Every day, we use bowls. We fill bowls with something and then empty them later. A bowl‘s identity varies, depending on what it contains. For example, if there is nothing in it, it becomes an empty bowl. If it contains jewelry, it is a jewelry bowl. If it has junk food in it, we call it a junk food bowl. Bowls come in different sizes. There are big bowls and small bowls. When we Koreans say, “He...

Last week, a bipartisan group of 16 US senators agreed on a long-awaited proposal to fix the Electoral Count Act, the ramshackle 1887 law that then-President Donald Trump used to try to overturn the 2020 election. Trump claimed the law, which sets the rules under which Congress counts electoral votes, allowed then-Vice President Mike Pence to block votes from states that Joe Biden won. Pence ref...

In my early years as an activist, I thought social change was about calling out all the ways that people in power were wrecking the world. Finding my voice meant telling other people what they were doing wrong, as loudly and self-righteously as possible. I came of age in the mid-1990s, an era where the activist atmosphere had profound similarities to today. I recognize the “tear it down” energy ...

It is now clear that the talks aimed at reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action -- commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal -- are going nowhere. After eight rounds of indirect talks, the Biden administration and the government of Iran’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, have failed to reinstate the deal that the Trump administration renounced in 2018. Iran refuses to return to the...

At their recent meeting in Bali on July 15-16, G20 finance ministers reaffirmed their commitment to coordinated action to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control and better prepare for the next global health emergency. A central topic was the creation of a new financial intermediary fund (FIF) to address pandemic preparedness and response (PPR), under the trusteeship of the World Bank and with t...

In April 1909, New York Highlanders‘ first baseman Hal Chase was hospitalized with smallpox near the team’s spring training site in Georgia. The rest of the squad -- which would be renamed the Yankees in 1913 -- took an overnight train to Richmond, Virginia, where they were scheduled to play an exhibition game against a minor league team before the regular season started. But first, the players ...

The island of Baengnyeongdo sits at the entrance to the Korea Bay, the northern extension of the Yellow Sea. “We are 203 kilometers from Seoul City Hall, 180 kilometers from Pyongyang and 177 kilometers from Shandong Peninsula,” my tour guide said. Probably, the island’s location -- and the turbulent waters off its shores -- inspired ancient storytellers to weave the popular tale of filial daught...

Recently, two pieces of international news have pleased and excited the people of Korea. One was about a Korean-American mathematician, June Huh, who received the prestigious Fields Medal, and the other was about a South Korean pianist, Lim Yun-chan, who won the Gold Medal in the famous Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Both winners are young: Huh is 39 and Lim is 18, which made him t...

I recently visited the beaches of Normandy and was awestruck at the scale of what took place there 78 years ago. The sheer horror it must have been is hard to capture in words, but the scars are still visible. Dozens of massive craters dot the fields. The landscape is interspersed with German fortifications reinforced with concrete two meters thick. Huge tangles of metal debris, part of the harb...