[Ramakrishnan, Lee] There’s a bamboo ceiling

Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Blackberry are leading technology companies with something notable in common: They are all run by Asian-American CEOs. The visibility of Asian-American leaders in tech companies has not gone unnoticed. Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon infamously complained that “two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or Asia.” Perception is far from reality, however. A new report by Ascend shows that Asian-American CEOs are th

Oct. 22, 2017

[Rachel Marsden] Courageous Macron leans to the right

After visiting France as a guest of honor at the Bastille Day parade earlier this year, US President Donald Trump said of French President Emmanuel Macron, “He‘s a great guy -- smart, strong, loves holding my hand.” A couple of months later, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Macron repaid the compliment during a press conference with Trump: “I have to say just for the American people, that our people in France were very proud to have you and your wife, Melania, in Paris ... for

Oct. 20, 2017

[Tyler Cowen ] North Korea Is Playing a Longer Game Than the US

If we think through the North Korea nuclear weapons dilemma using game theory, one aspect of the problem deserves more attention, namely the age of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-n: 33. Because peaceful exile doesn’t appear to be an option -- his escaping the country safely would be hard -- Kim needs strategies for hanging on to power for 50 years or more. That’s a tall order, but it helps us understand that his apparently crazy tactics are probably driven by some very reasonable calculations, a

Oct. 19, 2017

[David Ignatius] Trump‘s personality and his Asian hosts

As President Trump prepares to head to Asia next month for his most important overseas trip yet, foreign intelligence services are undoubtedly trying to assemble personality profiles to explain this unconventional, risk-taking, domineering president to the leaders he will meet. How will they describe Trump? Probably not with the same hyperbole we sometimes use in our daily news commentary. Foreign governments aren’t as easily shocked or offended as journalists. They‘re used to bullying autocrats

Oct. 19, 2017

[Leonid Bershidsky] Putin wants to run Russia like corporation

By swiftly replacing 11 of 85 regional governors in the past two weeks, President Vladimir Putin is previewing plans to run Russia as a corporation after his all-but-inevitable victory in next year’s presidential election.Long tired of politics, he needs to set up a formal system that doesn’t depend upon former bodyguards and other loyal retainers -- there aren’t enough of them anyway. Instead, he’s seeking to borrow selection techniques from large corporations, according to commentators close t

Oct. 18, 2017

[Lee Sun-young] Agony of living in a small country

Shortly before Chuseok, the Korean thanksgiving, earlier this month, I had the opportunity to step back from the front line of daily news production and take a break. I stayed a wonderful five nights and six days in Riga, the capital of Latvia, as part of a South Korean media delegation. It was slightly off the “best season” for travel in the Baltic state -- spring and summer -- but luckily the weather was mostly favorable, almost like the weather in Seoul now. With its beautiful medieval city c

Oct. 18, 2017

[Lee Jae-min] In the National Assembly we trust

The same scenes are repeated each fall. Angry faces, shouting matches and group boycotts, and all these in front of national TV cameras. The National Assembly started this year’s plenary national audit on Oct. 12. It will run for 20 days until Oct. 31. The first four days of the audit indicate that we can expect the same this year as well. To governmental agencies and entities with state funding, the annual audit is one of the most critical moments of the year for leaders and organizations alike

Oct. 17, 2017

[Kim Seong-kon] The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick in our society

Reading nineteenth century American literature, we encounter a number of memorable characters. Among others, Rip Van Winkle, Huckleberry Finn, and Hester Prynne come to mind as they are unforgettably charming protagonists.Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle is known to be an archetypal American man who “was a simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband.” Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, too, is a typical American man who constantly wants to explore the

Oct. 17, 2017

[Andrew Sheng] Feeling dumb about artificial intelligence

There has been so much hype about artificial intelligence that rock-star historian-turned-futurist Yuval Noah Harari thinks that man (Homo sapiens) will evolve into Homo deus -- almost god-like through technology and science, conquering famine, war and possibly even death. We used to suspend belief through science fiction, until large parts of the gadgets that we watched in “Star Trek” in the 1960s become reality. With the ability of computers to beat the best human Go champion, science fiction

Oct. 16, 2017

[Abbas Milani] Trump strengthening Iran’s radicals

The United States and Iran have rarely agreed on how to proceed with nuclear talks or other elements of their bilateral relations. But synergies and similarities between two factions -- Iranian hard-liners and the hawks of the current US administration -- are as counterintuitive as they are profound. Indeed, Donald Trump’s new Iran strategy has given radicals in Tehran reason to celebrate, as they have found in the US president an unwitting ally in their quest for political dominance.For years,

Oct. 16, 2017