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Desk Columns

When nobody wants a piano anymore

I was in the fourth grade when my parents bought me a piano. I had been taking lessons for two years and wanted one desperately. When it arrived in the room I shared with my brother, I felt as if I had the whole world. Part of the excitement came from the sense of privilege. Few children in my class had a piano at home, and I suddenly became one of them. The instrument my parents bought was not new. It was a secondhand upright piano. Yet that hardly mattered to me. What mattered was that I finally had a piano to practice on — and, to be honest, to show off to friends who visited me at home. That sense of pride stayed with me for years. In fact, the piano remained in my childhood room longer than I did. When I left home for college, it stayed. When I graduated from graduate school and started working, it was still there. In 2008, when I was 28, the piano moved to my aunt's apartment in Seoul, where it served her two children, then ages 7 and 10, who were learning to play. Years later, she passed it on to an acquaintance. Three years ago, another piano entered my life. An acquaintance of

3 MIN READBy Kim Se-jeong

Staunch president, docile diplomats

For decades, Korea’s foreign policy establishment has prided itself on caution, restraint and alliance management. Its diplomats often described these traits as sophisticated — the habits of a mature middle power navigating a dangerous neighborhood. Yet the recent handling of the Israeli seizure of aid vessels carrying two Korean activists exposed the dark underbelly of that carefully cultivated image: a culture of bureaucratic self-preservation that too often mistakes timidity for prudence. The situation revealed not only a disagreement over diplomatic tactics, but the widening gap between a Korean public that increasingly demands a confident, sovereign foreign policy and the entrenched elite in those circles who are conditioned to avoid discomfort at almost any cost. In particular, the episode highlighted the contrast between political pressure for transparent and assertive action and the instinctive caution of Korea’s traditional diplomatic establishment. Figures such as National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac and Second Vice Foreign Minister Kim Jina symbolize this mindset, whi

3 MIN READBy Shim Jae-yun

Korea’s risk-free schools

For many Koreans, school trips from elementary, middle and high school are lifelong memories. Those from Seoul mostly headed to Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, to see cultural relics such as Bulguksa temple, and even rundown motels became part of the fun when shared with classmates. However, as President Lee Jae Myung recently remarked, it seems these experiences are becoming a thing of the past. “I hear that these days, students don’t go on picnics or school trips much anymore,” he said in a Cabinet meeting, lamenting that they are “taking away good opportunities from students just to avoid responsibility.” According to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, only 31 percent of elementary, middle and high schools in Seoul have announced plans to conduct daytime field trips this year. Overnight field trips are decreasing even further, with only 17 percent of schools planning to do so. Behind the plunge are the excessive legal and emotional risks borne by teachers. In a survey by the Elementary School Teachers’ Union, 96 percent of teachers who responded expressed a ne

3 MIN READBy Yoon Ja-young

Empathy in an era of division

Empathy has emerged as a focus of public interest in Korea, reflecting a growing desire to understand one another in an increasingly polarized society. The steady stream of bestselling books on the subject underscores its significance in public discourse. However, popularity does not guarantee clarity. How well do we actually understand empathy, and what does it ask of us as members of a civil society? Empathy is far more than clasped hands, tearful eyes or the familiar platitude, “I feel your pain.” It is a capacity that integrates emotional attunement with cognitive perspective-taking. While emotional resonance enables us to feel what another is feeling, the cognitive dimension is to mentalize as we step beyond our own vantage point and see the world from another’s perspective. Rightly understood, empathy becomes a foundation of social life, grounded in the recognition of human dignity and a commitment to the well-being of others. Without such an orientation, civic bonds fray, and those vulnerable are pushed to the margins of society. Yet, a growing body of scholarship suggests

3 MIN READBy Ma Kyung-hee

Guest Columns

  • More coordinated efforts needed to reduce nuclear weapons

    It was no surprise that the recent Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) ended in disarray at the United Nations. The 191 states attending this five-yearly review of a 1968 treaty widely considered one of the world’s most important security agreements failed to make any real progress on its "three pillars" of non-proliferation, disarmament and the peaceful use of nuclear material. The treaty is in growing danger of unravelling. The four weeks of meetings in New York failed to reach consensus, and were instead marked by acrimony and a clear divide, with the five nuclear weapon states in the NPT (Russia, Britain, France, China and the U.S.) on one side and the vast majority of members — the non-nuclear weapon states — on the other. The five nuclear weapon states have promised under Article VI of the NPT to move towards the complete elimination of their arsenals. In return for this promise of disarmament, the non-nuclear weapon states have pledged never to develop nuclear weapons. Sharp disagreement between the U.S. and Iran was the main st

    3 MIN READBy Marianne Hanson

  • The pope should have gone further on AI

    BOSTON — Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we communicate, access information, and work, how income and status are distributed, and even how we wage war. Yet the public conversation remains narrowly focused on the competition between AI labs or on abstract debates about the technology’s capabilities. Almost no one is asking what purpose AI ought to serve, or whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are capable of steering the technology toward broad-based improvements in human welfare. It was therefore refreshing to see Pope Leo XIV weigh in on the issue with his first encyclical, which describes AI’s current trajectory as a profound threat to human dignity. As an economist who has long argued that technologically driven outcomes are matters of choice, not fate, I welcome his intervention. Leo is ahead of most commentators in pointing out that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” And yet, I worry that even he has not gone far enough on the most consequent

    4 MIN READBy Daron Acemoglu

Tribune Service

  • Congress must put guardrails on Trump’s vanity projects, spending

    When President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in January, some pundits raised their eyebrows. The skepticism didn’t just arise because a sitting president was essentially suing the government he also runs, but that it was Trump who was doing the suing. The apparent motive behind the scheme unfolded last month when Trump dropped the lawsuit but an extraordinary deal was announced in its place: A $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate Americans who felt unfairly prosecuted under previous administrations. After much backlash from Democrats and even some Republicans, Trump’s Department of Justice said Monday it will abide by a judge’s order to put the fund on hold. Who, by chance, could have benefited from such a fund? Any of President Trump‘s many allies and advisers who have been convicted or indicted in crimes against the government, such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, adviser Steve Bannon, former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn or former campaign chair Paul Manafort, among others. Even the Trump Org

    2 MIN READ

  • Bring back the ‘1990s summer.’ Moms need it

    3 MIN READBy Abby McCloskey

  • The time has come for city-owned groceries

    As advocates for progressive social policy, we found it rare and promising good news when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced in April that he plans to create a city-owned grocery in East Harlem, Manhattan. The East Harlem store will be the first of five planned city-owned stores, one in each borough. And Mamdani aims to do it right — with union labor, lower prices on staple goods, and the absence of lottery and tobacco sales. Plus, the East Harlem store will be in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and, like all the planned stores, will bring affordable food to a low-income, low-access (LILA) community. The project marks a system change approach to tackling the nation’s affordability and food insecurity crises. It is consistent with the vision of a more democratic economy that The Democracy Collaborative, a research-led change agent where we are fellows, has been pursuing for years. A democratic economy approach — what we like to call a Next System— means that basic economic institutions are designed to serve the public good through their normal functioning, like stor

    3 MIN READBy Marjorie Kelly and Anthony Cook

Columnists

  • Park Jung-won

    Park Jung-won, Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a professor of international law at Dankook University.

  • Peter S. Kim

    Peter S. Kim is a managing director at KB Securities.

  • Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho

    Chyung Eun-ju is studying for a master's degree in marketing at Seoul National University. Joel Cho is a practicing lawyer specializing in IP and digital law.

  • Min Seong-jae

    Min Seong-jae (smin@pace.edu) is a professor of communication and media studies at Pace University in New York.

  • Eugene Lee

    Eugene Lee is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.

  • Charles Chang

    Charles Chang is a PhD candidate in AI Convergence and a security resilience consultant based in Seoul, with extensive experience spanning government and corporate leadership.

Read more

Michael Breen

Was the Starbucks Korea 'Tank Day' fiasco caused by AI?

When Starbucks Korea launched its “Tank Day” coffee promotion on May 18 — the day South Koreans commemorate the 1980 massacre of protestors in Gwangju by martial law troops — the scale of corporate self-sabotage was astonishing. Public outrage erupted so quickly that even asking how such a disaster happened risked sounding like an attempt to excuse it. In Starbucks' hometown of Seattle — where May 18, 1980 is remembered for the eruption of Mount St. Helens with the loss of 57 lives — the corporate response was restrained support for its Korean affiliate. But the issue may not end there. Under its agreement with Shinsegae Group’s Emart, which owns Starbucks Korea, HQ could potentially claim severe brand damage and exercise a call option allowing it to acquire the Korean business — the world’s third-largest Starbucks market — at a discount. Given this corporate equivalent of a public execution, we ask: What was the company thinking? Or rather, who was thinking? Companies themselves do not think. They are concepts without consciousness. People think — so how did multipl

8h agoBy Michael Breen
Was the Starbucks Korea 'Tank Day' fiasco caused by AI?
Guest Columns

More coordinated efforts needed to reduce nuclear weapons

It was no surprise that the recent Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) ended in disarray at the United Nations. The 191 states attending this five-yearly review of a 1968 treaty widely considered one of the world’s most important security agreements failed to make any real progress on its "three pillars" of non-proliferation, disarmament and the peaceful use of nuclear material. The treaty is in growing danger of unravelling. The four weeks of meetings in New York failed to reach consensus, and were instead marked by acrimony and a clear divide, with the five nuclear weapon states in the NPT (Russia, Britain, France, China and the U.S.) on one side and the vast majority of members — the non-nuclear weapon states — on the other. The five nuclear weapon states have promised under Article VI of the NPT to move towards the complete elimination of their arsenals. In return for this promise of disarmament, the non-nuclear weapon states have pledged never to develop nuclear weapons. Sharp disagreement between the U.S. and Iran was the main st

12h agoBy Marianne Hanson
More coordinated efforts needed to reduce nuclear weapons
Tribune Service

Congress must put guardrails on Trump’s vanity projects, spending

When President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in January, some pundits raised their eyebrows. The skepticism didn’t just arise because a sitting president was essentially suing the government he also runs, but that it was Trump who was doing the suing. The apparent motive behind the scheme unfolded last month when Trump dropped the lawsuit but an extraordinary deal was announced in its place: A $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate Americans who felt unfairly prosecuted under previous administrations. After much backlash from Democrats and even some Republicans, Trump’s Department of Justice said Monday it will abide by a judge’s order to put the fund on hold. Who, by chance, could have benefited from such a fund? Any of President Trump‘s many allies and advisers who have been convicted or indicted in crimes against the government, such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, adviser Steve Bannon, former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn or former campaign chair Paul Manafort, among others. Even the Trump Org

14h ago
Guest Columns

The pope should have gone further on AI

BOSTON — Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we communicate, access information, and work, how income and status are distributed, and even how we wage war. Yet the public conversation remains narrowly focused on the competition between AI labs or on abstract debates about the technology’s capabilities. Almost no one is asking what purpose AI ought to serve, or whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are capable of steering the technology toward broad-based improvements in human welfare. It was therefore refreshing to see Pope Leo XIV weigh in on the issue with his first encyclical, which describes AI’s current trajectory as a profound threat to human dignity. As an economist who has long argued that technologically driven outcomes are matters of choice, not fate, I welcome his intervention. Leo is ahead of most commentators in pointing out that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” And yet, I worry that even he has not gone far enough on the most consequent

14h agoBy Daron Acemoglu
The pope should have gone further on AI
Park Jung-won

The world still fears American retreat

The Middle East conflict is not yet over. The United States and Iran may be edging toward a diplomatic framework intended to halt the fighting, but the odds of renewed escalation remain high. Washington has continued limited strikes under the banner of self-defense, while Iran has responded with missile attacks on U.S. military facilities in Kuwait. Yet the more important question is this: Why does the United States, still the world’s most powerful military power, appear so uncertain and hesitant? Why has Washington failed to decisively resolve the two central issues at the heart of this conflict — the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Many observers explain this simply as the results of the impulsive and unpredictable personality of U.S. President Donald Trump. Certainly, Trump matters — but Trump himself is also a product of a deeper problem: The accumulated fatigue of a hegemonic power increasingly uncertain about the burdens and costs of maintaining the international order it once built and defended. In “War and Change in World Politics,” Robert Gilpin warne

15h agoBy Park Jung-won
The world still fears American retreat
Peter S. Kim

The greed and fear of KOSPI 8000

As the Korean stock market roars past the once-mythical KOSPI index of 8,000, Korean investors are facing the classic investor dilemma: greed versus fear. More than half of the Korean population reportedly has a stock brokerage account, the highest level ever. For those already holding stocks or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), greed is setting in, with the temptation to buy more. For the other unfortunate half, the fear of jumping into the market at its current dizzying level would be frightening, and the loneliest feelings in a herd-driven society. The history of the Korean stock market is littered with extreme cycles of boom and bust, often marked by retail exuberance, as we are seeing today. With each market bubble peak, there are theories that “this time is different.” There is never a better time than now to identify the factors that are indeed different from those that have not changed at all over time. By now, international investors are aware of the power of Korean retail investors, given their traditionally massive underweight position in equities. Normally, the Korean bull

1d agoBy Peter S. Kim
The greed and fear of KOSPI 8000
Desk Columns

When nobody wants a piano anymore

I was in the fourth grade when my parents bought me a piano. I had been taking lessons for two years and wanted one desperately. When it arrived in the room I shared with my brother, I felt as if I had the whole world. Part of the excitement came from the sense of privilege. Few children in my class had a piano at home, and I suddenly became one of them. The instrument my parents bought was not new. It was a secondhand upright piano. Yet that hardly mattered to me. What mattered was that I finally had a piano to practice on — and, to be honest, to show off to friends who visited me at home. That sense of pride stayed with me for years. In fact, the piano remained in my childhood room longer than I did. When I left home for college, it stayed. When I graduated from graduate school and started working, it was still there. In 2008, when I was 28, the piano moved to my aunt's apartment in Seoul, where it served her two children, then ages 7 and 10, who were learning to play. Years later, she passed it on to an acquaintance. Three years ago, another piano entered my life. An acquaintance of

1d agoBy Kim Se-jeong
When nobody wants a piano anymore
Tribune Service

Bring back the ‘1990s summer.’ Moms need it

For most moms I know, summer is a mixed bag. It’s not hard to understand why. For mothers without access to flexible or remote work, summer break is associated with a significant drop in earnings and work hours. This tightens already tight family budgets and adds to the gender pay gap, as fathers don’t tend to reduce work hours in the summer. Then there’s the financial (and administrative) obligation of patching together camps that cost hundreds of dollars per week, per child. Some of my girlfriends have color-coded Excel files to keep all the camps and activities straight. If only. Because I normally miss the first hour of signup in the depths of January (truly, who can keep it all straight), my boys are the ones stuck in line-dancing and weaving lessons instead of the hit camps like Lego-building or zoology. Carting around unhappy campers in 100-degree weather and squeezing work into a shorter window is not exactly being poolside with a marg. Then there’s learning loss; studies find that students backslide by around 20% over the summer, and more in lower-income families. This h

1d agoBy Abby McCloskey
Bring back the ‘1990s summer.’ Moms need it
Tribune Service

The time has come for city-owned groceries

As advocates for progressive social policy, we found it rare and promising good news when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced in April that he plans to create a city-owned grocery in East Harlem, Manhattan. The East Harlem store will be the first of five planned city-owned stores, one in each borough. And Mamdani aims to do it right — with union labor, lower prices on staple goods, and the absence of lottery and tobacco sales. Plus, the East Harlem store will be in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and, like all the planned stores, will bring affordable food to a low-income, low-access (LILA) community. The project marks a system change approach to tackling the nation’s affordability and food insecurity crises. It is consistent with the vision of a more democratic economy that The Democracy Collaborative, a research-led change agent where we are fellows, has been pursuing for years. A democratic economy approach — what we like to call a Next System— means that basic economic institutions are designed to serve the public good through their normal functioning, like stor

1d agoBy Marjorie Kelly and Anthony Cook
Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho

The invisible labor of 3rd-culture belonging

As third-cultured individuals, there is a very particular and peculiar kind of exhaustion we have always felt in our lives that comes from constantly calibrating ourselves to fit other people’s expectations. For us raised between cultures without belonging entirely to either, our identities seem to become less of a stable core and more of a series of carefully managed versions of ourselves, where we are not simply transitioning between languages, but translating personality, humor, emotion, even silence. As Korean-Brazilians, we often grew up feeling too Brazilian for Korea and too Korean for Brazil. Whenever we are in Korea, our Brazilian directness can appear excessive, emotionally loud or insufficiently restrained. In Brazil, our reservation arising from our Korean identities may be interpreted as coldness, distance or social awkwardness. Now, as more experienced and mature adults, we realize that neither perception is entirely wrong, they are both just incomplete. It seems that the difficulty we faced and continue to face as third-culture individuals lies not in cultural differenc

2d agoBy Chyung Eun-ju (By Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho)
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