If your picture of Korea comes from Netflix, it is a country of glowing screens and elaborate plots. The real calendar from October to February runs on smaller things: a dust alert on a phone, a…

Anyone who has tried to book a Valentine's Day dinner on the afternoon of February 13 knows the feeling: every table you actually wanted is gone. In Korea that feeling arrives in December, a…

New Year's Eve in most North American cities builds toward a countdown, a drop or a burst of fireworks, and the whole crowd shouts the final seconds together. Seoul's best-known version …

Most wedding receptions have the same moment. The DJ drops a song that half the room knows by heart, a few people head for the floor, and everyone else stands at the edge doing the quiet math: g…

When an English speaker says "it is what it is," the conversation is usually over. The problem has been looked at, nobody can fix it, and the shrug is the last word. Koreans have a phr…

In English, a dead-end job is the one you stay in because nothing better has turned up. It pays the rent, it leads nowhere, and everybody in the break room knows it. The Netflix series called De…