Frank Sinatra recorded “There Used to Be a Ballpark” in 1973. If this does not rank among classics like “My Way,” “Strangers in the Night” and “New York, New York,” it was still a good one. The song captured how a community had lost its baseball...
Back in 2013, my student Juliana Kim spoke enthusiastically about skiing at Vivaldi Park, 63 kilometers east of Seoul, every winter with her husband and children. Whether they visited the place in summer for its equally famous water resort, I am...
Huge and well-rendered murals of George Floyd can now be found in such places as Houston, Texas; Gaza, Palestine; Nairobi, Kenya; Idlib, Syria; Manchester, England; Karachi, Pakistan; and Belfast, Northern Ireland. In more than one, he is drawn...
My flight from Cairo, Egypt to Manama, Bahrain in the summer of 1993 was memorable for four reasons: (1) Never have I been in such a cramped airplane, (2) there were no smoking restrictions whatsoever, (3) we had a 30-minute layover in Doha...
Any football or basketball coach who wants to win and keep his job is going to put the best players out on the field or court. This is as it should be. Nevertheless, I get sick of mono-cultural sports. A quick glance at virtually any college or...
Kindly allow me to begin by reprising my Facebook post dated June 3, 2020: “I have a question for Thomas Lane, J.A. Kueng and Tou Thao. You saw your colleague, Derek Chauvin, with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes, 46 seconds on...
Two months ago, I was immersed in a book about the Wright brothers, builders and pilots of the world’s first motor-operated airplane. The author, David McCullough, did a fine job with one exception: He made no reference to Orville or Wilbur’s...
Hardly a day goes by without me opening The Korea Times or one of Seoul’s other newspapers and finding a story or two about this country’s most distressing problem—our low birth rate and its long-term demographic implications. As much as I value...
It seems that I was 40 years too early. Way back in 1980, I was living in Denton, Texas. Sometimes I would visit the county courthouse, paying special attention to the Confederate monument. It featured dear old Johnny Reb holding a rifle and...
The logo of the Coast Guard air station in Salem, Massachusetts features a witch riding a broom. Same for police cars. There is a Witchcraft Heights Elementary School, and the mascot for Salem High School is, naturally, the witch. Salem, known as...
I suspected that at some point in the summer of 2020, I would visit an island off the southwest coast of Korea. While looking at the map on my kitchen wall, I picked Jido along with a nearby town on the mainland called Muan. Neither had...
I have little patience with people who utter such absurd lines as “I don’t like history,” “history is boring” and “what’s the use of studying history since it’s all in the past?” Before telling them to shut the heck up, I remind them that there...
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