I am a fan of BTS and know many American fans in the BTS Army, as the fan group calls itself. I am also in contact with many K-pop professionals and Korean fans of K-pop. I was in Korea a couple of weeks ago, and it really struck me how different American and Korean perceptions of Suga’s recent drunk-driving controversy were. The bottom line comes down to American beliefs about redemption for past personal transgressions versus Korean beliefs about equity in punishment for celebrities, at

Listening to former US President Donald Trump speak to the Economic Club of New York, you could be forgiven for thinking that the economy has been such a disaster since he left office that the stock market is in a perpetual free fall. And yet, the benchmark S&P 500 Index is up 64 percent since the 2020 election through Wednesday, topping the 60 percent gain at the same point in the Trump administration. There’s an old saying that the stock market is not the economy, and that’s true

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s newly unveiled “Aug. 15 Unification Doctrine” is loaded with lofty goals for “freedom-based unification” without any acknowledgement of the formidable challenges ahead. Unfortunately, it is more arbitrariness from a leader wanting in analysis and foresight. What the nation has heard lacks feasible action plans and consideration for regional geopolitics conducive to inter-Korean peace and reconciliation, let alone his would-be counterpart in

By the end of the 1970s, the US economy appeared to be in serious trouble. Years of inflation had caused deep discontent; measured productivity growth had fallen from its post-World War II pace of 2 percent per year to almost zero; and America’s resilience in the face of geopolitical and geoeconomic shocks seemed to be waning. The proposed solutions to these problems fell into two categories: neoliberalism and activist industrial policy. The neoliberals won. Neoliberalism called for shrink

Learning Korean continues to grow in popularity around the world, but the speed of growth may be slowing as the popularity of K-pop has plateaued. Universities in many countries have seen a decline in second language learning as part of a broader shift away from the humanities. Over time, this could result in a weakening of important institutional support for Korean classes. According to the “2023 Duolingo Language Report,” an annual report produced by the popular language learning p

Climate protesters have disrupted the tennis at Wimbledon, thrown tomato soup at the glass protecting famous paintings, sprayed orange powder on Stonehenge and blocked traffic. In response, European governments have been cracking down on environmental protesters with detentions and fines, and, in one case, with a five-year prison sentence for advocating civil disobedience in a Zoom call. Whether a protest is ethical is distinct from whether it is legal. As Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in his

The scorching summer of 2024 has finally passed, and South Korea is now entering the autumn season. While the weather has cooled down, the heated political fight continues unabated. A fierce debate revolves around allegations that the Yoon Suk Yeol administration is preparing for martial law. The opposition has raised suspicions, claiming that the government's recent actions suggest preparations for martial law. In contrast, the government and ruling party vehemently deny these allegations,

Recently, newspaper reports said that Seoul National University canceled an undergraduate course on Marxist economics due to the lack of registered students. It is only natural in this era of the global economy. In fact, Marxist economic theory became extinct as a failed experiment in the early 1990s when communist countries in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China gave up on it and adopted free market principles. In that sense, canceling a course on Marxist economics was a much-belated me

Anyone who’s seen swathes of sunburnt German tourists harrying Greek workers for a beach towel this summer will know how wrong economic cliches can be. Greeks, depicted as “lazy” during the euro crisis, actually work more hours than anyone else in Europe, and supposedly workaholic Germans work among the least. Now the gap is getting starker with a divisive new law allowing some Greek firms to enforce a six-day workweek -- a first in Europe and one that runs counter to the trend

Following a speech by Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, at the Republican National Convention last month, a New York Times analysis considered whether the party could really carry out a populist agenda in support of workers. While Donald Trump has never shown much interest in workers’ rights, many of his acolytes have. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley, Roger Marshall, Marco Rubio and JD Vance (the party’s vice-presidential candidate) have all sided with workers in

For the past four years, I’ve taught a first-year seminar titled “Race and Place in British New Wave, K-pop and Beyond” at Yale University. Since it’s the beginning of the Fall semester here, it seems like an appropriate time to share what my course is like. At Yale, we have special seminars that are only open to our first-year students. These courses are introductory and offer unique content. First-year seminars give our newest students a chance to interact with other st

The European Union is facing three major crises. The first is a competitiveness crisis that was already apparent in the late 2010s but has worsened, leading to lackluster productivity and growth performance. More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a security crisis that is compounded by the bloc’s deteriorating relationship with China. The war also triggered an energy crisis that puts Europe at a disadvantage relative to its major competitors, the United States and China.

An efficient economic policy is not necessarily one that simply achieves its intended goal regardless of side effects, but rather one that economic players trust, believing it was based on a correct assessment of the situation and expected effects from the policy. Measured against this criterion, South Korea’s recent policies and top officials' comments on rising house prices in the capital area fall short of being efficient -- not because they will fail to curb housing prices, but be

The upcoming US presidential election in November has a surprising degree of similarities with the South Korean presidential election in 2022. For starters, both elections feature candidates who are being tried for various criminal charges, facing prosecutors-turned-candidates on the other side. But more importantly, both elections highlight a remarkably sharp gender divide among young people, particularly Generation Z. In both countries, young men predominantly support conservative candidates,

On Sept. 9-10, South Korea will host the second summit on the Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain (REAIM). The first-ever summit on this topic was held last year in the Netherlands. REAIM 2024 in Seoul will continue to deepen understanding and awareness of the issues surrounding the application of AI in the military domain, and will explore ways to ensure that AI is used responsibly by militaries around the globe. AI is transforming all facets of human existence at an asto

A nasty specter of historical revisionism has again shaken the Republic of Korea. This time, a comment in question came from Kim Moon-soo, the labor minister nominee. During his confirmation hearing in parliament, he denied the nationality of Koreans in the Japanese occupation period from 1910 to 1945. He asserted, “Our country was completely taken over and forcibly incorporated in Japan. How could there be such a thing as (Korean) nationality?” Shockingly, there exists a faction in

On Aug. 14, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that he would step down as leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in September. Soon after, the LDP will select Kishida’s replacement -- who will serve as prime minister, given the LDP-led coalition’s control of the Diet (the lower house of parliament). The new government is then likely to call a snap election, in the hopes that the “honeymoon effect” will help it increase its majority. What the LDP must f

When I was a white supremacist who had infiltrated the Canadian military reserves, an officer who had spent two tours of Northern Ireland embedded in a British unit told me that the Irish Republican Army had only 75 active personnel who pulled triggers and planted bombs. Behind those combatants were 3,500 people who offered them safe houses and storage for their ammunition. Bolstering them was a much broader community of people who endorsed their efforts. Ultimately, decades of sectarian violenc

We Koreans are very proud of the outstanding young athletes and charming K-pop singers who made South Korea internationally famous. On the other hand, we are not so proud of our politicians, who have seriously damaged the reputation of our country in the international community lately. Some political analysts have observed that the two representative political parties of South Korea seem to have exhausted their possibilities. Others have diagnosed that the Korean political parties are now suffer

Why do certain countries dominate the Olympics? The answer may lie in the correlation between athletic performance and gross domestic product. The 2024 Paris Olympic Games were a case in point: the top seven medal winners -- the United States, China, Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom -- are all among the world’s 20 largest economies. This can be partly attributed to demographics: a larger population provides a deeper pool of athletic talent from which to draw