
Zing Tsjeng
Singaporean journalist
4
APPEARANCES
3
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012
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Sep 16, 2026
The Value Crisis: 1. Crisis, What Crisis?
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Zing TsjengGUEST
I think there are some values that are really integral to dating someone, right? Things like a curiosity about the other person's life, an openness to what they have to say about what they bring to your life, about their values and their lifestyle.

Zing TsjengGUEST
The value of being open to someone else has been chipped away by dating apps because what dating apps do rather than present this whole complicated person right in front of you in three dimensions is actually try and distill it into several key traits.

Zing TsjengGUEST
It was almost like trying to find the one Tetris block that fits into your life perfectly.

Zing TsjengGUEST
And if someone has a little bit of a jagged edge where you're like, "Oof, I don't think they work for my life.
Ex-VICE Editor-in-Chief: How to Build a Career That Survives Anything | Zing Tsjeng
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K
13:57KumbaHOST
Do you think media outlets like Vice shutting down, because it's just one of many magazines that have shut down, do you think it's a part of this wider shift where iconic magazines are no longer as influential as they once were?

Zing TsjengGUEST
I think a lot of readers and consumers still have a lot of fondness for these brands.

Zing TsjengGUEST
So when I tell people I used to work at Vice, people are still like, oh my God, wow.

Zing TsjengGUEST
They'll even name specific things or videos or articles that they've consumed over the years.

Zing TsjengGUEST
But I think what has happened is the wider media ecosystem has completely changed.

Zing TsjengGUEST
So the way that these publications made money has been completely upended by the tech industry.
12 MINS LATER
K
27:06KumbaHOST
What advice would you give to people who have so many different interests but I don't feel like they want to stick to one traditional pathway?
Uzoamaka Power on her rom com, Call of My Life
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Nikki BediHOST
So before we go any further, Zing, do you have a cultural highlight that you want to recommend to the world?

Zing TsjengGUEST
I would love to recommend a book called Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuangji, which won the International Booker Prize.

Zing TsjengGUEST
And it's a brilliant story about a almost a proto-Anthony Bourdain type travel writer from Japan, who's a woman who goes on this kind of almost diplomatic trip to Taiwan to sample the country because it's now a Japanese colony.

Zing TsjengGUEST
And she ends up falling in love with her female translator and interpreter, And it's a beautiful love story wrapped in a kind of old to Taiwanese food.

Zing TsjengGUEST
I mean, it left me feeling so hungry because some of the descriptions of food in that novel are so brilliantly vivid and realised.
12 MINS LATER
Tina Gharavi on Virginia Woolf
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Nikki BediHOST
How do you feel about that development of a small mention in the original book being taken in a different direction?

Zing TsjengGUEST
Because, and I don't know if many listeners will know this, but the word computer was once mainly associated with women because women who were talented mathematicians, indeed astronomers, astrophysicists, they weren't really allowed to take on those posts in universities and higher education.

Zing TsjengGUEST
So instead, they were kind of condemned to do the grunt work of all these mathematical calculations.

Zing TsjengGUEST
that were really complicated, but the men then went on to take the credit for them.

Zing TsjengGUEST
So if you remember the film Hidden Figures, the women in Hidden Figures were actually called the computers because competing was seen as a woman's job.
9 MINS LATER