[Wang Son-taek] Korea’s standing at Olympics over 100 years

The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris wrapped up a 17-day run with a dazzling closing ceremony on Sunday. Although the South Korean team participated in the event with its smallest number of athletes since 1976, it exceeded expectations by winning 32 medals, including 13 gold medals. In the overall medal standings, South Korea ranked eighth, placing itself among the ranks of France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany as one of the top 10 sports powers. It may look natural now to

Aug. 14, 2024

[Kim Seong-kon] We should think big and global

The way we perceive things is often provincial and parochial rather than global and universal. We assume that people in other countries think the same way as we do. In many cases, however, foreigners think differently due to cultural differences. Therefore, we need to think big and global, while embracing different opinions and perspectives. Our love of ivy and pine trees can be a good example. In Korea, we like ivy because it decorates a building beautifully by crawling all over it and giving i

Aug. 14, 2024

[Kathryn Anne Edwards] America's fertility policy gap is bad economics

Even if you didn’t care about or respect women’s choices when it comes to having children, the “childless cat ladies” comments from Donald Trump's running mate JD Vance are still deeply problematic because they suggest a misunderstanding of a vital policy issue: fertility. To the extent that this deeply personal choice can be aggregated and tracked, it is akin to a performance measure of the economy -- and the data is flashing red. The US fertility rate has been fall

Aug. 14, 2024

[Grace Kao] What it’s like to ride in a driverless car

Waymo One is the first “autonomous ride-hailing service” available to customers. It advertises itself as offering a safer ride and allowing the autonomy of “people who can’t drive -- whether elderly, blind, or disabled -- to get around and do the things they love.” While many of us are cautiously optimistic and sometimes fearful of technology, in this particular case, I couldn‘t agree more with Google, the parent company of Waymo One. Recently, I visited San F

Aug. 13, 2024

[Lee Kyong-hee] A Japanese way of facing history

The tumultuous history of the Korean Peninsula can be seen through a myriad of prisms. In some cases that defy conventional wisdom. Well-educated Koreans in the South moved willingly to the communist North before the Korean War and stayed. One exceptional case caught the attention of Ryuta Itagaki, a professor of historical anthropology, and the outcome is an illuminating saga of a prominent linguist. In 2010, Itagaki, then a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, met Kim Hye-young,

Aug. 12, 2024

[Karishma Vaswani] People power has won in Bangladesh, for now

Sheikh Hasina could have left gracefully. Instead, Bangladesh’s prime minister resigned and fled to neighboring India, ending her 15-year-long rule as chaos has engulfed the nation. The army wasted no time stepping in to form an interim government, although what shape that will take is still unclear. The military needs to find a swift path to a peaceful transfer of power. Any delay will risk damaging the country’s reputation with the international financial community even further --

Aug. 12, 2024

[Robert Fouser] Some changes in Korean since the 1980s

Languages change all the time, and Korean is no exception. In the age of social media, words that go viral quickly become mainstream, but other changes happen slowly and are hard to notice. I started learning Korean in 1983, and the 41 years since then have revealed a number of interesting changes. The most obvious change is the decline in the use of Chinese characters. In the early 1980s, Chinese characters were much more common in newspapers, books and street signs. Newspapers used vertical te

Aug. 9, 2024

[Wang Son-taek] Humanitarianism will prevail

In August 2024, two fevers rage on the Korean Peninsula. One is the summer heat wave that hits the Peninsula every year. After the rainy season in late July, the heat wave pressures people to refrain from outdoor activities at higher than 35 degrees Celsius. The other is stories about the Olympics being held in Paris, France. Koreans were cold-hearted at the beginning of the Olympics, but the reports of adding gold medals every day standing around sixth place in medal earnings revived their nati

Aug. 8, 2024

[Kim Seong-kon] Waiting for truly great leaders

The whole world is now watching the political leaders who are dividing the world into “us” and “them”; who pretend that they are saviors who can deliver the people from the miseries inflicted upon them by the privileged or the establishment. Populists in essence, those politicians are posing as messiahs who can bring back the good old days to the disappointed, nostalgic people. Their slogan is invariably a variation of “Make our country glorious again,” whethe

Aug. 7, 2024

[Grace Kao] Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ make memes for democracy

Who doesn’t love a good cat meme? In a 2021 interview with Fox News, US Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance referred to Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Later he adds, “It's just a basic fact -- you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC -- the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without chil

Aug. 6, 2024

[Marc Champion] Russia’s prisoner trade

Take a good look at the lists of prisoners exchanged between Kremlin and the White House. If, after that, you still find yourself admiring President Vladimir Putin for his strength and despising US alliances for their “weak” liberalism, you need help. Putin went in person to Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport to hug Vadim Krasikov as he stepped off the plane that brought him home. Krasikov is the “patriot” Putin has sought to free ever since the former was convi

Aug. 6, 2024

[Career compass] 'You can only succeed by making others successful'

Readers have requested interviews with successful individuals about their career journeys. For this column, I had the pleasure of interviewing Park Hee-je, managing director of Kohler Novita Korea, a leading global bathroom products company. Park began his career in marketing at P&G Korea, later moving on to eBay and Philips. His professional journey has taken him to Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, gaining valuable experience in each location. I have immense respect for Park's leadership,

Aug. 5, 2024

[Sheldon H. Jacobson] Who will pay for Crowdstrike outage?

Crowdstrike did not have a good day on July 19. During a routine software update, the file that the cybersecurity firm issued triggered a logic error that prohibited Windows machines from rebooting. Microsoft estimates that around 8.5 million computers may have been affected by the event. This created a tsunami of downstream consequences, as computers that supported numerous industry operations were unable to coordinate and process data. For air travel, the net effect was the cancellation of mor

Aug. 5, 2024

[Yoo Choon-sik] Central bank independence and government policy

In countries like South Korea that adopt the presidential system of government, the president can wield much stronger power than the prime minister under the parliamentary system because the president usually rules for a fixed period. Accordingly, comments by the president or presidential officials on specific issues can carry a much stronger and wider impact on people’s lives as well as financial markets. At the same time, their comments sometimes have a different type and magnitude of im

Aug. 5, 2024

[Lee Byung-jong] Espionage or public diplomacy?

The recent indictment by the US government of former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry on espionage charges smacks of a thrilling Hollywood spy movie. As an expert on Korean affairs, she allegedly received luxury handbags and expensive meals from the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s main spy agency. In return, she arranged meetings between officials of Seoul and Washington and provided sensitive US government information to the agency in a bid to influence US policies on the Korean Peni

Aug. 2, 2024

[Wang Son-taek] Obscured truth in the Sado mine complex

The Sado mine complex on Sado Island in Niigata prefecture of Japan has suddenly become world-famous. On Saturday, the 46th UNESCO World Heritage Committee in New Delhi, India decided to list the complex as a World Heritage site. Japan had sought to register it since December 2021 but had not succeeded, mainly due to strong opposition from South Korea. But recently there has been a big change in Korea’s position and Japan succeeded. In Japan, national leaders, including Prime Minister Fumi

Aug. 1, 2024

[Eric Posner] Prosecutions, politics don't mix

As America’s attention turns to November’s presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the prosecutions of the former president have been all but forgotten. But Democrats hope that Harris’s previous role as a district attorney may help jog memories and persuade some crucial swing voters to ditch the felon for the prosecutor. Will it work? Or has the failed assassination attempt against Trump retroactively mythologized the sputtering prosecutions as Stations of

Aug. 1, 2024

[Kim Seong-kon] Cultural differences make our eyes open

Despite many striking similarities, there are a myriad of cultural differences between the East and the West. Living in Korea and the US, I can attest to the plethora of such differences. Those differences reflect how Koreans and Americans perceive things differently. The way of disciplining a child is a good example. For instance, American parents usually “ground” a badly behaving boy by confining him in his room, probably with no TV or computer. On the other hand, Korean parents pu

July 31, 2024

[Lisa Jarvis] Extreme heat hits mental health

On July 22, planet Earth achieved a terrifying milestone: Global temperatures reached their highest level in recorded history, breaking a record set just one day before. This year is expected to be the hottest in centuries. Heat waves are hotter, longer and more frequent than they were in the 1960s. By now, most of us understand that extreme heat is bad for our health, making our hearts, lungs, kidneys and other organs work much harder. But too often we overlook the quieter, less obvious toll he

July 30, 2024

[Grace Kao] Asian Americans in US Census counts

The United States is a land of immigrants, with many racial and ethnic groups. How the US government counts them changes regularly, and the latest revisions affect all minority groups, including Asian Americans. For immigrants to the US, including those from South Korea, it is often a shocking transition for them as they are identified via the racial categories in the US. Certainly, for new arrivals from Korea, China, India, the Philippines and other countries in Asia, it’s not obvious why

July 30, 2024