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Entertainment & Arts

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SCMP
Asia

Opinion

Columnists

Jason Lim

Accidental (Sri Lankan) arsonist

A gasoline storage depot in Goyang City blew up, sending out thick, dark plumes of smoke that could be seen from Seoul. The fire consumed 2.6 million liters of gasoline over 17 hours - this was actually fortunate since only one tank exploded and no casualties were reported.

2018-10-14 17:37

Juche as addiction, not ideology

A Mother Jones article titled, “Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists,” Wes Enzinna writes, “de-radicalization activists argue that much of what the left thinks it knows about shutting down racist extremists is misplaced. When it comes to changing individuals, denunciation may counteract rather than hasten de-radicalization. If that seems like surrender, consider that some researchers who study hate groups think we should view violent extremism not only as a problem of ideology, but also as a problem of addiction: a craving for group identity...”

2018-09-28 16:59

Who am I in 4th Industrial Revolution?

No, I am not writing about one of the oldest and most frustrating questions in human history and spiritual quest. I actually want to explore the topic of identity in the context of the coming 4th Industrial Revolution.

2018-09-21 16:52

Korea's peculiar tribalism

So, it was South Korea vs. Japan in the gold medal match for soccer in this year's Asian Games. Besides being a dream match for the game organizers and TV studios, the biggest news seems to be about Park Hang-seo, the South Korean coach of the Vietnamese U-23 team that made it all the way to the semifinals before losing to Korea.

2018-09-02 17:10

What if the rich lived forever?

Everyone knows the famous story of how Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, made a fool of himself trying to live forever. He entrusted the magician Xu Fu of Zhifu Island with 6,000 virgins, untold riches, and a fleet of ships to travel to Pengal Islands where eight immortals kept the elixir of life. Even when the magician failed to return, the emperor entrusted other charlatans with riches to go out and bring back a way to live forever. Ironically, the emperor ended up overdosing on pills made of mercury, which was a common ingredient in elixirs of life.

2018-08-19 16:55

Preordained analytics of big data

In an article titled, “What we buy can be used to predict our politics, race or education _ sometimes with more than 90 percent accuracy,” the Washington Post describes a study done by University of Chicago Booth School of Business economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica that shows that consumer behavior patterns can reliably predict whether someone is white or not in the U.S.

2018-08-05 17:16

Is xenophobia in Korea's DNA?

Aylan Kurdi was a three-year old Kurdish Syrian boy who washed up on the shore of a beach in Turkey in September 2015, drowned when the boat carrying the refugees sank off the coast. The visceral image of an innocent child victimized so cruelly by circumstances beyond his control led to an outpouring of grief across the globe. Expressions of public grief were likewise plentiful in Korea, with everyone conveying heartfelt sympathies.

2018-07-22 17:22

Thai boys and Sewol children

Thank God they were found. The twelve boys and a coach from a local soccer team were found inside flooded Thai caves after going missing for ten days. As each day ticked by, there was mounting dread that the boys would never be found. They would either be drowned already or, even worse, desperately clawing out the last days of their short lives in sheer terror against the unrelenting darkness and water.

2018-07-10 17:27

Breathless in Korea

I am not exactly unfamiliar with Korea. I worked here for a few years way back when, and have been back frequently enough to pass as a local. But every time I visit, Korea always manages to present me with little odds and ends about its culture, people and things that give my brain either a brief pause or a longer-lasting freeze. Not necessarily bad, but different or unexpected enough to notice against my own cultural and behavioral paradigm that I have become accustomed to living in Washington D.C. During this current visit, the little things about Korea that I knew were always there but go...

2018-06-22 17:15

What about the expats?

When the tension was near the breaking point last fall, with both President Trump and the official North Korean mouthpiece hurling insults and threats at each other on a regular basis, there were many handwringing reports of how a war _ or even a limited military engagement _ would cause untold havoc and loss of Korean lives in Seoul and surrounding areas. But what about the lives of foreign residents of Korea?

2018-06-10 16:45

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