“Culture is not necessarily our destiny,” wrote the high-profile Korean activist and later president of South Korea Kim Dae-jung in a 1994 Foreign Affairs piece. “Democracy is.” Kim made that claim as part of an argument against Lee Kuan Yew, three-decade prime minister of Singapore, who took a dim view of transplanting Western political institutions into Asian soil. […]
Essayist, interviewer, public speaker
Notebook on Cities and Culture podcast
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Recent Posts
- Korea Blog: Reading Tocqueville in Korea (Part Two)
- Talk at San Diego State University: “The Urban Future on Film” (2/14/19)
- Korea Blog: Reading Tocqueville in Korea (Part One)
- Korea Blog: The Making of a Korean Monster in Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High-School Novel “Mina”
- My ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2018: Malcolm Gladwell in cafés, Éric Rohmer in Paris, David Lynch at Bob’s Big Boy, and more
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