The Philippine Senate has never looked like itself. There have always been deals sealed in corridors, alliances shifted by the morning session, men in barong who smile at each other across the floor and mean something entirely different by it. But even by the Senate's own baroque standards, what happened in the first two weeks of May 2026 constitutes a kind of political rupture that will be studied, argued over, and selectively remembered for years. On May 11, 2026, Senator A

At the end of the day, I am just trying to get home. This is the entire ambition of the late afternoon, of the hour after everything has finished and the body has given what it had to give and all that is left is the ride, the road, the particular quality of city light that comes in the early evening when the sky cannot decide between orange and gray and the jeepney moves through it like a vessel through something thicker than air. The breathing matters more than it sounds. T

On the evening of February 28, 2026, the war arrived. It arrived as a headline on a phone screen, a spike in a commodity index, and then, hours later, a notification that someone's daughter had died in Israel. Mary Ann B. De Vera, a thirty-two-year-old caregiver from Pangasinan, was struck by shrapnel while helping her elderly patient reach a bomb shelter. She was the first confirmed Filipino fatality of a war that the Philippines had no part in starting and no capacity to st

In 1948, the United Nations wrote the word "everyone" and meant it. A Singaporean passport opens 195 countries. An Afghan passport opens 26. That gap is a decision, made and remade every year in foreign ministries and executive orders and consular offices, that some people's need to move is a problem to be managed and other people's desire to move is a freedom to be protected. This essay is about that decision, and about the 123 million people currently paying for it with the

A poem I watch the mayor shake hands in front of the shuttered plant on the six o'clock news, his teeth catching light Behind him, men in hardhats stand arranged like furniture. Someone decided this would look like hope. The woman beside me on the bus folds a notice into smaller and smaller squares until it disappears into her coat pocket. I don't ask. We've learned not to ask. Outside, the billboard has been repainted again— last month a senator, this month a beer that p