About 72 percent of adults reported reading the Bible; 53 percent picture books; 52 percent short stories, 48 percent romance novels, and 48 percent newspapers and reference materials. Moreover, books are prohibitive to many.

Teleseryes create employment for otherwise dormant actors, creative staff, and production crew. They are also exported in increasing number to countries in Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Africa, and Latin America where they are dubbed in the local language.

Flakiness also arises due to the widening range of options available to people. Higher incomes and more mobility allow people to pick among events to attend, and millennials usually choose the flashier one for fear of missing out (FOMO).

The Philippine cinema industry hasn’t bounced back since 1986. An average of 166 movies were made annually in the 1970s; this fell to 142 in the 1980s. This year, only 90 films are expected to be made. And of the total, a critic estimates that only 5 percent pass “reasonably high standards of art excellence.” 

Let our comfort rooms be not rooms of discomfort for others. We should not oversimplify the gender assignment problem of toilets as one of discrimination against trans people.

The re-imposition of capital punishment is again a hot topic. We need a new body of laws that looks at modern crimes in a new light.  

New mayors Isko Moreno, Vico Sotto, and Francis Zamora demonstrate strong political will that their predecessors didn’t seem to have, and to achieve popular goals that earlier leaders promised but failed to achieve. Their style of millennial leadership should be replicated in other localities.  

UHC is a daunting challenge if PhilHealth itself is not reformed. Policy reform has moved ahead of systems reform. Health insurance is essentially about systems: membership eligibility, provider accreditation, provider payment, and quality assurance. 

In the case of PhilHealth, fraud can arise from ghost patients, upcoding or upcasing, and over-admission. The costs of these different types of fraud have not been calculated, but they run in the hundreds of millions a year. 

The nutritional status of the Filipino children is buried in dusty academic journal articles that policymakers may not be aware of. It's about time to bring out the issues on nutrition into the policy table. 

Technocrats often do not know the daily constraints of ordinary people. It is time we looked at representation in a more inclusive light. True representativeness is the essence of democracy.

It was indeed the best of times for the Duterte administration’s senatorial slate, just as it was the worst of times for the opposition’s Otso Diretso.