On Hiatus (and Future Plans)

I have been blogging since July 2009 (10 years!) and publishing the weekly newsletter since October 2017, and while there has been reasonable success I feel like I have unfortunately plateaued. Both the blog and the newsletter need a better focus, and I would personally benefit if both endeavours aligned with my work as an aspiring social welfare scholar.

Also, I last took a break from blogging five years ago in November 2014.

The book reviews will stay, but probably synchronised with Goodreads. The weekly newsletter will continue to carry the book reviews and a weekly global and Singapore roundup, but the blog will only feature a monthly roundup with the most pertinent news stories. And there will be a stronger emphasis on presenting and explaining social service research as well as applied data analysis in Singapore. For instance:

A journal article or book on inequality: Who conducted the research? What were their motivations? What were the research methods? How does it align with similar articles? And what are the next steps?

A government, think-tank, or non-profit publication or report on eldercare: How should the graphs or statistics be interpreted? To what extent were the research methods or questionnaire questions unbiased? And what are the implications?

A newspaper article referencing research or data (or the aforementioned): What is the context? Was the information reported fairly or accurately? And are there contradictions?

These are tentative ideas and examples, and – as always – let me know your thoughts and send me any and all recommendations. And expect updates ahead of the relaunch of the blog and newsletter in end-August / early-September!