The mynah bird is everywhere in Singapore. It perches on hawker centre tables, hops along pavements, and chatters from every power line. It is so common that most Singaporeans have stopped seeing it — which is precisely why Ruby Thiagarajan, Karen Gwee, Isabelle Lim, and Darren Wan chose it as the name and symbol for their magazine. Launched in October 2016, Mynah is an annual longform print publication devoted to the Singaporean stories that lie forgotten at void decks, unnoticed in phone camera rolls, and stashed away in parts of the city that the MRT still can't reach.
The magazine is explicitly, almost stubbornly local. In a publishing landscape where most independent titles chase an international readership, Mynah trains its attention on a single city-state of under six million people and finds, issue after issue, that there is far more to say than a lifetime of publications could contain. The editorial focus is longform non-fiction: deeply reported features, profiles of notable Singaporeans, forgotten chapters of national history, and intimate examinations of subcultures that the mainstream press either overlooks or flattens. Issue five, published in 2025 through Ethos Books, included a meditation on the Great Singapore Workout and the disciplining of the Singaporean body, a spatial examination of female prayer halls in local mosques, and an essay about Singapore's barbecue culture from the inaugural recipient of the Mynah Emerging Writers Mentorship.
magCulture named the first issue Magazine of the Week, praising its 162 pages of proudly Singaporean design — the MRT system's own LTA Identity font repurposed for a story about the subway's public art collection, Windows screen-grabs illustrating a feature on nineties gaming. The aesthetic is busy and spontaneous, reflecting the visual cacophony of a city where East meets West on every shopfront. Mynah is entirely self-funded, pays its contributors, and operates without formal offices or internships. After an eight-year run, editor-in-chief Ruby Thiagarajan still speaks on panels about the politics of independent print in Singapore, and the team still has absolutely no plans to go digital. The bird remains invisible. The magazine does not.
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