Features
Unique perspectives on diverse topics—informed, honest, provocative, and unbounded.
Itaewon, Part I: Seoul’s Little America – A Depravity in Four Acts
These places exist around the world, these “Pleasure Island” communities near current or former army installations: Bangkok, Tijuana, Saigon, Manila, Okinawa to name just a few, all with a parallel motif of booze, hookers and cheap souvenirs.
The Cost of Achievement: a Front Row Seat for the Korean CSAT
“…relative strangers, with whom I once shared joy, laughter and mischief in class, extraordinarily bright and happy kids reduced to empty eyes and blank faces.”
Life Under the Button: The Go-Bag, Kim Jong Un and Me
Dooms day preparations are often ridiculed, but what about when you live under the credible threat of nuclear war? Cowie pokes fun at his own fears even as he takes a sober look at “life under the button” in South Korea.
Reluctant Romantic
Why can’t I remember his name? I quote him often… I’d gone West after graduating. It was election night, 2008, and Jackson Hole Wyoming was a tiny blue dot in a vast red state…
Raising a Honyol
Raising a racially mixed child in an insular society. As a foreigner living in the Republic of Korea, it can be a rewarding existence…
Other Essay Sections
Paine Day 2018
Motivating histories are necessary but imperfect things. Imagined communities of people become such by participating in aspirational stories of a shared past…
July 20, 2019, 33 Years Later
Some time in 2014 I picked this up at a yard sale. It was hard to resist, for a $1, with the day of the title coming up. Arthur C. Clarke, renowned science fiction writer, published this strange, heavy book in 1986, imagining this day in 2019 that would commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing in 1969. It’s not, Clarke was adamant, an attempt at prophecy, but (as he said of his work generally), “An inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.”
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