Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Gangnam district, Colin Marshall speaks with Mipa Lee, proprietor of Itaewon’s vegan cafe and bake shop and café PLANT and author of the […]
Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Hongdae district, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Russell, author of the books Pop Goes Korea, K-Pop Now!, and the coming novel Young-hee and the Pullocho. They discuss […]
Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Gangnam district, Colin Marshall talks with with Laurence Pritchard, writer, teacher, and enthusiast of Korean literature. They discuss the Korean phenomenon of […]
Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Garosu-gil, Colin Marshall talks with Korean music industry expert Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a creative agency that provides digital media, […]
Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Mapo-gu, Colin Marshall talks with Hyunwoo Sun, founder of the Korean language-learning site Talk to Me in Korean. They discuss whether a […]
I talk in Seoul, Korea with Krys Lee, author of the acclaimed short story collection Drifting House. We discuss her obsessions with violence and religion, “Koreanness” as an accidental unifier of her stories, her life between Korea, America, and England, and her next novel, which deals with the lives of North Korean refugees. You can listen to the […]
A white guy living in L.A. like it’s Seoul. That’s Colin Marshall. Living in the Koreatown district of Los Angeles, a city where people drive to the park to take a walk, his main form of transportation is his two feet. Marshall recently traveled across South Korea, from Seoul to Changwon to Busan, for six […]
The streets of Seoul strike me as a uniquely rich and incongruous mixture of the urban future and the urban past. As soon as I emerge from the city’s subway system – so admirably planned, so meticulously engineered, so impeccably maintained – I step into a reality where street names and addresses suddenly lose their […]
Today begins An Urbanist’s Tour of South Korea, a five-part series at the Guardian chronicling my experience of urban life eating, sleeping, walking, cycling, and riding a hell of a lot of trains in Seoul and well beyond. Since at least the 1970s, we’ve turned to East Asia for a look at the urban future. Thirty […]
My recent, first trip to London presented me with two surprises: the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube, and the volume of Londoners’ complaints about the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube. English friends had explained to me, not without pride, the importance of grumbling to the national character, but I still want […]