On a recent Sunday morning, I went for a leisurely stroll at Seooreung, a Joseon royal tomb in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, just outside Seoul. Entering the compound of five royal tombs, my husband mused about his elementary school field trips to Seooreung. Pointing to the huge mound on which the twin tombs of King Sukjong and his second wife sit side by side, he said the kids would run up the mound and then roll down. Korea in the ’70s did not have many grass fields and there were signs o

By going officially and formally rogue, Poland may unwittingly have done the European Union a favor. In blatantly challenging the bloc’s legal authority, Warsaw is forcing the EU to decide whether it wants to become the “ever closer union” it claims to be, or to remain the malleable club of nations it actually is. Union or club -- either way the EU will have to make fundamental changes if it intends to survive in the long run. Last week’s judgment in Warsaw was the judic

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem. Republicans and Democrats were, for once, united on her side, at several points even calling her a “hero.” What they needed was direction. Luckily, Haugen gave that to them. Throughout the hearing she used the term “engagement-based ranking” to synthesize the complexities of Facebook’s problems into a si

Torrential rain fell all night. It just meant more monsoon season drainage work would be needed during the next interlude. Nobody in the small provincial city of Gongju, South Chungcheong Province, imagined the utter chaos that was about to be unleashed by a Hankook Ilbo exclusive report: “New Baekje royal tomb found.” The discovery of King Muryeong’s tomb on July 5, 1971, during drainage work to protect two adjacent royal graves from the Baekje Kingdom in its old capital, l

As the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank prepare for their annual meeting next week, all eyes are on Evergrande, China’s second-largest property developer, which apparently cannot repay about $300 billion it currently owes to banks, bondholders, employees, and suppliers. With the property giant teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the world is being forced to contemplate a scenario it had never seriously considered: a made-in-China financial crisis. Observers have been quick

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. European politicians are scrambling to pin the blame for a painful surge in wholesale energy prices on reliable punching bags -- the shift to cleaner power sources, the price of carbon, greedy utilities -- while conveniently missing the bigger picture of dependency on Russian gas and internal battles over what should count as “clean.” France is using the opportunity to spread the gospel of nuclear power, which produces no greenhou

Although they often miss their youth, old people are wise enough to know that they cannot get any younger. For some inscrutable reason, however, some young people seem to forget they will grow old someday. They naively think that they will be young forever. Perhaps that is why they unabashedly make fun of elderly people, or have even gone so far as to insult them in public by calling them various derogatory names, such as “old bat,” “old-timer,” or “kkondae”

“Those of us who conduct foreign policy haven’t always done a good job connecting it to the needs and aspirations of the American people,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his first major speech. President Joe Biden’s administration, he said, seeks to change that and is calling this approach a “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class.” According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ new survey on American Attitudes toward US foreign policy, the

“Hate the game developer, not the game.” This slightly tweaked version of the timeless maxim applies to the two well-known massively multiplayer online role-playing games: Lineage and Diablo 2. Both have been touted as the undisputed pioneering games that set the stage for the rapid growth of the MMORPG genre in the past decades. Lineage, released by NCSoft in September 1998, reshaped the Korean gaming scene; Diablo 2, put out by Blizzard Entertainment in June 2000, was a landmark P

Articles on the housing market in the South Korean media are frequent and focus entirely on two topics: cost and scandal. Cost concerns the steady rise in prices, both for buying and renting. Scandal concerns the various tactics that the rich and powerful use to profit from real estate. The thread running through the media’s interest in cost and scandal is that owning a home is critical to building and accumulating wealth. Since taking office in May 2017, the Moon Jae-in administration ha

If you want to know why nearly 40 million leaked documents on the salting away of assets in offshore financial centers have failed to result in comprehensive change since the revelations started eight years ago, Billie Holiday provides a clue: “Them that‘s got shall get; them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible said, and it still is news.” The latest set of leaks to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is the largest yet. After sifting the data, medi

Many South Koreans, under continuing duress from the COVID-19 pandemic, have an additional cause for discomfort these days: a housing development scam unfolding in a satellite city of Seoul where a handful of unknown people made undeserved profits of an astronomical scale. Their adrenaline goes up when they imagine the possible involvement of Lee Jae-myung, the ruling party’s presidential election front-runner, in this affair in his political hometown. The Daejang-dong project in Seongnam

Recently, the Korean television series “Squid Game” has become the top-rated program on Netflix in many countries, including Korea. “Squid Game” tells the story of 456 desperate and down-and-out men and women who decide to go through a cutthroat survival game for an astronomical prize: 45.6 billion won, which is about $38.4 million. The problem is that only the final survivor can get the prize money, while all of the others must die along the way. Behind the game, a sin

Is the specter of communism haunting Russia again? Not since the election of 1996, the only post-Soviet presidential race in Russia to result in a runoff, has the country’s Communist Party seemed like a real threat. In more than two decades since Vladimir Putin first took the helm, it has played the role of pliant opposition, helping the Kremlin to maintain a facade of democratic choice. The future looks less predictable. Gennady Zyuganov, the 77-year-old former Soviet ideologue who unsuc

From the Huawei affair to the AUKUS spat and beyond, a new reality is shaking up the global economy: the takeover, usually hostile, of international economics by geopolitics. This process is probably only just beginning, and the challenge now is learning how to live with it. Of course, economics and geopolitics have never been completely separate domains. The post-World War II liberal economic order was designed by economists, but on the basis of a master plan conceived by foreign-policy strat