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Everything everywhere all at once

It seems as if everything is going to hell all at once. You have the Russia-Ukraine war, with the always constant threat of a catastrophic nuclear exchange just below the horizon. You have Iranian women and young people violently pushing back against the suffocating rule of a fundamentalist theocracy. You have the Chinese being locked up in their own houses for months at a time, often not able to provide for their basic necessities, at the mercy of a central government hellbent on an unrealistic “zero COVID” policy. In the same country, you have the ongoing suppression and destruction of the...

2022-10-02 15:06

I look at myself but I can't see me

A few years ago, my little boy and I were talking over dinner about how our respective days went. He was trying to narrate a story and was differentiating himself from the other kids in his class. He used a word that I never forgot. He said, “Not me, that was for the real American kids.” I feebly protested, “But you are a real American, too.” He nodded, somewhat impatiently. “I know, but you know.” And I did.

2022-09-04 15:37

We are all toxic

When I first landed in Queens, New York City, as a 12-year-old immigrant, the only time I saw the word, “toxic,” was on a warning label affixed to a drain opener plastic container in a supermarket. In a similar vein, the imagery that I associated with “toxic” was the skull and crossbones icon used to denote something as poisonous. In a word, “toxic” was something that was serious, lethal and rare. Moreover, things were toxic, not humans.

2022-08-21 14:13

Brain freeze in two languages

I was born and raised in Seoul until I was nine years old. Then we emigrated to Asuncion, Paraguay and spent about two-and-a-half years there before landing in New York City where I grew into young adulthood. So, that means that I was immersed in three different languages in the first twenty years of my life with little exposure to the other languages when submerged in the culture of the dominant language. Naturally, I have been fascinated by how different languages play within my own brain.

2022-08-07 16:31

North Korean fishermen or murderers?

The first legitimate political bombshell of the new Yoon administration is here. It's about the forced repatriation of the two North Korean squid fishermen who confessed to killing 16 of their fellow crew members after being captured by the South Korean Navy in November 2019. After a three-day investigation by South Korean authorities, the two North Korean men were sent back to North Korea for having committed “heinous crimes.”

2022-07-24 15:21

Abe and Ito

In his Friday article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Shinzo Abe Shooting Recalls Japan's Prewar History of Political Violence,” Peter Landers writes, “The shooting recalls Japan's turbulent pre-World War II era, when assassinations occurred more frequently and were used as a political tool.

2022-07-10 16:54

AI can never be human

The world is often filled with imprecise words in such numbers that I often feel that I am drowning in the verbose inanities of language. But we must communicate for that's what makes us human. As such, we bravely dive into the foaming sea of words and grasp those few to which we choose to imbue certain meanings, as people utter them at us, twisting them with the inherent biases and mental constructs that are uniquely our own. Which, needless to say, are different from the biases and mental constructs of the person who uttered those words to us in the first place. It's a wonder we can unders...

2022-06-26 16:32

Renormalizing Seoul

I spent these past few days on a business trip to Seoul. It was interesting timing in that it feels to me that Korea is just starting to come out of many of its COVID-19 restrictions and renormalize.

2022-06-12 16:14

'Depp sadness'

It's always jarring to see the idols of your youth turn into an unfortunate spectacle right in front of your eyes. This happened to - among many others - Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and now, Johnny Depp. I was too young to experience Elvis and Michael as they were in the beginning of their careers, except for snippets of old videos on Ed Sullivan shows and Jackson Five performances. So, when they turned into unrecognizable, larger-than-life caricatures - more akin to bad modern art than actual, relatable people - it was more of a rubbernecking exercise than anything else.

2022-05-29 16:25

'Luna eclipse'

The crash that some had been warning about happened. TerraUSD (UST), a stablecoin, imploded over a period of a few days. TerraUSD was pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar through an algorithmic smarts that linked its value to a sister cryptocurrency called Luna, which crashed to $0.40 on May 12th; on May 5th, Luna was worth $87

2022-05-15 16:25

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