President Yoon Suk Yeol’s controversial speech on the 104th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement prompted me to watch two movies: “A Resistance” and “Anarchist from Colony.” Both are based on the heart-wrenching fate of courageous Koreans who as teenagers joined the massive anti-Japanese protests of March 1, 1919. A presidential speech customarily marks the watershed event. Yoon, no ...

Following a year of halting negotiations, six of Turkey’s opposition parties have finally united behind a single presidential candidate in the election this May, with the hope of ending Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic and repressive two-decade rule. This month, the so-called Table of Six converged on Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the social democratic and secularist Republican ...

In the late 19th and early 20th century, foreign adventurers, reporters and missionaries visited Joseon, which is now Korea. During their stay in the “Land of the Morning Calm,” they wrote some penetrating accounts describing pre-modern Korea. Some of them were favorable remarks, and others were somewhat negative observations, though amusing. For example, they unanimously praised the Korean peop...

Too many people are dying every week in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and millions are living in fear and hopelessness. The world’s response has been characterized by too many statements and too little action. That must change. We in the European Union and the wider international community need to do more. We know that people around the world expect us to work for peace, justic...

A year ago, two of us (Fedyk and Hodson) co-authored a commentary arguing that Russians would not rise up to stop President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. There was too much suppression of dissent in Putin’s Russia, we noted, and too much real support for the war among the public. That assessment proved correct. Still, there is a lingering question: What role are Russian “opposition” parti...

Two disturbing incidents roiled the cyber seas last week, one foreign and one domestic. They both strengthen the case -- which was already convincing, and which I have been making for almost a decade now -- for the creation of a US Cyber Force. The first incident was yet another cyberattack on a NATO member, Albania, by Iran. It was part of an ongoing Iranian campaign to attack Albania, a small ...

When I write critical columns about US policies and politics, I occasionally strike a nerve and get enraged letters from readers denouncing me as a traitor or suggesting I am providing grist for our nation's enemies. I've been told, for instance, that I should move to China because I'm anti-American. And when I raised the possibility of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, I was accused of be...

The 21st century has seen a boom in learning Korean around the world. The wave began in the early 2000s as hallyu gained popularity in Asia and grew in the 2010s as K-pop swept the world. Universities around the world have started and expanded Korean language classes, online classes have boomed, and K-pop fans have created informal learning networks spanning the globe. Meanwhile, the number of fo...

“AI passes US medical licensing exam.” “ChatGPT passes law school exams despite ‘mediocre’ performance.” “Would ChatGPT get a Wharton MBA?” Headlines such as these have recently touted (and often exaggerated) the successes of ChatGPT. These successes follow a long tradition of comparing AI‘s abilities to those of human experts, such as Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov in 1997, IBM W...