The Bag That Says Everything Without Saying Anything In Seoul, you can tell a great deal about a person from their eco-bag. Not from whether they carry one — nearly everyone does — but from wh…

When the Arm Moves, Something Shifts in Your Understanding of Seoul The robot arm at Better Than Yours in Seongsu-dong is named Porty. When it receives an affogato order, it reaches for the po…

The City That Turned Every Coffee Shop Into an Office You open your laptop, connect to the wifi in under ten seconds, and run a speed test out of habit. The download number climbs past 150 Mbp…

What Machines Discover When They Try to Understand Korean Every language presents challenges to artificial intelligence, but Korean presents a particular configuration of them — challenges tha…

Three Keys, Every Sound, and the Philosophy That Made It Possible In 2023, a study measuring smartphone typing speeds across multiple languages found that Korean users consistently ranked amon…

The Moment a Familiar Logo Becomes Something You Have Never Quite Seen Before There is a Starbucks in Insadong, the traditional craft and culture district of central Seoul, that looks almost l…

Two Sticks, One Roof: The Cultural Kinship Binding East Asia's Three Great Nations There is a single Chinese character that carries more meaning than most sentences ever will. The characte…

Not Fighting Time. Negotiating With It. There is a specific quality visible in the face of a Korean woman in her fifties who has taken care of her skin since her twenties. It is not the absenc…