Somehow, after reading about Steve Johnson’s six-hour ordeal with the iPod, I lost my entire faith in technology’s promise to rescue mankind from all its miseries. If an alleged Internet critic with a respectable organisation like Chicago Tribune can struggle with an idiot-proof product, what hope does the hapless man in the street have? But… Read More »
I was reading American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and it suddenly dawned on me that the choice of Christian Bale as Batman in Batman Begins was, to put it in Ellis’ term, “premeditated”. In the chapter titled “Nell’s” (page 206, Vintage Contemporaries, paperback), there is a paragraph that goes: “Daisy! And Patrick, you devil!”… Read More »
This is the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is… Read More »
“If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society… So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.” – Lee Kuan Yew, National Day rally, 1983 “If nature… Read More »
Someone once said that politics is a big joke. But perhaps the biggest joke of all is when George Bush gets elected to a second term. Judging by how things are going at press time, it looks like we’re all going to have a good laugh. Whether the US Presidential election is an exercise in… Read More »
To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prisonis an excellent study of the conceit and deceit of a man many Singaporeans thought they knew. The author, Francis Seow, is a former solicitor general and president of the Law Society in Singapore. This is his first-hand account of how he has suffered under… Read More »