[Grace Kao] BTS J-Hope’s ‘Sweet Dreams’ an update to ‘Daydream’

J-Hope of BTS released the new single “Sweet Dreams,” featuring Miguel, on Friday. Like an increasing number of K-pop songs, it was released at midnight in the eastern US to match the start of the week for the US Billboard Hot 100 Charts. The song is R&B and pop, with a memorable chorus and hook. It is also a love song. And unlike most of BTS’ discography, the love is directed at one person and not to the BTS fandom Army. However, what was most notable for me were the parallels to his 2018 solo

March 11, 2025

[Lim Woong] From programming to AI agents: The next frontier

Every day, it seems there’s fresh news about artificial intelligence: self-driving cars, cloud-based services, generative AI that can produce art and text, and even robots with synthetic muscles. The pace of change is dizzying, filling us with hope for a better future as well as worries about deepfakes, misinformation and ethical lapses. It can feel like we’re driving on a foggy highway or drifting on a vast, uncharted ocean. In this column, I hope to clear some of that haze by looking at how ou

March 11, 2025

[Editorial] Impact of Yoon’s release

Court ruling underscores importance of due process for Yoon’s impeachment case President Yoon Suk Yeol was released from jail Saturday after a court accepted his request to overturn his arrest over his short-lived imposition of martial law in early December. Yoon had been held in detention since Jan. 15 on insurrection charges related to his Dec. 3 declaration of martial law that plunged South Korea into political turmoil, national division and economic uncertainty. On Saturday, a special invest

March 10, 2025

[Elizabeth Shackelford] How to spot autocracy’s rise

Global freedom and democracy have been declining for two decades, reaching historic lows, according to two reports just released from the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House. To those of us who witnessed the end of the Cold War, it’s hard to accept that the trend toward a freer and more democratic world has reversed. But that’s just because we haven’t been looking for the right signs. Autocracy is on the rise, but it’s not happening with tanks in the streets or generals in uniform anno

March 10, 2025

[Lee Kyong-hee] Struggle of the ‘beasts’ far from over

Seeing tens of thousands of demonstrators engulfing the capital’s downtown streets on Saturday, March 1 harkened back to a massive rally on the very same byways exactly 106 years ago. It is extremely disheartening to fathom the difference. On March 1, 1919, our forebears were firmly united in confronting the brutal Japanese gendarmes under the sole objective of regaining independent sovereignty. Their rally in Seoul sparked a nationwide movement that laid the spiritual and legal cornerstone of o

March 10, 2025

[Editorial] Negative economic indicators

South Korea suffers ‘triple minus’ in January amid negative export outlook due to US tariffs South Korea’s economy faces pressure on multiple fronts ranging from industrial output and facility investment to the outlook for exports and consumer prices amid growing concerns about a global trade war. The country’s industrial output, retail sales and facility investment all fell in January from a month earlier, data showed Tuesday. The figures marked the first “triple minus” since October, a signal

March 7, 2025

[Robert J. Fouser] Where should next president live?

The possibility of an early presidential election in South Korea in May raises the interesting question of where the new president should live. Until President Yoon Suk Yeol, every South Korean president had lived in Cheong Wa Dae, commonly known in English as the Blue House. Located behind the main royal palace Gyeongbokgung, Cheong Wa Dae was long the center of political power in South Korea. After winning the presidency in 2022, Yoon Suk Yeol refused to live in Cheong Wa Dae, arguing that it

March 7, 2025

Gwon Dong-hyun, Kwon Sea-jung trace tales of our oldest, beloved companion

Gwon Dong-hyun principally works with sculpture and Kwon Sea-jung with documentary filmmaking, but since forming a two-person collective in 2020, their modus operandi has been transdisciplinary in terms of thought experiment and production. Their works of art combine video, sculpture and installation, and some are often shown at film festivals. Their aesthetic interests lie in the entanglement of beauty and disfiguration, the transformation of bodies with regards to emotional layers, and histori

March 6, 2025

[Editorial] Build strength

Pause of military aid to Ukraine, comment on Taiwan hint at Trump's 'deal-making' US President Donald Trump reportedly ordered a pause to all US military aid to Ukraine. The move comes just days after an argument at the Oval Office meeting in which Trump and US Vice President JD Vance upbraided Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for being insufficiently grateful for Washington's backing. Pausing aid is a step to pressure Zelenskyy into accepting Trump's plan to end the Ukraine war through pea

March 6, 2025

[Jeffrey Frankel] Trump’s imaginary victories

The torrent of far-out policy moves that Donald Trump has announced during the first month of his second presidency has left pundits struggling to find method to the madness. Some say it is all a negotiating tactic: Trump starts by staking out an extreme position, so that he later has space to exchange “concessions” with the other party without giving up anything valuable. They point to Trump’s 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” which encourages readers to “do things that are bold or controversia

March 6, 2025

[Wang Son-taek] Moments that made a diplomatic fiasco

The heated exchange in the White House on Feb. 28 between US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shocked the world. The meeting was supposed to be a routine diplomatic event where national leaders exchanged opinions using calculated expressions and sophisticated language. However, what transpired shattered every fundamental element of diplomatic communication. Given the significance of this failure, a thorough review should be meaningful. W

March 6, 2025