Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, I’ve stumbled between nausea, anger, grief and numbness. The barbarity inches closer. My sister’s classmate from high school lost a family member. My cousin’s best friend lost her brother. A student who graduated from my high school last year is missing. My Facebook feed alternates between pleas for information and funeral announcements. Picture after picture. Grandchildren and grandparents. Youthful smiles and serene wisdom. Hav

On Oct. 7, the Middle East became a sea of blood and tears again. The Palestinian militant Hamas group launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Israel has retaliated, killing more than 3,000 Palestinians, including Hamas members. Almost a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip became refugees as Israel announced evacuation warnings before a full-scale ground operation. Many would agree that Hamas' surprise attack is a criminal act again

When people meet for the first time in English speaking countries, they usually ask, “What do you do for a living?” In South Korea, by comparison, people habitually ask, “Where is your hometown?” because Koreans are strongly attached to their hometowns. If one party shares a hometown with the other party, the two may immediately become good friends. As for me, I do not have any particular attachment to my hometown because I have lived in so many places all throughout my l

Ever since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel has waged an intermittent but limited military campaign to keep a lid on the violent Palestinian faction. Hamas fired missiles at Israeli cities, Israel bombed Gaza from the air or attacked on the ground, then negotiated a cease-fire. The goal was never to remove Hamas; that appeared too costly. It was merely to keep it under control. Israeli military officers gave their recurring Gaza offensives a sad, cynical name: "mowing

The horror unleashed by Hamas is only beginning. A terrorist group that killed at least 1,200 people in Israel last weekend is now endangering countless Palestinian lives, through its cynical practice of putting military capabilities in hospitals, schools and dense urban areas. But if shocks like the one Israel suffered have any upside, it’s that they expose the sloppy thinking that allowed them to happen in the first place. This attack highlights four intellectual failures in the recent a

An American woman has won the Nobel Prize in economics for her work studying the economic lives of American women. How poetic is that? No less poetic: Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, 77, is the only woman ever to have received the award by herself, with no (male) collaborators. In her work, Goldin has tried to explain why the wage gap between men and women has persisted, and why women so often are discouraged when it comes to pursuing more advanced job opportunities. "Women are now more

Almost without exception, lawmakers from both parties in Congress are eager to give Israel whatever it asks, from missiles to dollars. And that is as it should be, for Israel just became the victim of unspeakable barbarity and now needs stalwart support. But in the very next breath, some of those same US legislators, mainly Republican extremists in the House who are beholden to former President Donald Trump, want to deny Ukraine what that beleaguered country needs to survive as a nation. These M

Hamas’s brazen and vicious attacks within Israel have rightly drawn condemnation from around the world. If this is a war, as both sides agree it is, then Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians counts as a major war crime. But the brutality demonstrated by Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum. The lesson of what is currently happening in Israel and Gaza is that violence breeds more violence. The last real chance of avoiding the tragic conflict being waged between Israel and Hamas was d

Humanity was caught off guard by the COVID-19 pandemic, even though we had effectively been warned by smaller-scale outbreaks -- of SARS, Ebola, MERS and bird flu -- for decades. US President Barack Obama, recognizing the true nature of the threat infectious diseases might pose, even created a Global Health Security and Biodefense unit within the National Security Council. But Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom, shut it down. Given the strong odds that we will face another pandemic sooner or l