Jose Manuel Tesoro
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My full name is Jose Manuel Tesoro, but everyone calls me Joel. My hometown is Manila. For most of the 1990s, except for eight months as a student in Myanmar (Burma), I was a print journalist who covered East and South East Asia, first as a staff writer in Hong Kong for Asiaweek and then as Jakarta correspondent for the magazine. I wrote The Invisible Palace, a true account of a journalist's murder in Java, which was named a 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book in Non-Fiction. Now I'm a third-year student at Harvard Law School, where I study transnational federalism, regulation and the evolving Internet.
[Editor's note: Sadly, Joel passed away at the end of 2008 and is missed and remembered by his friends at Global Voices]
Latest posts by Jose Manuel Tesoro
22 March 2006
Malaysia
Rajan Rishyakaran recently got his exam results back. That got him writing about the differences between the Singapore and Malaysian systems of education. Singapore's is highly competitive and meritocratic while Malaysia's has affirmative racial discrimination.
Singapore
A Xeno Boy in SG tells a little fable about how Singapore's threatening diversity was domesticated and coopted. “The city mimicked democracy, mimicked prosperity, mimicked diversity, mimicked lives. It was a wonderful performance. And the City became the City of Laughter.”
Thailand
Claudio Romano at wanderingkhunphu struggles with the eternal question of money and sex as he fights off Thai transvestites.
Vietnam
Vietnam's Ministry of Culture and Information is considering banning overseas Vietnamese filmmakers from releasing films within Vietnam. Diacritic.org has more here.
Philippines
Howie Severino talks about the linguistic divide in the Philippines between Tagalog a.k.a. Filipino (the language spoken in and around the capital Manila) and English (the widely-used colonial lingua franca). “…a foreign correspondent once noted that our presidents use Filipino only when they want to tell jokes or be folksy. When it’s time to explain something serious like foreign policy or economics, it’s always in English, as if it’s beyond the unwashed natives to know about it. Or perhaps language is the unspoken wall in the Philippine version of apartheid.”
21 March 2006
East Timor
tumbleweed in timor lorosae tells the story of a local East Timorese woman who went from janitor at a UN facility to principal secretary to the local UNICEF chief.
Indonesia
Nearing tax reporting date in Indonesia, Cafe Salemba decries the progressive income tax. “In addition to being the cruelest income cutter, progressive tax is also the meanest disincentive to work hard(er).” He starts a discussion with his co-group blogger, another economist.
Philippines
Jardine Davies, an ardent Filipino science-fiction reader, analyzes why in so many science-fiction novels poverty is juxtaposed with high technology.
Singapore
Malaysian blogger Mack Zulkifli comments on a recent survey in Singapore that ranked blogs as lowest in credibility and newspaper reports as highest. But Mack says there is more than meets the eye.
Thailand
Maytel 2020 describes the rural-urban divide in Thailand that characterizes Southeast Asian politics as a whole. “Southeast Asia has long been noted for its ‘patron-client' political structures which many theorists believe stem from the primarily agrarian nature of most of the region. Farming rice is a precarious livelihood strategy and poor farmers need protection.”
I want to ask, there is not software to change from letter to letter Latin...