Features

Is AI really making us better workers?

Michelle Anindya

AI can make our work faster and more polished. But by eliminating the struggle, mistakes and imperfections, it may also be eliminating some of the ways we learn and become better workers.

Little Big Things

Travels in the land of Gen Z

Pallavi Aiyar

To become a professor to Gen Z today is to take a disorienting journey to an exotic land. First of two parts.

Features

More trains, more stations, but Greater Jakarta still isn’t connected

Andriana Wirrotama

Jakarta now has more trains and stations. But getting to them from Depok, Bogor, Tangerang or Bekasi still means an ojek or a car ride.

Little Big Things

The app life

Pallavi Aiyar

Living in China, where all of life's needs have been telescoped into the mobile phone, feels like the future the rest of the world is queuing for.

The Neighborhood

The quiet chapter: the society of silent book clubs

Sheena Suparman

Silent book clubs are rising in Jakarta as a new way to socialize through a shared love of literature, without the pressure of conversations.

Warm Takes

The long plié

Devi Asmarani

Having discovered ballet in her forties, a writer-cum-dancer learns that mastery is less about talent than the willingness to return, and the joy that comes from learning and growing.

Little Big Things

Of cats and writers

Pallavi Aiyar

After 19 years, a beloved cat leaves behind more than memories: he survives in a family’s lore, two novels, and the peculiar bond between writers and their feline muses.

Warm Takes

The girl I chose to forget

Dedari Arane Wibowo

Growing up complicated a childhood love of Indonesia. Years later, an old song offers one young writer a way back: not to innocence, but to a more difficult kind of belonging.

Features

A year after Affan: The anger that stayed

Dedari Arane Wibowo

A year after Affan Kurniawan’s death, the fury that spilled into Jakarta’s streets has not disappeared.  It has settled into other forms: exhaustion, distrust and a lingering sense that nothing has really changed.

Market Pulse

The ludicrous economics of Pokémon cards in Indonesia

Aqraa Sagir

How did pieces of cardboard go from childhood collectibles to billion-rupiah commodities?

Little Big Things

A fair national exam is radical politics

Pallavi Aiyar

When India's medical entrance scandal drove students into the streets, a writer watching from Beijing asked what exam systems are really protecting.

Warm Takes

Adulthood, in installments: The hidden cost of keeping things together

Lutfiya Tussifah

Nobody warned us that grown-up life would have to be held together by a stack of small monthly charges.

Health And Wellness

For recreational athletes, chicken goes by another name

Michelle Anindya

The need to fuel the work their bodies are doing has changed the way recreational athletes view food.

Little Big Things

Here, there, everywhere: The geography of belonging

Pallavi Aiyar

For children raised across borders, the relationship between place and identity can become complicated, raising new questions about roots, privilege and belonging.

Warm Takes

Saya Orang Indonesia?

Xu Xi

Born an Indonesian citizen but raised in Hong Kong, a transnational writer with a hyphenated identity reflects on language, inheritance and the complicated question of what it means to call a country home.