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Colin Marshall

Sunday, January 1, 1984

… is a Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker on cities, language, and culture.

On my new Substack newsletter Books on Cities, I write long-form essay-reviews on exactly that.

You’ll find my essays here. I write for outlets including the New Yorker, Guardian Cities, Open Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books (including its Korea Blog), KCET, Boom: A Journal of California (and guest-edited its issue on architecture, infrastructure, and the built environment), Bookforum, Boing Boing, Put This On, The Japan Foundation, The Millions, 3Quarksdaily, The Quarterly Conversation, and Maximum Fun.

I’ve previously appeared on a Seoul urbanism radio feature on TBS eFM’s Koreascape as well as hosted and produced the world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture [RSS] [iTunes], which evolved from the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas. 

My video essay series The City in Cinema examines cities (especially Los Angeles) as they appear on film.

My public speaking, which I’ve done in places like Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chapman University, California State University Long Beach, and the Seoul Book and Culture Club, usually covers this same suite of cities-and-culture-related topics.

You can also keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook as well.

콜린 마샬은 도시와 문화를 포함해서 여러 주제들에 대하여 에세이를 쓰는 수필가이다. 그 에세이들은 <뉴요커>와 <가디언> 그리고 <로스 앤젤레스 리뷰 오브 북스> 같은 주로 영미권 매체에 실리고 또한 그는 한국 문학 잡지 <Axt>에 기고한 적이 있고 <동아일보>에 칼럼을 기고하고 있다. 모국인 미국에서 30년 넘게 살며 8년 동안 라디오 방송과 팟캐스트에서 인터뷰을 진행했다. 그 후에 로스앤젤레스의 한인타운을 거쳐 세계에서 제일 큰 한인타운인 서울로 이사왔다. 서울에 사는 동안 <콜린의 한국> 팟캐스트를 운영하며 작가와 교수을 비롯하여 건축가와 방송인 같은 다양한 사람들을 여전히 인터뷰한다. 첫 번째 책 <한국 요약 금지>는 2024년 2월에 출판되었다.

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동아일보: 한국은 끝났다?… 답은 대통령 아닌 한국인에게 있다

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

6·3 대선을 앞두고 나는 후보자나 정책을 넘어 한국의 종말이라는 주제에 대해 생각하게 됐다. 4월에 인기가 많은 독일 유튜브 채널 ‘쿠어츠게자크트(Kurzgesagt)’가 ‘한국은 끝났다(South Korea Is Over)’라는 제목의 동영상을 올렸다. 알록달록하고 유머러스한 애니메이션과 함께 통계를 자세히 소개하는 이 영상은, 한국의 저출산율이 2060년까지 인구, 경제, 문화, 심지어 군사력까지 붕괴시킬 가능성이 높다고 경고했다. 이 끔찍한 분석 영상은 두 달 만에 1200만 조회수를 기록했다. 작년 초 한국의 높은 자살률을 다뤄 화제를 모았던 미국 유튜버 마크 맨슨의 영상보다 조회수가 1000만이나 더 많았다.

내가 ‘한국은 끝났다’를 보며 가장 인상 깊었던 점은 영상의 내용보다 영상 아래 한국인들의 댓글이었다. 한국 사회가 점점 어려워지고 있다는 영상 속 묘사가 전혀 과장되지 않았다고 동의하는 한국인들이 적지 않았다. 그들은 소득은 너무 낮고, 직장 문화는 지나치게 힘들며, 경쟁이 과열됐다고 불평했다. 무엇보다 정치인들이 이 상황을 해결하려는 진지한 관심조차 보이지 않는다고 비판했다. 이번 대선에 출마한 후보들도 인구 위기를 막기 위한 여러 정책안을 제시했지만, 정치 평론가들은 현실적인 해결책은 거의 없다고 평가했다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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Books on Cities: David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

As you’d expect from a cultural figure who moves in the international music and art worlds — while running a record label called Todo Mundo — David Byrne travels a lot. What’s more notable is that, when he arrives in each world capital that requests his presence, he gets around on a bicycle. Sometimes he rents one in the city; most of the time, he flies with a folding model in an oversized suitcase. Part of this must owe to sheer habit, since Byrne has been cycling in New York, where he lives, since the early eighties, but it also seems to take the psychological edge off frequent business travel. “Some people retreat into themselves or their hotel rooms if a place is unfamiliar, or lash out in an attempt to gain some control,” he explains in Bicycle Diaries. “I myself find that the physical sensation of self-powered transport coupled with the feeling of self-control endemic to this two-wheeled situation is nicely empowering and reassuring, even if temporary, and it is enough to center me for the rest of the day.”

Cycling may also be the sensorially richest way to experience a city. “I felt more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport,” he writes. “I could stop whenever I wanted to; it was often (very often) faster than a car or taxi for getting from point A to point B; and I didn’t have to follow any set route. The same exhilaration, as the air and street life whizzed by, happened again in each town.” Byrne’s experiences suggest that one can get the measure of a new city no faster than while riding a bike. That goes as much for the Copenhagens of the world as it does for the places where taking to the streets on a bicycle of one’s own volition is considered a mild form of insanity: Manila, for example, which Byrne recounts first visiting as a research trip for Here Lies Love, his disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Monday, May 19, 2025

The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his pointed observations on the state of the world appears as the epigraph of the first chapter of Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. “The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.” The following 350 or so pages constitute an expansion on that theme, and specifically on the part about parking areas, the overabundance of which has done so much to reduce the quality of life in cities — across the world, yes, but most visibly in the United States of America.

I admit that, when Paved Paradise came out two years ago, I wondered if the world really needed another book on that subject. After all, there was already The High Cost of Free Parking, chef d’oeuvre of Donald Shoup, the UCLA urban planning professor interviewed for every single article, explainer video, and podcast about the negative effects of excessive legally mandated parking infrastructure on the built environment. I even interviewed him on my own podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture, which I started up soon after moving to Los Angeles in the early twenty-tens. As any fan of Shoup (or “Shoupista,” as they call themselves online) will tell you, his book is far more readable and entertaining than an 800-page statistic-laden tome about parking policy has any right to be. As is the work, so was the man, who continued patiently and humorously articulating his diagnosis of the problem and his recommended solutions right up until his death this past February. Given that he was in his mid-eighties, the need for a successor had presumably been clear for some time, and in any case, The High Cost of Free Parking, originally published twenty years ago, hadn’t had a revision since 2011.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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동아일보: 꿈이 건물주?… 돈에 대한 ‘한국식 태도’

Monday, April 21, 2025

요즘 일론 머스크 테슬라 최고경영자(CEO)는 도널드 트럼프 미국 행정부와의 연관성 때문에 더욱 자주 뉴스에 등장하고 있다. 그는 공식적으로 대통령 고문에 불과하지만 트럼프 대통령과의 친밀함을 과시해 한때 ‘공동 대통령’으로 불리기도 했다. 하지만 그가 수장을 맡은 정부효율부(DOGE)는 미 연방정부뿐 아니라 미 경제에도 혼란을 초래하고 있다. 또 공개석상이나 소셜미디어에서 그의 행동은 갈수록 기이해지고 있다. 이에 지난달 미 인기 방송 프로그램 ‘새터데이 나이트 라이브(Saturday Night Live·SNL)’에서 개그맨 마이크 마이어스가 머스크처럼 차려입고 전기톱을 휘두르며 그의 엉뚱함을 조롱하기도 했다.

미국에서와는 달리 한국에서 머스크는 인기를 그다지 잃지 않았을지도 모른다. 그 이유는 간단하다. 그가 부자이기 때문이다. 미 경제전문지 포브스 선정 ‘2025년 세계 최고 부자’에 오른 머스크는 한국에서 인간보다는 신(神)으로 여겨진다. 내가 매주 시청하는 KBS조이 프로그램 ‘무엇이든 물어보살’에서도 그렇게 표현된다. 해당 프로그램 촬영 장소에는 유명인의 얼굴을 본떠 신의 형상으로 표현한 그림들이 걸려 있는데, 그중에는 ‘일론머니神’으로 형상화된 머스크의 그림도 있다. ‘뭐니 뭐니 해도 머니가 최고’라는 말이 자주 들리는 한국에서 세계적으로 유명한 부자가 숭배의 대상이 되는 것은 놀랍지 않다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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Books on Cities: Harold Brodkey, My Venice

Sunday, April 6, 2025

Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if “enjoying” be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he’d been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised full-length debut repeatedly failed to appear, his golden-boy reputation turned somehow villainous. During the first half of his career, he seems to have been regarded as a potential American Proust; during the second, as a bloviating, quasi-malevolent egoist, bent on inflicting his torturously convoluted, near-parodically self-obsessed prose on the innocent reading public. When it appeared, the 800-page-long The Runaway Soul was greeted by reviews now remembered — if, like the book itself, remembered at all — as career-endingly harsh.

Yet Brodkey’s career didn’t end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged The Runaway Soul centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, Profane Friendship centers on Niles O’Hara, a famous novelist remembering his youth in the Venice around that same period. Though primarily set in Venice, it does fall short of being a book about it. In a contemporary London Review of Books piece, Colm Tóibín notes that “there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers,” quoting the following: “February’s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly vulgar, pallid and yellowish light of March.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Jorge Almazán + Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

Friday, February 28, 2025

Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period’s restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it’s surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published in the middle of 2022. While most of Japan’s recent first-time visitors were no doubt content to put together a few Instagram stories and check the Land of the Rising Sun off their “bucket list,” one imagines the more urbanism-minded among them returning home inspired to understand what they saw and experienced of the day-to-day life of Japanese cities — and of no Japanese city more than Tokyo, foreign tourists’ most common starting point.

It hardly needs saying that Tokyo is unlike any capital in the West, and it doesn’t closely resemble any other Asian megacity either. Sheer scale contributes something to its difference — more than 14 million people live within the city proper, and 41 million in the metro area — but more so the sheer functionality it exhibits at that scale. At every level, from its efficient train networks to its countless eateries to its well-stocked convenience stores to its ever-present bottled-drink vending machines, Tokyo appears simply to “work” in a way Westerners no longer even expect from their own cities, even without an apparent guiding intelligence overseeing the process. The reasons behind that hold out enough interest that Emergent Tokyo‘s co-author Joe McReynolds, an American academic with a good deal of experience in Japan, has spoken of originally having intended to write a book called How Tokyo Works.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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동아일보: “트럼프주의”에 함축된 미국인들의 속내

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

미국 캘리포니아에 계시는 어머니와 마지막으로 통화했을 때 어머니는 내가 한국에 사는 것이 다행이라고 하셨다. 지난달에 도널드 트럼프가 두 번째로 대통령에 취임한 것을 염두에 두고 하신 말씀이다. 현재 문제는 트럼프 그 자체뿐만 아니라 트럼프 때문에 미국에서 심화되는 내부 투쟁과 정치적 분열이다. 현재 한국도 그러한 상황에 시달리는 듯 보이지만 미국만큼은 아닌 것 같다. 내 어머니는 트럼프를 싫어하시는 반면 아버지는 트럼프를 응원하시는데, 이처럼 미국인들이 완전히 다른 정치적인 색깔로 나눠지고 있다는 인상을 받는다.

나는 트럼프 팬이 아니지만 그의 매력을 어느 정도 이해할 수 있을 것 같다. 트럼프는 대부분의 정치인과 달리 유머 감각이 있다. 미국인들은 코미디언들에 대해 ‘우리가 생각하는 것을 말해 준다’며 칭찬하곤 하는데, 트럼프에 대해서도 그렇다고 한다. 2018년 이민법 개정안을 논의하기 위해 의원들과 트럼프가 만났을 때 트럼프는 아이티를 언급하며 “왜 거지 소굴에서 들어오는 사람들을 계속 받아주는 것이냐”라고 말한 적이 있다. 언론은 거친 발언을 한 트럼프를 꾸짖었지만 많은 미국인들은 바로 그 질문에 응답한 것 같다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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Books on Cities: Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities)

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Stendhal was born and buried in France, but his tombstone describes him as a Milanese. Italo Calvino, whose life began and ended in Italy, long maintained that he wanted “New Yorker” engraved on his tombstone. Stendhal may only have lived in Milan for seven years, but that was considerably more time than Calvino’s longest stretch in New York, four months of a six-month trip to the United States sponsored by the Ford Foundation in 1959 and 1960. Though he did make an effort to see the country from the Midwest to California and back around to the South, he felt most at home in New York, “a place which is neither exactly America nor exactly Europe, which gives you a burst of extraordinary energy, which you immediately feel you know like the back of your hand, as though you had always lived here.”

This passage comes from Martin McLaughlin’s English translation of Calvino’s “American Diary,” which is included in the collection Hermit in Paris. So is an interview conducted in 1985, the last year of Calvino’s life, by the scholar Maria Corti. “Every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city,” he tells her. “It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; therefore it is the city which intimidates me least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant.” This could almost be a passage from his most famous book — and perhaps the most famous modern Italian book — Le città invisibili, which had come out in 1972.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Friday, January 24, 2025

If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn’t really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it’s now “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in his book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. If you do make such a move, you could do worse than following his example and living in Queens, since “nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile, is more linguistically diverse.” This was heartening for me to read, since I’ve long imagined that Queens would be my own most viable New York option, given the cost of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I still recall a good Dominican breakfast I had the one time I stayed there.

Whether I ordered that breakfast in Spanish doesn’t come back to mind. Not that I would have had to go to New York to do so, Spanish being a practicable language in more than a few regions of the United States — and, in any case, not one especially relevant to Perlin’s project. The core chapters of this book deal with Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N’Ko (technically a writing system), Nahuatl, and Lenape, some of whose names may not ring a bell even for serious linguaphiles. But linguaphiles don’t come much more serious than Perlin, who in college “tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic, racing like a bucket-list traveler to stamp the pages of my linguistic passport. Above all I threw myself into Mandarin, keen to go up against its proverbial difficulty,” a desire that led him to a six-month immersion sojourn in Beijing.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Orhan Pamuk has spent almost all of his 72 years in Istanbul. That may not be especially rare for a Turk, but it’s somewhat more surprising for one who happens to be an internationally acclaimed novelist, not to mention a Nobel laureate. When he was growing up, as he tells it in Istanbul: Memories and the City, his older brother was the real achiever. Şevket Pamuk went on to become a economist, educated at Yale and Berkeley, who throughout his career has year held positions at universities like Penn, Villanova, and Princeton, with more recent stints at the London School of Economics and Harvard. As for the younger of the two, “apart from three years in New York, Orhan Pamuk has spent all his life in the same streets and district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised.”

I quote from the bio on his official web site, which one might expect to end by saying he’s now an emeritus at, say, UC Irvine. That seems to be part of the deal for those who rise sufficiently high up in the realm of “world literature,” on whose top tier Pamuk presumably sits. But he’s done things his own way: “I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood,” he writes in the first chapter of this book, which was first published in 2003, before his New York sojourn. (Maureen Freely’s English translation came out two years later.) “We live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, so l am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I’ve stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building.” The rest of the text constitutes that explanation, more or less.

Istanbul is a book about the eponymous city, but it’s also an autobiography. Any attempt Pamuk might make at the former would also be the latter, it seems, and vice versa. Moreover, it’s a book about civilization, though it presents Turkish civilization per se as something of a construct, evoked mainly to shore up the modernization project that, amid Ottoman ruins, created the Turkish Republic we know today. “Great as the desire to Westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire,” he writes. “But as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to Westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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