The Korea Times

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

There are days, most days, if I’m being honest, when Seoul feels less like a city and more like a high-speed assembly line I’ve accidentally stepped onto sideways. Everything moves with this synchronized, conveyor-belt urgency, and I’m the defective product drifting against the current. Cars don’t so much drive as lunge: sudden, angular movements that make me consider slamming my horn with righteous theatricality. I almost never do, because in Korea the horn is not so much a warning as a declaration of open hostilities. Doorways swallow people whole; nobody waits behind to hold anything open. Coffee cups — still upright, still warm — are abandoned on sidewalks like tiny exhausted soldiers who have fallen in battle. The whole landscape starts to feel like a collage of micro-indifferences, each one trivial and yet collectively forming this impression of a society in which everyone is pathologically sealed in their own sleek ergonomic capsule of self. Screens are part of the problem, obviously. We carry these glowing rectangles like secular rosaries, caressing them for spiritu

Nov 29, 2025By David A. Tizzard

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

Opinion

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

There’s a particular kind of filmgoer who claims “Burning” is slow. Or ambiguous. Or — God help us — boring. These are the same people who order a steak well-done and then complain it’s tough. What Lee Chang-dong has constructed in his 2018 mystery is not just a movie but rather a trapdoor into the subconscious of a society that pretends to be functioning while its young men quietly immolate from the inside out. Of course viewers love the clues: The cat named Boil. The pink suitcase. The watch. The greenhouse. The “aha!” moments that make them feel smart. Lee allows them to assemble the puzzle. But the ending doesn’t resolve the mystery; it tells you the mystery was the wrong question all along. The real mystery is Jeong-su himself. The extraordinary thing about "Burning" — and this is where Lee surpasses virtually every working director with perhaps the exception of Park Chan-wook — is that nothing in the frame is wasted. Even the negative space is meaningful. You don’t know this at first. You think the drawer-opening, the cow-feeding, the cigarette-lighting is

Nov 22, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

Opinion

Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press

There is something deliciously ironic in the sight of a government — let’s say, the government of the Republic of Korea — that once invited the world in for the selfie by the Han River, now issuing warnings about what voices may or may not be heard in its territory. More precisely, it was said by a member of the government this week that foreign content creators who post “derogatory commentary” about Korea may face entry bans. The country’s dignity is now apparently as fragile as a YouTube algorithm. Yes, it is understandable that Korea wants to clamp down on hate speech. The president also said that racially targeted, nationality-based denigration can no longer be tolerated when pointing towards the increased anti-Chinese sentiment the country is sadly witnessing. Thankfully, unlike his democratic party predecessor who used anti-Japanese sentiment to boost his own ratings, President Lee Jae Myung is playing a very straight bat in terms of international relations by trying to be friends with everyone. Giving U.S. President Donald Trump a gold crown, saying nice things abou

Nov 16, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press

Opinion

The shrimp and the algorithm

There are always these little Korean things that both delight and mildly terrify me, the kind of quotidian oddities that make you feel like you’re living inside a simulation that’s been coded by someone who is definitely on the spectrum. Of course on paper the country looks familiar enough: there’s the pop music, subways, hamburgers, coffee chains, partisan politics, nightclubs, and an alarming number of teenagers pounding cans of Monster. But then there are the things that make it wonderfully weird. The people walking up the hill behind the apartment decked out as if they’re climbing Everest. The fact that shops and stores leave expensive goods outside unattended as if theft were just an outdated Western superstition. Cars parked across each other with the handbrakes off so strangers have to move them around in an urban ballet of inconvenience. And then there’s the almost erotic national fascination with AI. Not just among students trying to get through boring assignments or journalists and artists outsourcing their integrity to meet deadlines and pay rent, but at the instit

Nov 8, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Capitalism, propaganda, and the tragedy of Halloween

Our kids were having friends over on Friday evening so I decided to stop by E-Mart on the way home to pick up some chocolates and cakes, the usual bribes that make pre-teen social interactions feel more like celebrations and less like hostage negotiations. But when I entered the country’s biggest supermarket, something felt off. The aisles were sterile. No pumpkins. No cobwebs. No cheap polyester witches dangling from shelves. Nothing. Confused, I ventured further in. Maybe Halloween had been demoted to some neglected corner near the dog food or the discount paper towels. So I climbed floors, wandered through cosmetics and kitchenware, half-expecting to find a lone pumpkin somewhere, as if capitalism itself had misplaced its orange grin. But no. Peppero Day was ready. The Suneung exam snacks were lined up like offerings to the gods of standardized testing. And Christmas trees were already blinking. So it wasn’t a pause on holidays in general. It was just this one. Just Halloween. I smiled. How lovely, I thought. For once, this vast corporate organism, the same one that can put an em

Nov 1, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Capitalism, propaganda, and the tragedy of Halloween

Opinion

The Infinite Loop: Notes from Korean Expressways

Driving in Korea is supposed to be insane, and maybe it is, but I love it anyway. There’s something about the stereo up, the windows down, the blue skies, mountains in the distance rising into the sky. It’s like some mad dream world. I sometimes have to pinch myself as to where I am in the universe when I’m going across the Han River in the evening as the setting sun bleeds red and the river glows a faded blue like a Taeguk come to life. With the Seoul skyline now infinitely familiar to me painting outlines of the buildings, and the omnipresence of the Namsan and Lotte Towers, I’m in a place that has decided beauty and chaos don’t have to take turns. People will say that driving in Seoul is an outrageous thing, or at least a form of masochism considering the cheapness and efficiency of the public transport system here. And they may be right at times. But rather than having a country built for public transport (Singapore) or one built for driving (the United States), South Korea does both. And when it’s pouring down with rain or the humidity has risen to such a level I can

Oct 25, 2025By David A. Tizzard

The Infinite Loop: Notes from Korean Expressways

Opinion

The art of becoming: RM, Yun Hyong-keun and modern Korea

I’ve read countless books, attended multiple conferences, and given more lectures than I can remember on the subject of Korea’s modernity. This week, I sat through another talk addressing the country’s reflexive move through second modernity and all the crises presented: the world’s lowest birth rate, elderly suicide, teenage depression, gender issues and everything else. Korea is a country experiencing pathological disaster resulting from a desire for perfection. A civilization that has warped its people and culture into artificial beings for financial success and Western recognition. That’s the message we hear a lot — from the media, professors and tired foreign correspondents. This is a country that took the worst of Confucianism and the worst of Capitalism and smashed them together in a postmodern dystopian Asian Frankenstein baby with perfect features and white skin. And then you take a step back and remember what Korea was before today. How dark it was. How the shadows filled people’s lives. How the struggle for breath came at every moment. How the effects of imper

Oct 11, 2025By David A. Tizzard

The art of becoming: RM, Yun Hyong-keun and modern Korea

Opinion

Kakao and the 'Enshittification' of Korea

Every so often the English language births a word so perfect, so painfully precise, that it becomes more than just a temporary slang expression to throw about for a few months. Instead it becomes something closer to a diagnosis. Selfie was something cute. A goofy neologism describing a modern digital self-portrait. But then it crystallized into a mirror for our age: narcissistic, democratized, performative. Woke was once a quiet term of social awareness with almost Buddhist undertones, yet it now drips with irony, weaponized to exhaustion by both sides of the political divide pushing us further from moral progress. An influencer was once someone with genuine authority; now, it’s more like a warning label for the commodification of personality itself. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, we now have another term to add to the list: Enshittification. Gloriously vulgar, akin to Harry Frankfurt’s use of the word Bullshit in his 2005 book, it allows academics, children, and media personalities to swear without censor. Created in 2022, enshittification captures the peculiar rot afflicting our digit

Oct 4, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Kakao and the 'Enshittification' of Korea

Opinion

Running in Korea

I’m not quite sure why I started running. There must have been a day when I decided I was going to start doing it. Probably around "Covid time," as people used it as an excuse to get out the house. Social media was filled with people doing 5k runs. There’s also the possibility of a midlife crisis having something to do with it. A lot of people my age seem to take it up as a way of clinging to their youth and staving off the paunch as long as possible. Whatever the reason, I now run regularly. I try to put in a 10k run 2 or 3 times a week as well as few 5ks as well. I don’t really go all in for the athletic clothing and sunglasses, but I have a decent pair of shoes and some headphones. That seems to be enough. What I love about running here is that there’s so much to see. A hidden Korea. Of course there’s a parallel universe when instead of being down by the river, I sit on my computer and get drawn into social media, commenting on every headline, getting wound up by every scandal. But when you are running, for an hour or so, there’s no screen, no algorithm, and no dopamine

Sep 27, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Why mid-life women are falling in love with Korea

“I'm (a very young) 72-year-old from Northern Ireland who lives in Italy. During COVID I discovered Korea, obviously through K-Dramas,” the first email said. The second began like this: “I am an 84 (eighty-four)-year-old woman who has fallen into the K-pop/BTS rabbit hole and am hopelessly smitten with the particularly beautiful relationship between JungKook and Kim Taehyung. I have been deeply depressed with my new life since the death of my husband two years ago, and when I somehow discovered BTS on YouTube, I was able to really lose myself in a joy of a kind of love that I had never known.” That was just in the past week. I have received countless emails like this. I’ve also met many of the people sending them. We get coffee, lunch, or they come and see my lectures. During dinner on Thursday, I spoke with Cristina, an Italian woman who has had a similar experience. Our conversation about the latest dramas, the fascination with the fashion, and the curiosity about the culture led me to a simple question: What is it about Korea that enthralls mid-life women from abroad? It

Sep 20, 2025By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

The walnut cake theory of Korean hospitality

Ben doesn’t exist: Rereading 'Burning' in the ruins of late capitalism

Only beautiful, please: Korea’s new battle with bad press

The shrimp and the algorithm

Capitalism, propaganda, and the tragedy of Halloween

The Infinite Loop: Notes from Korean Expressways

The art of becoming: RM, Yun Hyong-keun and modern Korea

Kakao and the 'Enshittification' of Korea

Running in Korea

Why mid-life women are falling in love with Korea

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