[Serendipity] Getting together, finally

When I heard a friend who is a few years older say that she missed the chaos of the kitchen before “jesa,” or ancestral rite, I was incredulous. She described how the women of her family would line the kitchen floor with layers of old newspaper to prevent the cooking oil from splattering and set up an electric griddle on top of it. “I miss the sound of sizzling jeon and the smell of cooking oil that wafted through the house,” she said. The kitchen countertop was not lar

Sept. 18, 2021

[David Fickling] COVID-19 becoming just another virus

In the days before COVID-19, I’d often get frustrated by the response that doctors would give when I turned up at their clinics with some infection or other: “It’s just a virus,” they’d say. As someone who’s long been fascinated by the detective work that goes into tracing the origins and history of infections, the answer always seemed too perfunctory. Which virus was it? Where and when did this strain emerge? How many other people were getting infected wit

Sept. 17, 2021

[Conor Sen] Amazon, Walmart winning labor market wars

Most of the talk this year about the labor market recovery has focused on leisure and hospitality, and the struggles that restaurant and hotel owners have had trying to staff up. Under the radar, it’s a different industry -- manufacturing – that’s having even more difficulty finding the workers it needs. And that’s what this week’s job openings report hammered home. Despite its reputation for high wages, the manufacturing sector is falling behind on the compensatio

Sept. 16, 2021

[Lee Kyong-hee] Tears of a young pilgrim shed on Afghan soil

The cascading events that followed the US exit from Afghanistan reminded me of a poem written by a young Buddhist monk of the eighth century. Hyecho, from the Silla Kingdom, upon meeting a fellow traveler from China in Fayzabad, in present-day northeast Afghanistan, wrote:  You bemoan the distance to the western frontier. I lament the long road east. Rugged roads cross colossal snow ridges, Dangerous ravines where bandits wander. Even birds in flight fear the soaring cliffs. Travelers

Sept. 16, 2021

[Kim Seong-kon] From ‘Gold medal or death!’ to ‘Freedom or death!’

When Seoul hosted the 1988 Summer Games, a reporter asked a famous Japanese judoka if he expected to win gold. The former gold medalist answered, smiling pleasantly, “I’m working at a bank. That is my job. Judo is merely my hobby. I will just do my best, but a gold medal is not my primary concern.” His answer was cool and impressive. Then, the same reporter turned to a Korean judoka who was also a strong candidate for the gold medal and asked the same question. The Korean ath

Sept. 15, 2021

[Justin Fox] No perfect time to return to work

The planned fall 2021 return to the office is being delayed. Until January, purportedly. That’s when Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and some other major employers of knowledge workers now say they expect people back at their desks, 22 months after sending everybody home at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the current high US levels of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and in some places deaths, it’s understandable that companies don’t want to do a big ret

Sept. 14, 2021

[Trudy Rubin] After Afghan failure, what is America prepared to fight for now?

As the news shifts, many Americans may think the Afghan war is over. Not so. The searing scenes of Kabul’s fall are having a powerful impact on America’s global image, including the abandonment of Afghan allies. Chinese and Russian propaganda outlets are gleefully trumpeting scenes of America’s “defeat.” NATO allies who had troops in Afghanistan are bitter that they were forced to leave Afghan staff and their own nationals -- because President Joe Biden didn&rsquo

Sept. 14, 2021

[Lee Edwards] 20 years later, critical lessons from 9/11

It is understandable, given the chaos surrounding the US exit from Afghanistan -- especially the murder of the 13 US troops -- that our attention has been focused on the ending of America’s longest war. The statistics are sobering. Length of the war: 20 years. Total number of US fatalities: 2,461. US wounded: more than 20,000. Afghan fatalities: more than 70,000. Cost of the war: $2.3 trillion. Major goal achieved: The Taliban were removed in late 2001 as the head of the Afghan governmen

Sept. 13, 2021

[Ajmal Ahmady] Economic challenges facing the Taliban

There are optimistic suggestions that the hard-won integration of Afghanistan into the global economy will remain despite the ascendancy of the Taliban and the withdrawal of the US. A number of commentators have suggested that China -- which the Taliban have declared their strongest ally -- could become Afghanistan’s primary economic supporter and help the country stay part of the global system. That analysis is unrealistic. For one, it ignores the sanctions regime imposed by the internat

Sept. 13, 2021

[Digital Simplicity] Is ‘metaverse’ another come-and-go digital meme?

Truck drivers are often blamed for the surging number of people who get transported to another virtual world filled with magicians, knights and demons. I mean, not real truck drivers, but those in fantasy web novels. A typical storyline goes like this: A protagonist is killed by a speeding truck on the road and for some mysterious reason comes to life in a new world that is drastically different from Earth. In the transition period, a mythical god gives superhuman abilities to the characters s

Sept. 11, 2021

[Robert J. Fouser] The post-war-on-terror era begins

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The attacks brought the two 110-story towers down, killing 2,606 people. Another 125 died at the Pentagon, and 265 died on the four airplanes hijacked for the attacks. In response to 9/11, then-President George W. Bush began a “war on terror” to weaken terrorists around the world and prevent future attacks. In October 2001, a US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to overthr

Sept. 10, 2021

[Bobby Ghosh] Ethiopia’s civil war is a disaster that’s only getting worse

As the world is transfixed by the tragedy playing out in Afghanistan, another humanitarian catastrophe is getting little scrutiny. In Ethiopia, a conflict with roots in a dispute between the central government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and authorities of the northern Tigray region has spilled into neighboring provinces and metastasized into a full-blown civil war -- one fueled as much by ethnic enmities as by political grievances. It’s time for the West to pay attention and get tougher

Sept. 9, 2021

[Kim Myong-sik] Pathetic ulterior motive of ‘fake news’ bill

In 2007, the final year of the Roh Moo-hyun presidency, major government offices literally locked down press rooms in their precincts under an order from the Blue House. The president made the decision out of belief that media representatives were just there to harass officials on duty. Print and broadcast journalists, as well as some internet reporters who were not many at that time, had to rent small spaces near government offices to continue to do their job of reporting what was going on in

Sept. 9, 2021

[Adam Minter] Space junk is now an imminent threat

In March, a Chinese military satellite appeared to spontaneously disintegrate in orbit, leaving a trail of debris high above the Earth. If China knew anything, it wasn’t saying. Did the propulsion system explode? Was there a collision with some of the space junk that’s accumulating in orbit? Or did something a bit more conspiratorial happen? The mystery persisted until last month, when an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics announced the answer. Yunhai 1-02, as the satellite is

Sept. 8, 2021

[Kim Seong-kon] The globalization of Korea and the prefix “K-”

These days, the South Korean government as well as pop culture promotion agencies attach “K-” to virtually everything of Korean origin that is popular overseas, such as K-culture, K-literature, K-pop, K-food, K-cars, K-dramas, K-quarantine and a host of others. Perhaps politicians and promoters want to inspire patriotism and pride by branding all these cultural exports with a “K,” suggesting that whatever raises the profile of Korea overseas is uniquely “Korean.&rdq

Sept. 8, 2021

[Hwang Jae-ho] Strategic perspective over the Afghanistan crisis

The chaotic scenes of Afghanistan women desperately crying out in fear, cheers from Taliban, Kabul airport covered with bloody terror, and President Joe Biden’s frustrated looks. ... With the recent withdrawal of Afghanistan, there has been growing controversy over the credibility and morality of US leadership; over whether “America is Back,” “America can be Back,” or even “America is Willing to be Back’. Criticisms of the Biden administration’s ir

Sept. 8, 2021

[Eric Posner] America’s return to foreign-policy realism

US President Joe Biden’s speech defending the withdrawal from Afghanistan announced a decisive break with a tradition of foreign-policy idealism that began with Woodrow Wilson and reached its apex in the 1990s. While that tradition has often been called “liberal internationalism,” it also was the dominant view on the right by the end of the Cold War. The United States, according to liberal internationalists, should use military force as well as its economic power to compel othe

Sept. 7, 2021

[Noah Feldman] Is the Supreme Court ready to overturn Wade v. Roe?

A day after the Constitution-flouting Texas anti-abortion law went into effect, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that it won’t block the law before it can grapple with a concrete case that tests it in practice. The five most conservative justices agreed to an unsigned, one-and-a-half-page opinion that said the law might or might not be unconstitutional, but that given its unusual form, which delegates enforcement to private citizens instead of state authorities, it was too legall

Sept. 6, 2021

[Bobby Ghosh] Biden shouldn‘t abandon Iraq too

As Afghans grapple with fear and uncertainty in the wake of the US military pullout from their country, Iraqis are beginning to wonder if it will be their turn next. The Biden administration, doubling and tripling down on the president’s defense of his Afghanistan withdrawal, has been deploying Washington‘s current catchphrase, “forever wars,” as well as invoking old shibboleths about the “national interest.” Pursuing the latter, so the theory goes, requires

Sept. 6, 2021

[Serendipity] Thinking of future in Korea

  A photo of massive, foreboding, rocky mountains, barren except for a few bushes, with a truckload of soldiers carrying rifles is a lasting image I have of Afghanistan. I used the photo, clipped out of Time magazine, I think, to make a scrap book about various countries -- a middle school geography assignment. I don’t remember why I chose Afghanistan, among all the other countries that started with the letter A. Perhaps because this was in the early 1980s and the country was much in

Sept. 3, 2021