3am Stories
The Causeway between Singapore and Johore in 1945.
The Causeway, 1945.
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Last week, Elon Musk called Lee Kuan Yew a genius.

3 July 2026

Not for building Singapore. Not for the port, the schools, or the housing. He called him a genius because of what Lee Kuan Yew said about air...

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The first NRIC number ever issued in Singapore was S0000001I.

21 August 2026

That's officially confirmed. ICA says it was assigned to Yusof bin Ishak, Singapore's first President, when the newly independent country introduced...

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My kids won't eat sausages. This is entirely my wife's fault.

25 June 2026

Trinity was 3 years old when Kikyo Chandecided it would be educational to show her a YouTube video about how sausages are made. I walked into the...

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The man tasked with building Singapore's army had one military qualification: he'd served as a corporal in a volunteer force that surrendered to...

5 September 2026

The man tasked with building Singapore's army had one military qualification: he'd served as a corporal in a volunteer force that surrendered to the...

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My sister moved out last year.

29 June 2026

She'd just got married, which meant her old room was finally free, which meant Trinity could have her own bedroom for the first time. We bought her a...

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They told him the road alone would take fifteen years to build.

21 April 2026

He did it in three. A 20-kilometre access road, blasted and carved through dense jungle and up the side of a mountain called Gunung Ulu Kali, 1,800...

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In the year 2000, a man's body was found in his apartment in Japan. He was 69 years old. He had been dead for three years.

10 July 2026

His rent had been paid every month. His electricity and water bills had been settled on time. His bank account had been quietly debiting each charge,...

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In 1980, a team from Harvard looked at Singapore's plans for an MRT and gave some advice.

5 October 2026

Don't build it. Buses would do the job. And if Singapore really insisted on a train, accounts of their report say, one line could be enough. Today...

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There are more bubble tea shops in Singapore than there are 7-Elevens.

8 July 2026

More than there are McDonald's, Starbucks, and KFC locations combined, most likely. You can find one in every MRT station, every mall, and every...

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Go to your bathroom. Stand in it. Look around.

7 July 2026

That's about 25 square feet. In Hong Kong, that's somebody's home. They're called coffin homes. A coffin home is a sealed wooden box, roughly six...

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Bread is the oldest prepared food on earth.

9 July 2026

Humans have been making it for at least 14,000 years. The recipe, at its simplest, is four ingredients. Flour, water, yeast, salt. So why does the...

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There is a scientific paper published in the American Journal of Medicine called "The Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads 'Chicken Little.'"

14 July 2026

That is a real title. Written by real doctors. Published in a real medical journal. And it is exactly as disturbing as it sounds. Dr. Richard deShazo...

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In 1957, eight human skulls and almost a hundred bones were discovered in a creek on a small island off Singapore's southern coast.

7 September 2026

They were thought to be the remains of Chinese men who had worked for the Singapore Harbour Board. Nobody could say for certain how they had died....

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To order a cup of coffee in Singapore, you need at least three languages. And you have about four seconds to do it.

1 August 2026

Walk into any kopitiam and listen... The customer ahead of you will say something like "kopi-C siew dai peng." Six syllables. Under two seconds. And...

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Every time you flush a toilet in Singapore, your waste disappears. You don't hear it. You don't smell it. You have no idea where it goes.

2 August 2026

But it goes somewhere extraordinary. 55 metres beneath the city, deeper than most MRT tunnels, a network of sewage tunnels slopes gently downward....