Carla Montemayor

.@RegineCabato knew something had shifted when the attacks stopped being about her work. The insults have come in waves: slurs like “presstitute” and “whorenalist,” mockery of her appearance from pro-Duterte bloggers and supporters. rightsreport.org/2026/04/16/wom…

Open-access until April 21. cambridge.org/core/elements/…

@elenacroitoru Thank you so much, Elena!

@FlipsideKitchen Many congratulations, Carla! I had missed this! Looking forward to reading it!

The world is burning, it feels awkward to talk about books. But here is mine — a book about stories and the women who kept them alive. A stand against forgetting and erasure. #philippines #philippinebooks #mythology #familymemoir penguin.co.uk/books/461316/i…

The Philippines grows 87% of the world’s abaca fiber. China turns it into textiles. Guess who keeps the margin. About 200,000 Filipino farming families harvest these stalks by hand. The entire country earns roughly $100M a year from abaca exports, raw fiber and finished products combined. That’s $500 per farming family per year from the strongest natural fiber on earth. Meanwhile, Chinese textile manufacturers sell finished abaca fabric to Levi’s, Calvin Klein, GAP, and dozens of global brands at markups that make the raw material cost a rounding error. The abaca fiber market is growing at ~8% annually toward $150M by 2029, but that growth is almost entirely in processing and finished goods, not in what farmers earn. The Philippines actually has a competitive edge here. Nine commercial fiber grades versus Ecuador’s five. High genetic diversity. Centuries of cultivation expertise. PhilFIDA has been trying to move the industry up the value chain for decades. But processing requires capital infrastructure and direct relationships with Western brands that Chinese factories locked up years ago. This is the same pattern playing out across Southeast Asian commodities. The country with the resource exports raw material. The country with the factories captures the spread. You’re watching a video of Philippine agricultural wealth being converted into Chinese manufacturing margin in real time. That $100M in Filipino export earnings? A single Chinese denim manufacturer like Black Peony does more than that serving just one brand account.

@arnesa_kustura Because everyone already knows who belongs to which class the moment they open their mouth. There are established ways of signaling wealth and social background other than talking about it.

Why do you guys do this though? I still don’t get it. It’s a country in which it’s simultaneously shameful to be both poor and wealthy in and also middle class too.

While most Filipinos were asleep, 107 accounts with nearly 3 million combined followers shared the Chinese Embassy’s post within two hours. By the time their audiences woke up, it had already penetrated the pro-Duterte ecosystem and surpassed 400 shares within 24 hours.

On the first day of the Confirmation of Charges hearing, a relative complained about the apparent rise in the number of trolls on her Facebook page. Some have even started messaging her on Messenger, saying she deserves what happened to her son, who died during the war on drugs.

The Hague is a small, quiet - and some would say boring - city. You’re bound to run into Filipinos in every bus, every tram. And while seeing Pinoys overseas is usually cherished, it’s anxiety for drug war victims & their lawyers. Here, they walk afraid. rappler.com/philippines/du…

A new public fountain has appeared in central London, but look closer & you’ll see that it’s a actually a fountain of filth. The water is black, the human victims of the sewage crisis are vomitting streams of liquid, whilst surmounted by a smug water executive with a briefcase stuffed with cash. The fountain commemorates one of the biggest environmental crimes in British history, where water companies stole tens of billions of pounds that was supposed to be spent on our sewage system, gave it to shareholders and executives and illegally poured billions of lites of sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas instead. The channel 4 docudrama about the sewage crisis, #dirtybusiness, starts at 9pm tonight. Watch it, get sad, get angry and then join the thousands of people around the country demanding an end to the sewage crisis.

@13thFool Nag-storyboard ba ito at talagang pinili nila yung kuha ng nag-iisang cyclist sa Iloilo Esplanade na mukhang naliligaw, lone farmer na namimitas ng gulay, 2 dancers in Capiz, one weaver in Aklan…Walang mga TAO sa Panay? No footage of the *biggest* festivals in the country?

Lakas maka-1992 feels. Too slow, dreary, and plain boring. Hindi ba tayo talaga maka-afford ng maayos na video editor at socmed manager? I am not a professional video editor, but I can do better reels than this and, surely, so many others can.

@13thFool Last I checked, there were 4 provinces in Panay.

Here Comes the Bride. Filipino weddings. Bakla beauticians, er, stylists. Precious unica hijas. How yayas are treated.

A common mistake when hanging the Philippine flag *vertically* (on a wall, say) is displaying the blue field on the right-hand side. The red bit should be on the right or else you’ve inadvertently declared war.

MOST EXPENSIVE BOOK SOLD IN PH HISTORY A rare first-edition copy of Jose Rizal's El Filibusterismo has been sold for P21 million from its starting price of P5 million. According to Leon Gallery, it has become the most expensive book ever sold in the Philippines. READ: philstarlife.com/geeky/849754-f…

@Ma_WuKong @Rhoffman94 Mhicky.

@Rhoffman94 Still a long way to go until I become a true Filipino connoisseur.

🇵🇭 Apellidos filipinos: Viva España Viva el Rey Viva el Orden y la Ley 🇵🇭 Nombres filipinos: Micky Mouse

Lugar lang (UP Press, 2025), now internationally known as Just Land tr. by @JLaneria, has been shortlisted in the 2025 Poetry in Translation Prize by the Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo, and New Directions! 🥹

So, today @tedtalks announced that my TED talk ‘This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like’ was their most watched talk of the year. It’s sort of amazing & terrifying. Because this *is* what a digital coup looks like.

@susie_dent @hayfestival ‘Banal’ , which I thought was pronounced bhey-nahl, . In Tagalog, ‘banal’ means ‘sacred’ and is pronounced bah-nahl. I thought it couldn’t be the same pronunciation in English.

Thank you to the lovely audience member at @hayfestival who shared that her daughter had once corrected her pronunciation of ‘epiphany’ and told her it should of course be ‘epi-fanny’. Which word have you royally mispronounced because you’d only ever seen it written down?