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Sun, August 25, 2019 | 18:09

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

Back in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia. In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, every...

2017-03-03 16:39

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

A few months ago, I wrote about two widespread cognitive biases about North Korea that tend to mislead us when making policy decisions about North Korea. One, that North Korea is a one-party, socialist dictatorship like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, with internal decision-making dynamics similar to what we see in those systems. Wrong. North Korea is still essentially a monarchy with hereditary kings who rule in conjunction with a tight-knit group of elites mostly interrelated by blood and whose original elite stature was given through their forefathers’ participation in the origi...

2017-02-17 17:17

Angelina Jolie is both right and wrong

Angelina Jolie published an oped in the New York Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s Executive Order restricting travel from certain countries. Jolie writes, “The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders. Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”

2017-02-03 16:24

Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

A few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behavior on the part of riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”

2017-01-20 16:24

Just a Gangnam ajumma?

Kim Chong-in, the well-known economist who led the Democratic Party’s win in the last April’s parliamentary election as the interim president, recently said that Choi Soon-sil was nothing but a “Gangnam ajumma” who happened to subvert the whole governance process as a trusted confidant of President Park Geun-hye.

2017-01-06 17:30

Cognitive bias in negotiating with N. Korea

I’ve been a Korea watcher for a long time in formal and informal capacities.

2016-12-23 15:55

Unbearable Banality of Park's Evil

When Sewol sank in April 2014, it became apparent that the cozy relationships among the regulatory agencies, industry watchdogs, and safety inspection organizations all led to cursory safety checks that allowed for the design change and even gave Sewol good safety marks in February. Supposedly, it took an average of only 13 minutes for each ship when a four-person inspection team checked the condition of 36 ferries last year.

2016-12-09 17:00

Divided Families in US

Early in 1950, my Dad was all set to go to Moscow University School of Medicine on a full scholarship. Then the Korean War started in June of 1950. A few months after that, along with tens of thousands of fellow North Koreans, my Dad escaped to the South as U.N. forces retreated in the face of a furious counterattack by the People’s Army of China in the winter of 1950.

2016-11-25 16:58

America has disinvited the Clintons

When it became obvious that Donald Trump would win, my mind for some reason recalled an old 2014 article in the Washington Post titled, “In Fairfax County kindergarten classes, school system’s future comes into focus.”

2016-11-11 17:09

Failure of followership

Two years ago, I published a column titled, “Korea’s CULTural Exceptionalism,” describing the country’s tendency towards a "Korean Messianic Exceptionalism" that pervades all aspects of its modern culture. It manifests in a typical visionary, ethnocentric narrative that says that the Korean people, having emerged intact and whole through 2,000 years of trials and tribulations that culminated in the forced subjugation by the Japanese, will now attain greatness and take their rightful place as leaders of mankind.

2016-10-28 17:17

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