Samantha HuiQi Yow

Contributing Editor at Economist Impact. Freelance journalist based in London and Singapore.

Huck Magazine •

The fight for long Covid to be recognised as a disability

One afternoon in April 2020, as the world was in a frenzy trying to cope with what was quickly shaping up to be a global crisis, Lucy Bailey was on the phone with her then-work manager when she felt a headache coming out of nowhere. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t make sense of what I was saying and what she was saying,” she recalls.

The host of symptoms that followed – fatigue, breathlessness, chest pains – made it clear it wasn’t the usual flu she was down with. But the general sentiment then wa
gal-dem •

#ESEAeats one year on: a celebratory movement of East and South East Asian food culture

Last year, when Masterchef: The Professionals finalist Philli Armitage-Mattin implied that Asian cuisine was “dirty” and needed refining, many in the UK’s East and South East Asian (ESEA) community were hurt — but not wholly surprised. While the London-based chef — a self-proclaimed “Asian specialist” of Indian heritage — has since scrubbed her Instagram bio of the “Dirty food refined” tagline and “#prettydirtyfood” hashtag, it was just yet another sentiment feeding into an anti-East Asian narra
Wired •

This AI Resurrects Ancient Board Games—and Lets You Play Them

In 1901, on an excavation trip to Crete, British archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed items he believed belonged to a royal game dating back millennia: a board fashioned out of ivory, gold, silver, and rock crystals, and four conical pieces nearby, assumed to be the tokens. Playing it, however, stumped Evans, and many others after him who took a stab at it. There was no rulebook, no hints, and no other copies have ever been found. Games need instructions for players to follow. Without any, the G
Foreign Policy •

Why Does the Singaporean Government Care About Egg Freezing?

The government’s outlawing of the procedure has come to illustrate just another form of social control in Singapore. In turn, the growing pushback from society represents a desire to wrestle free from it.

Oocyte cryopreservation, which is the technical term for the procedure, has come a long way since it was first developed in the 1980s. It was considered experimental by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine until 2012, and today, the procedure is still by no means a guarantee. Accordi

Singapore's last surviving village

Away from its soaring skyscrapers and urban sprawl, one rural oasis shows how Singapore used to look.

Rustic idyll isn't what usually comes to mind when most people think of Singapore today. Rather, it's the boat-shaped Marina Bay Sands towers, the soaring skyline, or the colourful and futuristic Gardens by the Bay. Yet, until the early 1970s, kampongs like Lorong Buangkok were ubiquitous across Singapore, with researchers from the National University of Singapore estimating there were as many