With so much attention fixed on soaring prices for gasoline and groceries, one can almost overlook the fact that we’re also enduring an affordable housing crisis. The question is, why? Spanning the pandemic era from February 2020 through May 2022, home prices soared 43.5 percent. Over the past 12 months, home prices are up 19.7 percent, while residential property prices in the United States, adjusted for inflation, are now 6.7 percent above the prior all-time record levels of the 2006 bu

I heard great news this year in June: Lim Yun-chan got the first prize in the Van Cliburn Piano International Competition. He was the youngest winner since the competition was first established in 1962. The news was sensational in the field of classical music. When the news came out, I saw many people around the world start to get interested in classical music and Korean musicians. Usually, when a person becomes a winner in major competitions, he/she gets famous quickly and tons of scheduled pe

When it comes to the United States Congress, nothing is ever over until it’s over. But as of late July, it looks as though two major pieces of legislation will soon be on President Joe Biden’s desk, awaiting his signature. The first is the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, which will provide tens of billions of dollars to support domestic semiconductor production and research. The second is the Inflation Reduction Act, a slimmed-down version of the fa

Four individuals weigh heavily on my mind these days. One survived a monthlong, self-tormenting sit-in to change the excruciating conditions of subcontract labor in shipbuilding; the other three lost their lives in the gray zone of confrontation -– and occasional, brittle mood of peace –- between the democratic South Korea and the authoritarian North Korea. Yoo Choi-an, a 41-year-old welder, on June 22, crumpled himself into a small steel structure in the main dock of Daewoo Shipbu

It was four in the afternoon on March 10, 1991, when the first planned explosion of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons went off at the US weapons depot in Khamisiyah, Iraq, and the first gray-white smoke cloud that would come to be called the Plume wafted skyward and drifted over the troops. There would be many blasts that day. Bill Florey, a young and proud-to-serve E4 specialist, had just parked his truck after a day’s work. Francesca Yabraian, who would become his friend and woul

The defeat of Donald Trump to Joseph Biden in the last US presidential election brought celebration and relief for half of the American people, but frustration and fury for the other half. At that time, America was sharply divided by two groups that were constantly blaming each other. For example, the Democrats blamed Trump for the division of America, but the Republicans asserted that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were responsible. Perhaps both sides had a point. During the Clinton era, campa