Culture

Commentary, Culture, Opinion

Yes Justin, It’s Finally Clocking To Us 
Reading Time: 5 minutes

By Jaden Lum (26S05A)

Bieber Fever is back.

In recent years, it’s been suspiciously latent, lurking in the shadows, waiting to break out yet again, and now, out of a desert in California, it’s swept the world once more—this time, in full, unapologetic, RnB-and-pop-entwined force. 

For those unlucky (or lucky, if you’re a snob) enough to test negative, here’s the rundown: 

Coachella has been no stranger to hosting some of music’s most legendary performances. Whether it was the 2012 hologram that summoned Tupac back to life, the pomp and pageantry of 2018’s Beychella (a portmanteau of Beyoncé and Coachella), or Lady Gaga’s massive, vibrant, stupefying sets just last year, the festival has become synonymous with not just spectacle, but innovation too. 

This year, however, was different. Or at least, for one of the headlining acts, it was. 

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Compilations, Culture, Features, Humans of RI, Special Editions, Student Features

To Speak the Language of Home: Raffles Dialects
Reading Time: 9 minutes

By Koh Shin Robbie (26A01A) and Tok Kai Xue Traven (26A01B)

In 1959, Singapore saw the first of many key developments to its education system: a bilingualism policy. Its premise was simple—English, as the language of international business, would be mandated to be taught in all schools. Alongside this, the study of one’s mother tongue (namely Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil) would also be made compulsory to ensure students did not lose touch with their cultural roots.

In an instant, dialect languages were taken out of official usage. Radio stations switched to purely official languages, and an entire Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched with vigorous dissuasion of dialect use.

Photo from a speech by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Source: Zaobao SG
Text in the background translates to “Speak Less Dialect”.

For Mandarin, however, this line of reasoning proved rather ironic. In the face of institutional pressures to adopt Mandarin as their home language, what would happen to the dialect-speaking households which relied heavily on Hokkien, Teochew or Hakka to communicate on a daily basis? How would the precious, dialectal tongues which served generations upon generations of ancestors manage to maintain their relevance?

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Commentary, Culture, Op-Eds, Opinion, School Life

The Case for Google Apps : Why They Are *Objectively* Better (For School)
Reading Time: 7 minutes

By Dara Tan (27A01A)

I nearly screamed aloud on the first day of orientation, in the middle of the lecture hall, with all of the 300-odd new JC students there. 

Why? The new school emails had just been passed out to all of us, and to my abject horror, we would be using Outlook. As a pure Google user, I was miserable. I would have to download all of the Microsoft apps (OneNote, Word, Excel etc.) and get used to an entirely new ecosystem. 

But then I stopped panicking for a while, and thought, Maybe Microsoft is just a JC thing. Maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe I can like it. (Spoiler alert, the answer was a vehement no.)

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Commentary, Culture, Humour, School Life

Beyond the Rot: How Brainrot Divides (and Unites) Us All
Reading Time: 6 minutes

By Gregory Ng (27S05A), Mary Tu (27S06O) and Ong Tsz Xiang (27S06M)

How did you react to this image? Either the frightful howl of children screaming “SIX SEVEN” manifested in your mind and sent shivers down your spine, or you joined in the hype. Either way, you probably would not have been able to escape the vicious claws (or rather, palms) of the 6 7 trend. And you’re not alone in this.

For the boomers out there, 6 7 is part of the wider phenomenon of “brainrot”: absurd internet trends whose reach extends far beyond our social media feeds and into everyday conversation. Yet, as we find ourselves unable to look at a banana or a strawberry the same ever again, we should challenge ourselves to consider: can this low-effort content offer more than just an assault on our attention spans?

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