50 Things Liberals Love to Hate


Book Description

National radio talk show host Gallagher provides a careful study into the psyche of the liberal mind, using humor and irony to both entertain and instruct.







Singapore 2065: Leading Insights On Economy And Environment From 50 Singapore Icons And Beyond


Book Description

As Singapore enters its 50th year of independence, it is a time for introspection to look back at the successes and challenges of the past, but is also a crucial time to consider what the future holds for the nation.Singapore 2065: Leading Insights on Economy and Environment from 50 Singapore Icons and Beyond is one such key contribution to the endeavour of thinking about what lies ahead. While many forthcoming projects and books take a more retrospective approach reflecting upon Singapore's past, this book adopts a forward-looking perspective, contemplating Singapore's distant future, which is important for posterity. This book is a collection of key insights from 50 iconic individuals of Singapore and beyond, and contains reasoned arguments, speculations and visionary expectations of Singapore's future in 50 years' time.The book discusses the distant future of Singapore's economy and the environment. What will Singapore's economic and environment landscape be like 50 years from now? Are there trends or scenarios common to the various discussions contained in this book? If there are, how big would be the impact of some of these trends? What and how should the government respond to these projections, expectations and informed visions of tomorrow? In sum, what would Singapore's economy and environment be like in 2065? The book explores a range of possible answers to these questions and more.Not only will the generations of today be able to gain much insight into Singapore's future by reading this book, but future generations, specifically 100 years after Singapore's independence, will be able to understand and affirm what and how today's generations think about their time. The book is a key contribution to envisioning Singapore's future, which is also vital for understanding what shapes Singapore's landscape today.




CultureShock! Singapore


Book Description

CultureShock! Singapore is essential reading for any foreigner who is going to live and work in the city. It is packed full of practical information as well as interesting trivia on the colourful customs and culture of the people. Learn how to get around the city effectively by public transport like the locals and how to assimilate quickly and shop for groceries. Join in the local celebrations such as Chinese New Year and Deepavali, and find out the best places to enjoy Singapore food such as laksa and nasi briyani. Packed with a resource guide, glossary, contact numbers, website addresses and useful advice, CultureShock! Singapore has the answers for anyone wanting to fit in and enjoy life in the Little Red Dot. About the Series CultureShock! is a dynamic, indispensable series of guides for travellers looking to truly understand the countries they are visiting, working in or moving to. Each title explains the country’s customs, traditions and social and business etiquette in a lively, informative style. CultureShock! authors, all of whom have experienced the joys and pitfalls of cultural adaptation, are ideally placed to provide warm and helpful advice to those who seek to integrate seamlessly into diverse cultures.




Singapore's Permanent Territorial Revolution


Book Description

Ever since Singapore became an independent nation in 1965, its government has been intent on transforming the island’s environment. This has led to a nearly constant overhaul of the landscape, whether still natural or already manmade. Not only are the shape and dimensions of the main island and its subsidiary ones constantly modified so are their relief and hydrology. No stone is left unturned, literally, and, one could add, nor is a single cultural feature, be it a house, a factory, a road or a cemetery. Given one of Singapore’s unique feature, namely that the state is the sole landlord, all types of property in all parts of the island, rural as well as urban, were and remain subject to expropriation, fortunately always with due compensation. This atlas illustrates, essentially through diachronic mapping of the changing distribution of all forms of land use, the universality of what has become a tool of social management. By constantly “replanning” the rules of access to space, the Singaporean State is thus redefining territoriality, even in its minute details. This is one reason it has been able to consolidate its control over civil society, peacefully and to an extent rarely known in history.




The Public Work of Christmas


Book Description

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas – as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness – at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies. Contributors include Herman Bausinger (Tübingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan), Christian Marchetti (Tübingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow (Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac Weiner (Ohio State).




Ocean In A Drop, The - Singapore: The Next Fifty Years


Book Description

The IPS-Nathan Lectures series was launched by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) in 2014. It is part of the S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore. The Fellowship was set up to fund further research into public policy, with the S R Nathan Fellow, who is appointed annually, delivering between four and six lectures each year. These lectures aim to advance public understanding and discussion of issues of critical national interest.Ho Kwon Ping was the 2014/15 S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore. This book contains the five IPS-Nathan Lectures he gave between October 2014 and April 2015, as well as highlights of the accompanying dialogue with the audience. In his lectures, Ho looks forward to the next 50 years, offering innovative ideas and robust views on how governance and key institutions can evolve to ensure the sustainable continuation of Singapore — the 'improbable nation'.This book illuminates Ho's vision of a cohesively diverse Singapore lasting beyond the lifespan of his generation, and aims to get the young to ponder and discuss the kind of home, and future, they wish for.




Not Born in Singapore: Fifty Personalities who Shaped the Nation


Book Description

Did you know that we owe the iconic Singapore Girl to a British-born adman? Or that the founder of the popular Mustafa Centre hails from India? This year as we celebrate our local heroes, it’s also time to put the spotlight on other unsung contributors who have shaped our nation. They may have come from other shores, but these 50 foreigners have left their mark in building Singapore into the nation we know it to be today. The 50 remarkable individuals are: ARTS Ian Batey, K. P. Bhaskar, Santha Bhaskar, Della Butcher, Choo Hoey, John Herbert, Kuo Pao Kun, Goh Lay Kuan, J. M. Sali, Tan Swie Hian ECONOMY Mustaq Ahmad, Sir Laurence Hartnett, Dr Tsutomu Kanai, Pasquale Pistorio, Captain Muhammad Jalaluddin Sayeed, Tang I-Fang Ratan Tata, Kartar Singh Thakral, Tan Sri Frank Tsao Wen- King, Alain Vandenborre, Cyril Neville Watson, Albert Winsemius EDUCATION Dr Robert A. Brown, Brother Joseph McNally, Milenko Prvacki, Mary Turnbull, Professor Wang Gungwu, Professor Wu Teh Yao, Dr John Miksic, Ann Wee SOCIETY Professor T. H. Elliott, Christine Laimer, Lien Ying Chow, BG Yaakov ‘Jack’ Elazari, G. G. Thomson, Krystyn Olszewski, Bruno Wildermuth SCIENCE AND MEDICINE Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, Dr Sydney Brenner, Professor Edward W. Holmes, Dr Edison Liu, Sir George Radda, Dr Shan Ratnam, Sir David Lane, Professor Jackie Y. Ying SPORTS Aleksandar Duric, Feng Tianwei, Jing Junhong, Ronald Susilo, Tao Li




Hard at Work


Book Description

For most of us, work is a basic daily fact of life. But that simple fact encompasses an incredibly wide range of experiences. Hard at Work takes readers into the day-to-day work experiences of more than fifty working people in Singapore who hold jobs that run from the ordinary to the unusual: from ice cream vendors, baristas, police officers and funeral directors to academic ghostwriters, temple flower sellers, and Thai disco girl agents. Through first-person narratives based on detailed interviews, vividly augmented with color photographs, Hard at Work reminds us of the everyday labor that continually goes on around us, and that every job can reveal something interesting if we just look closely enough. It shows us too the ways inequalities of status and income are felt and internalized in this highly globalized society.




Malaysia-Singapore: Fifty Years of Contentions 1965-2015


Book Description

This book offers an interesting and informative account of the often fractious account of two countries in the heart of Southeast Asia. It outlines the primary issues that plagued relations between Malaysia and Singapore in the last fifty years and the political, diplomatic and legal initiatives taken to address them. The author gives a first-person narrative of the seemingly endless behind-the-scenes episodes that have brought the love-hate relationship to where they are today. He further delves into the vast reservoir of information on the rocky bilateral relationship to provide a reasonable argument over why Malaysia has behaved as it has since 1965. Exhaustive records of, among others, minutes, letters and documents are brought to light to substantiate the Malaysian view in relation to issues of contention with Singapore. Coming from an insider with more than four eventful decades in the Malaysian Foreign Service, it will be an eye opener for many.