While Vice President Sara Duterte is often criticized for her frequent trips abroad—her “world tour”—the specter of 2028 grows larger and the question of how to stop another Duterte presidency becomes harder to ask. What’s obvious is that Sara Duterte is securing the vote of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), a small but not insignificant...
Author: DLS Pineda (Dino Pineda)
Post
Why are we blaming everyone else but the police?
It seems that in some countries, the availability of guns has become a complex problem. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated, the fatal bullet was fired from a gun assembled from parts fabricated with a 3D printer. Even with the strictest gun control laws, Japan saw its once most powerful person downed by...
Post
A third (and probably not the final) installment on my phone addiction
I find that one way I get myself out of a writing slump is to write about my day-to-day fight with phone addiction. It’s been five months since I last wrote for CoverStory, and in the two times I emerged from a similar writing slump, I got myself out by writing about my phone addiction....
Post
The everyday absurdity of ‘accidents’ on the road
Last March 3, a 22-wheeler trailer truck spun out of control and hit the island in front of Miriam College on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City at 2:58 a.m., spilling its load of tons of sacks of chicken-feed additives and causing unusually heavy traffic up to around 10 a.m. According to reports, nobody was killed...
Post
Thoughts on the standees of Rodrigo Duterte and Leila de Lima
When I first saw the Duterte standees, I almost cried laughing. Even funnier is how his supporters have made different versions of “Tatay Digs”—such as the thin and flimsy one, faded under the sun, in front of their supposed pobre residence in Davao City; the one at the head of a table somewhere in the...
Post
Relapsing into phone addiction, and getting out again
Last August, CoverStory ran a piece I wrote on three simple ways to lessen screen time. That was six months ago and, like a dutiful patient out of rehab, I am reporting on how it has been, some losses and some gains, since I weaned myself off my phone. Suffice it to say that it...
Post
What’s taking so long, Bongbong?
The first strike was at the State of the Nation Address (Sona) last July, when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. appeared to be scolding the corrupt, blurting out so confidently, “Mahiya naman kayo!” only to be met with resounding applause and loud cheers by the people he was addressing. It was a curious moment, patently Pinoy...
Post
Postscript to the Frankfurt Book Fair with my friends Jose Rizal, Edward Said and Adania Shibli
To be clear, I was not at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But in the past few months, I’ve been holding a book fair of sorts on my own after coming to terms with my being a polygamous reader. I seem to think that just because I am unable to read one book at a time,...
Post
I’m only happy when it rains
My wife and I woke up one Wednesday morning and I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock. It was raining and the air was cool. In the additional five minutes of sleep, otherwise known as negotiating with myself if I should get up or not, there was a quandary in my head: With...
Post
Running in (academic) ovals
In the week after the nth iteration of “The Great UP Run,” I found myself asking: What’s so great about it? Sure, this may be just a matter of branding, and brands don’t always have to make sense. But as any decent adman would know, a brand can only be as good as the service...