Author: Chad Merchant

Spoiler alert: It’s not a parade of MCOs or a two-hour limit on shopping at the mall. As an American, watching my home country utterly bungle its response to the coronavirus crisis was disheartening to say the least. For months, the United States was the world’s cautionary tale: If you wanted to know exactly what not to do in the face of a global pandemic, this was where you looked. It was a toxic combination of incompetent and disinterested leadership, vocal conspiracy theorists, and conflicting guidance, all on a grand, disunited scale – after all, the US is a huge country with…

On January 1, Beijing introduced a mandatory ‘cooling off’ period for couples seeking to dissolve their marriages. The first quarter results saw divorces plunging by over 70%. China’s government has never been especially shy about inserting itself into the personal relationships of its citizens, with the most well-known example being the long-running ‘one child policy,’ which was introduced in 1980 in a bid to address a then-rising population growth rate. In the face of declining fertility rates a generation later, it was announced in late 2015 that the policy would be discontinued in 2016, replaced with what was effectively a…

There’s an undeniable energy that permeates Bukit Bintang, easily Kuala Lumpur’s buzziest and brashest district for entertainment, dining, and shopping. But there’s a history here that many overlook. If you’ve been in Kuala Lumpur any time at all, you’ve likely sat in the crush of traffic methodically curling slowly around Pavilion KL as the one-way road leads into what has for many years been the city’s undisputed beating heart of commerce and entertainment for tourists and residents alike: Bukit Bintang. A retail and business centre since its earliest days, historians write that Chinese entrepreneurs set up shops along this stretch…

Over 50 years after Concorde first brought supersonic travel to the public, the next generation of ultra-high-speed flight looks to be right around the corner. The two decades following the end of World War II were truly incredible in the world of aerospace, particularly the 1960s. We saw everything from Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to the production of the amazing SR-71 Blackbird (still the world record-holding fastest airplane) to the first flight of the game-changing Boeing 747 all the way to manned spaceflight and the first moon landing. The seminal decade of the ’60s also brought…

Regional and global outbreaks have happened before, and they will certainly happen again. Sometimes, we humans learn the lessons offered by these epidemics; often, we do not. So is it naïve to envision a future world in which Covid-19 – or some future pandemic – has actually made humanity better? Amid fractured politics, social upheaval, climate disruption, and a global viral threat, is there value to be found in imagining a radically better world? Amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis, we must understand that pathogens and microbes are omnipresent in our world and have been for eons. Most of the time, we…

Like many people, I suppose, I’ve been handling the Movement Control Order reasonably well over the last month and a half. In addition to working from home, I’ve tackled some overdue home projects, gotten creative in the kitchen, caught up on a large slate of movies and series, and frankly, consistently kept my hands the most scrupulously clean they’ve ever been. So on the whole, it really hasn’t been a miserable lockdown, but the things about my “pre-pandemic life” I think I miss the most are regular social activities and travelling. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my recurring trips to Langkawi, and…

The tiny city-state of Singapore, which is roughly the size of San Francisco, is home to somewhere between 1.1 to 1.4 million migrant workers who come from impoverished countries to work in Southeast Asia’s wealthiest country; many work as domestic helpers, cleaners, construction staff, and day laborers. Most do so to send money back to their families. Just four decades ago, Singapore was but a shell of what it has become today. The per capita income was barely $4,700 a year (today, it’s over $57,000). With few natural resources and a small population – both conditions that still exist now…

If there’s one arguably positive thing a pandemic tends to bring to the fore, it’s a reawakened sense of personal hygiene. For many of us – at least hopefully – our hands have quite literally never been so scrupulously, consistently clean. It doesn’t matter which public health agency, which healthcare worker, or which epidemiologist is being asked, if the question is, “What’s the most important thing I can do to help protect myself and others from the coronavirus?” then the answer has been startlingly consistent: “Wash your hands.” A Method to Combat the Madness? Let’s face it, human beings aren’t…

There would be a lot of pushback from whisky purists if you tried to characterise the current era as the ‘golden age of whisky’ — many consider that time to have long since come and gone — but what cannot be denied is that we are now living in a time where whisky is enjoying a renaissance and growth curve seldom seen in its history. With waves of new aficionados, new markets opening up, and these spirits being distilled in countries not historically associated with whisky, it may not be a golden age, but it’s certainly paying the bills like…

Now that we are fully into week two of the Movement Control Order, it’s likely that a lot of people are rediscovering the pleasures, born out of necessity, of preparing much of their own food and beverages at home. Many are still practising their morning coffee routine, but now at home, rather than at the office, a café, or a local kopitiam. So a question suddenly arises: What to do with all those used coffee grounds? You might be surprised at just how useful they can be. We’ve rounded up a few great uses for your leftover grounds after you enjoy…