• Pakistan irked by shooting of schoolgirl

    In a bit of encouraging news out of a nation that has produced few of them, a broad spectrum of Pakistan has become enraged by a Taliban attempt to murder a 14-year-old schoolgirl as she rode a school bus home. The Washington Post reported that the attempted killing “united Pakistanis…

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  • Column

    What can K-pop learn from Psy?

    “By satirizing standard K-pop tropes in Gangnam Style, Psy may have subverted K-pop’s chances of making it big in the West,” writes John Seabrook in the Annals of Music section of this week’s New Yorker magazine. Insightful, yes, but true? Not so fast. There are many aspects of the Korean…

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  • Column

    Political experiment in Korea

    Koreans are experiencing an extraordinary three-way presidential race among Park Geun-hye of the ruling Senuri Party, Moon Jae-in of the opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) and independent Ahn Cheol-soo. The election is two months away, but it is too early to predict who will be the next president. Polls show…

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  • Column

    [Korea Report] Gamin’s 3rd concert of eight sounds concert series held at hanok in Seoul

    Gamin, Korean traditional instrument musician, held her third concert of four concert series. This time, the concert was held in a beautiful Hanok (traditional Korean house) in Seoul, Friday night (October 12). Gamin played three kind of Korean traditional instrument and entertained the audience for a full one hour. She played Piri,…

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  • Column

    Personal blogs turn into best-selling books in Egypt

    Blogging has become something we’re really familiar with, especially in the Middle East. Middle East bloggers mainly talk politics, Entertainment, and personal issues and daily problems. But imagine when a girl talks on her blog about her daily adventures in finding her “Future Husband” and then this blog gets turned…

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  • Column

    South Korea’s Quest for Global Influence

    *Author, Philipp Olbrich is a graduate student of Political Science and East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. David Shim is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg, Germany. This article is a…

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  • Column

    Living in a ‘Big Data’ era

    Can you guess how much raw information floats around in digital space? Of course not. During the last year alone, for example, it is presumed that the total amount poured into info-communication digital space reached as much as 1.9 zettabytes worldwide. Not only multimedia content, including broadcast services, online news…

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  • New female justice

    Top court’s formation must reflect social composition It is always good to see responsible officials act to correct wrongs in society when such moves are positive reflections of public opinion. Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae did that Wednesday when he recommended a prominent female judge as a new justice of the…

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  • A new debate game plan for a new comeback kid

    The morning after the night of the first presidential debate, loyal Democrats awoke (if indeed they slept at all) to find in their inboxes an email with a subject line that had the too-familiar look of spam. “Subject: Hey.” But then they saw the sender: “From: Barack Obama.” And that…

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  • Column

    Why Asia is off Romney’s radar

    Sometimes you have to wonder what the Asian half of the world means to Americans. How could a serious candidate for president make a whole “foreign policy” address and leave out America’s allies from Northeast to Southeast Asia? Is there any chance that Mitt Romney will cast a wayward eye…

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