It is not that I truly hate the book vending machine introduced by National Book Store, which has opened a 24/7 book vending machine in Mandaluyong. In fact, I do not want to dismiss it outright as an unnecessary innovation or reduce it to another marketing strategy designed to sell
October 16, 2026
We celebrate our young artists, but are we actually prepared to support them? We praise their creativity, share their work on social media, invite them to exhibitions, and proudly present them as proof of Iloilo’s vibrant cultural scene. Yet when it comes to funding their projects, paying them fairly for
October 14, 2026
I will not hide the fact that I was nervous before I stepped up to the microphone on October 6, 2026. I have hosted programs before, spoken in front of audiences, taught classes, facilitated discussions, and participated in many conversations about culture, language, and the arts. But there was a
October 12, 2026
There is something appealing about the idea of encouraging young people to become farmers through film. A short film can make the invisible visible. It can tell the story of a farmer whose name rarely appears in newspapers, whose labor is often reduced to statistics, and whose hands produce the
October 9, 2026
Some essays linger in the mind because they give shape to questions we have carried for years but have struggled to put into words. This was my experience when I read Shafiq R. Bhuiyan’s essay, “Teaching needs pedagogical skills, not just subject knowledge,” online in The Daily Star on World
October 8, 2026
There are stories that make us angry, stories that give us hope, and stories that leave us strangely quiet because we no longer know what emotion is appropriate. Mary Jane Veloso’s story belongs to that difficult space. For years, her name appeared in newspapers, on television, in human rights discussions,
October 6, 2026
More than a decade after “Puede Nang Mangarap” was released, the song has suddenly returned to Filipino popular culture. Old clips are circulating again. The familiar choreography has been recreated. Memes have been made. Celebrities have joined the trend. Young people who were barely old enough to remember Lyca’s rise
October 5, 2026
I returned to Resil B. Mojares’s Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History this morning, and I found myself reading the essay “Rizal Reading Pigafetta” with a different kind of uneasiness. I was not simply reading about Rizal reading Pigafetta. I was watching one reader confront another reader
October 3, 2026
In a conversation about fiction and reading, Raymond Antrobus, poet and one of the judges of the 2026 Booker Prize, emphasized an idea that sounds simple but carries profound implications: fiction can expand a reader, and our understanding becomes limited when we insist on defining who a book is for
October 1, 2026
There is something deeply appealing about the call to “magpauli kag mag-upod sa pamilya.” In a day that is usually consumed by work, deadlines, meetings, traffic, classes, business, and an endless list of obligations, it is comforting to hear the government itself tell us to pause for a while, go home,
September 30, 2026
I have been thinking about ecocriticism lately, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I came to it long before I knew its name. I did not encounter it first in a theory book or in a university classroom, but in places I had already
September 29, 2026
There is something about the column that deserves closer attention. It is one of the most familiar forms of public writing, yet it is also one of the forms most easily misunderstood. A column may occupy only a few pages in a newspaper, magazine, or digital publication, but within those
September 28, 2026