The Philippines does not need panic. It needs execution. A recession is not the base case: the IMF still projects Philippine growth at 5.6 percent in 2026. But complacency would be a mistake. Official data show growth slowed to 4.4 percent in 2025 from 5.7 percent in 2024. At the same time, headline inflation jumped to 4.1 percent in March 2026, while unemployment stood at 5.1 percent and underemployment at 11.8 percent in February. That is the real warning sign: not collapse

The Philippines cannot talk seriously about becoming an AI player while treating energy as a secondary issue. Artificial intelligence is not powered by slogans, launch events, or policy papers. It is powered by electricity — constant, affordable, and dependable electricity. Without that foundation, every ambitious AI roadmap will remain just that: a roadmap, not a functioning industry.

One of the most important pieces of advice I have ever received did not come wrapped in grand words. It came in the form of a simple question from one of my mentors in the UK: Why can’t you seem to focus on your research?

The Philippines does not need to be in recession to prepare for one. In fact, the right time to prepare is when growth is still positive. The IMF still projects 5.6 percent growth in 2026, but the recent trend is not comforting: full-year GDP growth slowed to 4.4 percent in 2025 from 5.7 percent in 2024, fourth-quarter growth was only 3.0 percent, March 2026 inflation climbed to 4.1 percent, and February unemployment was 5.1 percent, higher than a year earlier. That is not a

There are honors you do not expect to receive, especially when your earliest experiences taught you to expect limitation instead.

When people speak about Oxford, they often speak about its history, its prestige, and its excellence. They speak of it as though it exists somewhere above ordinary life. But what Oxford taught me most was not grandeur. It was bravery.

In the past, crime scenes were defined by fingerprints on glass, footprints in mud, and handwriting on paper. Today, many of the most revealing clues are invisible to the naked eye. They live inside mobile phones, laptops, cloud accounts, GPS logs, email trails, deleted messages, and encrypted storage. That is why digital forensics has become one of the most important pillars of modern law. It is no longer a specialist concern at the edge of criminal justice. It is central to

There is a peculiar pressure placed on young people today: the pressure to become someone, quickly and publicly. By 18, you should know your path. By 21, you should be building a brand.

We are told to greet artificial intelligence with awe, curiosity, and optimism. We are told it will make life easier, work faster, decisions smarter, systems smoother. We are told that autonomous agents will book our travel, manage our inboxes, negotiate our bills, write our reports, monitor our health, and maybe one day run entire companies, governments, and wars more efficiently than we ever could.

A city is often judged by what it builds: glittering skylines, widened highways, new business districts. But it should also be judged by something far more basic: whether people can move through it with dignity. Public transportation is not merely about buses, trains, and terminals. It is about access to work, education, health care, family, and community. And if that system is not accessible to marginalized people, including persons with disabilities and senior citizens, the

Dialogue is one of the most ordinary things we do—and one of the most endangered.

Plet Bolipata’s “The time has come,” Plet said, “to talk of many things” unfolds like a private song finally sung aloud. In this exhibition, memory, solitude, and fantasy do not merely coexist; they braid themselves into a visual language that is tender, searching, and luminously alive. These works feel less like declarations than revelations—fragments of an inner world gathered with sincerity and offered without defense.

There is a particular loneliness in grief when distance stands between sorrow and farewell. For me, that loneliness is made sharper by the fact that, because of travel restrictions, I cannot go home to pay my respects to a man I deeply admired. And so I do what writers have always done when presence is denied them: I turn to words, inadequate though they may be, and hope they are enough to honor Edgard Cabangon.

I have seen war through the eyes of my classmates—people who come from countries that are currently in conflict. They don’t always talk about it directly. Sometimes it’s a silence that arrives when the conversation turns to “home,” or a pause when someone’s phone lights up with a message they’re afraid to open. Sometimes it’s the way they carry ordinary moments with a kind of quiet alertness, as if their bodies learned a different definition of normal long before they ever wa

Peace is the word we reach for when something breaks. We say it at podiums, stitch it onto banners, whisper it at hospital bedsides and graves. But most days we treat peace like a background setting—like it will simply remain on if we don’t touch the controls. That is the first mistake. Peace isn’t a default. Peace is a construction project, and it needs constant maintenance.

If you want to understand inequality in Manila, don’t begin with income statistics. Don’t begin with GDP growth or ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Begin with a wheelchair.

A city does not end at sunset.

There is a particular electricity in an unexpected encounter. You turn a corner and see an old friend you haven’t thought about in years. You duck into a café to escape the rain and overhear a conversation that shifts your thinking. You sit on a public bench and find yourself talking to someone whose life seems entirely unlike yours—until it isn’t. These moments feel accidental. But they are rarely random. They are made possible by the environments we build.

If you want to know whether a city is truly working, don’t start by asking the happiest commuters or the residents with the most options. Start with the people the city fails first: those with the least money, the least power, the least time, the least safety, and the fewest ways to “just make it work.” Design a city for them, and you don’t just build a kinder place—you build a city that functions better for everyone.

The newest assessment snapshots should end the era of excuses. Filipino learners are not mastering foundational skills early, and gaps widen with every grade. If we read the data honestly, one reform rises to the top in a multilingual country—teach children first in the language they use at home.