Artists are no strangers to poverty. Great artists died in dire situations –- and despair about their own art. Vincent Van Gogh famously sold a single painting during his entire career. He died penniless and destitute, saying, “The sadness will last forever.” When Paul Gauguin died alone in poverty, he had no idea of the impact that his work would have on the art world. I couldn’t but recall these stories of poignant irony on my recent visit to the Park Soo Keun Museum

Labeling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that COVID-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result. Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact fr

Catching up with a friend over Zoom, I wondered recently what might have happened if China had come clean about the presence and origins of COVID-19 before it spread beyond Wuhan. But, my friend asked, wouldn’t the United States have done the same and tried to hide it too? No, I replied. Even if our government had tried, it would have come to light. That’s the beauty of an open society and a free press. Imagine if COVID-19 had first emerged in a country with a free press. Governmen

It seems that our left-wing politicians today tend to think that corporations only exist to exploit their workers. Perhaps that is why they so frequently discourage our enterprises and give them such a hard time. Yet, corporations create jobs, often pay high salaries and instill a good impression of South Korea around the world. They even contribute to our diplomacy by investing in foreign countries. At a recent press conference after the summit between Korea and the United States, US Presiden

Korean President Moon Jae-in did make some strong commitments at the P4G Summit, repeating the country’s Net Zero 2050 pledge, an end to financing coal projects internationally, and a significant increase in the green share of Korea’s Official Development Assistance. At the summit, President Moon did not yet commit to a stronger Nationally Determined Contributions’ target for 2030, but he promised it will be announced before COP26 in November. The Global Green Growth Institut

As rich countries get their vaccination numbers up while poorer countries are still struggling, there is some hope that we are getting to grips with the pandemic. On the climate change front, there have been some remarkable achievements in the last two months. First, US President Biden’s Climate Summit in April got 40 top leaders to commit toward working together on climate change. Even though several countries did not commit to anything new, just getting the US back to the Paris Agreemen

Even if we never learn whether COVID-19 escaped from a lab or jumped to humans from animals, the public is entitled to a closer look at what‘s going on in virology labs. Some scientists worry that laboratory scientists are getting too little oversight on projects that could potentially start pandemics. Others worry about the global proliferation of labs that work with dangerous viruses and other pathogens. The journal Nature accused politicians and the press of stirring up a “divis

Late last month, the American actor John Cena issued a groveling public apology after having referred to Taiwan as a “country” in an interview to promote his latest film. Though he was using the term to refer to a linguistic media market with a discrete distribution channel, not to the status of the island of Taiwan in international law, the Chinese government would make no allowance for such distinctions. What are we to make of this episode? Clearly, globalization has gone terribl