A few weeks ago, I visited Japan for the first time in four years. I expected to find many changes but was surprised to find things almost the same as they were in 2019. Compared to South Korea and the US, where some pandemic era innovations have become the norm, Japan feels the most like 2019. As I traveled, I began to wonder why and came up with several possible answers. Compared to South Korea and the US, Japanese society changes more slowly. Japanese organizations are wary of sudden change a

The pandemic is officially over. By federal declaration, the public health emergency expired on May 11. Yet COVID-19′s devastating effects are going nowhere. I recently attended a wedding where only one of the bride’s parents was there to see her take her vows because the coronavirus had claimed the other. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.1 million Americans and nearly 7 million people globally have died as a result of the disease. Nevertheless, three years after the wo

The security situation on the Korean Peninsula has fallen into a foggy hole again as North Korea attempted the launch of a military reconnaissance satellite. Though the launch failed, it does not change the assessment that North Korea seriously violated the UN Security Council’s resolutions which ban the North from using ballistic missile technology. As North Korea's satellite launch has consistently deteriorated security anxiety, dragging down the security situation on the Korean Pen

The bizarre and unsavory strongman bromance between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump continues. If you’re a Make America Great Again Republican and not having second thoughts by now, something’s wrong with you. The latest head-scratcher and jaw-dropper is a new list of sanctions slapped on American individuals by the Russian president. That’s already weird. Aren’t we in the West the ones imposing sanctions on him for waging a genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine? But

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

One of the boldest, most breathless claims being made about artificial intelligence tools is that they have “emergent properties” -- impressive abilities gained by these programs that they were supposedly never trained to possess. “60 Minutes,” for example, reported credulously that a Google program taught itself to speak Bengali, while the New York Times misleadingly defined “emergent behavior” in AI as language models gaining “unexpected or unintended

The Supreme Court has sided with individual artists -- but against art itself. In a fascinating copyright decision that transcended ideological lines, the court held that Andy Warhol’s distinctive reworking of a photograph of Prince did not count as fair use, thus requiring the Andy Warhol Foundation to compensate the original photographer. The upshot is that little-guy artists win, because they now have more rights than they had before to claim credit for works re-used by others. But art

Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget. We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and checking-account fraud. Our daughter’s day-care center closed three times, for a COVID outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I’d look at wh

On Dec. 16, 2022, a Russian KH-55 missile flew halfway across Poland before landing 12 kilometers outside Bydgoszcz, a city of over 300,000 people that is host to five NATO units and the Joint Forces Training Center. NATO’s largest producer of TNT, Nitro-Chem, is in nearby Belma. The Russian missile, designed to carry a nuclear payload of up to 200 kilotons -- 13 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- was six meters long and weighed 1.7 tons. Fortunately, it appears to have be

We've become accustomed to the weaponization of words. Words are used to divide, dehumanize and incite violence. Conservative leaders spread hateful rhetoric to whip up support for attacks on women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and more. Progressives fight back by trying to shout down the purveyors of bigotry. Meanwhile, Americans are losing faith in their capacity to tap into the opposite power of words -- bringing people closer together. Polls show a tendency to avoid political