on the issue of gender, specifically on the (mis)use of gender pronouns, and offer a new ontological footing for a politics of “strategic obfuscation” which aims to disrupt hegemonic gender and sexual taxonomies. Simply, this essay calls for a collective adoption of “them” pronouns in a post-genderist, post-identitarian spirit of deprivileging sameness and interpersonal difference….

Which event has most changed your life? It is usually hard to give a clear, definitive answer. However, in China, there is a standard reply: it is the Gaokao, the nation-wide university entrance exam. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of the Gaokao in the national consciousness—every year in June, celebrities record videos to encourage examinees, crowds throng temples to pray to divinities associated with wisdom and intelligence, and motivational slogans are hung on the main gate of every high school, at least in my home city of Hangzhou. The most famous slogan of the pack is probably “one exam determines the rest of your life” (一考定终生). The common sentiment behind this phrase goes: a good score in Gaokao will gain you entry into a good university; a good university will lead you into a good company; a good company will bring you a good salary and social prestige; and these will finally enable you to form a happy family. Though such formulations may be somewhat overdramatic, it is still true for most Chinese that the Gaokao determines access to higher education and social mobility….

Rainbows. Dreams. Mist. With one verse alone, Xu successfully weaves an ethereal world where dreams and desire flourish in his poem “Taking Leave from Cambridge Again.” In the eyes of a poet, an ordinary pool filled with duckweeds can easily transform into an alluring rainbow which harbours our wildest desires. Perhaps such is the power of literature—it is the power to use simple language to envision another reality and transform our mundane reality into a radically exciting one. Yet, this ability to imagine—to dream—is often considered excessive in modern society, where everything is mostly governed by utilitarian metrics. In a world where success is measured by efficiency and productivity, what value can literature hold? It seems to embody the exact opposite: it is subjective (god forbid), occasionally abstract (how unfortunate) and often idealistic (yikes!). …

Peter Debruge of Variety is exactly right: “Wonder Woman 1984 accomplishes what we look to Hollywood tentpoles to do: It whisks us away from our worries, erasing them with pure escapism.” Indeed, the comic banality of the eighties-chic—permed hair, baggy suits, and neon unitards—is a welcome distraction from the tedium of COVID fatigue, eco-anxieties, and other afflictions of the postmodern capitalist condition. But WW84’s campy portrayal of a past so bright and beautiful advances a sinister “truth”: that this mad world is all that we deserve, that the status quo should be the true object of our desires—a desire for non-desire. …

Economic inequalities are widening. Consider inequality data from the World Bank or even recent work such as the landmark Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. The consensus is clear: disparities in income and wealth have been increasing in many countries over the past few decades. Most of all, it has congregated greatly in the top 0.1%. In some countries, this 0.1% of individuals command more than the bottom 30% combined. Suffice to say, we now have the rise of the extremely wealthy—a new gilded age where certain individuals have the spending power and wealth accorded to the kings and rajas of past centuries.

Here, Llewllyn Carroll aims to properly introduce the view called Limitarianism, which, as its name suggests, argues that there should be an upper limit to the amount of income and wealth that a person can hold. He will show that this view is not as repugnant as some might think….