Linguists say that the Korean people have an extraordinarily keen sense of colors. For example, Koreans do not simply say something is red, blue, or yellow, or reddish, bluish or yellowish. In fact, the Korean language has numerous, rich adjectives depicting the subtle nuance of different colors. Among others, "bulgu-jukjuk hada," "pureut-pureut hada" and "nori-kiri hada" come to mind, all of which are hard to translate into English, but delicately describe complex

A fake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral across Twitter on Monday, and stocks dipped. The incident confirmed what many have said for months: Misinformation is on course to be supercharged as new AI tools for concocting photos get easier to use. Fixing this problem with technology will be an endless game of whack-a-mole. It’s certainly worth trying to track image provenance, as Adobe is doing with its Content Authenticity Initiative. But as the saying goes, a lie can trav

Recently, I came across an article in Axios with the headline, “Asian Americans least likely to feel they belong in U.S., study finds.” Quoting from a survey jointly conducted by the Asian American Foundation, the article reported, “Only 22% of Asian Americans said they feel they belong and are accepted in the U.S.” CNN, too, recently reported that many second-generation Korean immigrants to the US are moving to South Korea because “they always felt like outcasts, a

Henry Kissinger’s warning of a possible US-China military conflict over Taiwan within the next 5 to 10 years is a sobering prediction for the global community, especially South Korea. Due to its geographic and strategic proximity, it could be quickly embroiled in the fighting. There are plenty of reasons to feel anxious, though publicly the situation is only addressed in measured and oblique terms here. “We are in the classic pre-World War I situation,” says Kissinger, “w

I did a recorded interview two weeks ago for the G-7 summit held in Hiroshima. This year’s summit marks the 50th year of G-7, which started in 1973. South Korea was invited as a guest amid the United States pushed for an initiative to decouple with China. The latest G-7 summit was seen as a parallel to the 1980s when Japan started to rise against the US on the global stage. Japan’s rapid rise came after the US transferred semiconductor technology to Japan, laying the foundation for t

The conflict in Sudan suddenly drew new levels of alarm when hostile forces in the capital city of Khartoum seized a biological research lab containing lethal viruses such as cholera, measles and polio. It is unclear whether the viruses will be properly contained by the occupying soldiers, or if they will somehow be released and cause new outbreaks. Scenarios like these could have been avoided if there were proper prophylactic measures in place, such as treaties and disincentives. Fighting in Su