The biggest trend in South Korea these past few months has been Pokemon bread. Pokemon bread is a bread that is packaged with a sticker of one of the 159 characters from a famous Japanese anime, Pokemon. Pokemon bread was sold until 2006 after it debuted in 1998 when the anime was aired in South Korea, and it was reintroduced to the market this year on Feb. 24.Since its return, Pokemon bread has sparked a craze in South Korea, especially among the Millennials (people in their 20s and 30s). According to SPC Samlip, the manufacturer of the product, its sales surpassed 10 million within 43 days s

The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MOEF) said it held a meeting presided over by Minister Hong Nam-ki on April 15 and jointly approved a plan to promote the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) membership in writing. The government said it has prepared a plan based on the results of collecting opinions from all walks of life and analyzing economic effects on the CPTPP membership applications and will faithfully implement related procedures such as reporting to the National Assembly before applying for membership. In the process of negotiations, the go

Shoplifters (2018) is a Japanese film about a special family who lives in severe poverty. The story unfolds as the family encounters a young girl Yuri, whom the family brings home. The film has won more than 30 awards including Palme d’Or from the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.SynopsisIn Tokyo, there is a special family: Shota, a young boy who routinely shoplifts; Osamu, a day laborer who also shoplifts on his way home; Nobuyo, the wife of Osamu; Aki, who works at a hostess club; Hatsue, the house owner who receives a pension from her dead husband. Interestingly, no member of the family is biologi

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are currently at the center of a rising hype for blockchain technology and a cryptocurrency-oriented economy. They are essentially a digital guarantee that one owns a certain digital or physical asset, encoded directly into a blockchain system such as Ethereum. Unlike its counterpart blockchain asset cryptocurrency, NFTs cannot be interchanged, hence “non-fungible”.Despite early concerns from various experts that it may just be a massive Ponzi scheme, NFT markets have been growing at sky-high rates. Nonfungible.com, an NFT data firm, alongside L’Atelier, a research fi

One of the keywords in Korea in 2021 was the inflation rate. Many consumers reported that the price of goods in markets increased significantly over the past few months. In 2020, the Bank of Korea (BOK), stated in their reports that the inflation rate was worrisome as it was too low. The inflation rate in 2020 recorded an all-time low of 0.54% due to a great fall in spending after COVID-19. However, things took a turn in 2021 as the average inflation rate soared to 2.5%, and from October 2021, the inflation rate exceeded 3% every month. The BOK announced at the end of 2020 that their primary o

Tragedies occur when they are least expected. They happen even to the best of us because none of us are free from life’s predicaments. It is those vulnerable times when beautiful works of literature provide consolations that no others can. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is one such novel that contains a fountain of thought-provoking ideas, tear-jerking plot points, and a wholesome ending, all of which play out to conjure a majestically cathartic storyline. The story deals with the theme of boundless familial love and coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. Th

Think of an ambulance carrying an emergency patient. It successfully passed the suburban area with the help of the ground-traffic control center. However, in the urban area, the patient is running out of time due to traffic congestion. Dramatically, the C-ITS integrated control center manages the situation and changes all traffic lights on the ambulance route to the green. The patient safely arrives at the hospital on time. This is just an example of what the Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) does.The C-ITS is a next-generation model of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS). Th

Display technology has made a visible improvement over the past few years. Even though it took nearly 90 years for the introduction of the first color television, display technology recently experienced exponential growth, and companies are focused on bringing new features to displays. Until 2017, most commercial display products were focused on making the most accurate 2D display. Companies produced televisions with 16,000 resolution and tried to fit more pixels so that the displays were as realistic as possible. In 2022, devices as small as mobile phone internal cameras can record microscopi

SynopsisThis book is set in A.F. (After Ford) 632 (A.D. 2540). In the World State, citizens are assigned into predetermined classes based on intelligence and labor. They livepromiscuous life and are ashamed of words such as father and mother. World State citizens often consume a soothing, happiness-inducing drug called Soma to keep themselves peaceful and entertained.Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and desirable in all respects. In contrast, Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is shorter than the average of his high Alpha class. His work with sleep-learning allows him to disapprove of t

The image of climate change is often dominated by the melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and CO2 emissions. Indeed, they are one of the largest and most dire problems, but they somewhat occlude the other problems at hand and tend to undermine the importance of individual action. The fact is that livestock is responsible for 7.5 billion tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year, 14.5% of annual global emissions. This is not taking into account all the deforestation and greenhouse gases (GHG) that occur due to animal agriculture. And when those factors are considered, it accounts for mo

From 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped the cultural industry from providing cultural products such as offline concerts and overseas trips. Although cultural facilities were busy catching customers by operating vaccine pass centers and introducing discount events for ticket prices, there were still restrictions such as those on gatherings and business hours which made consumers hesitate. However, from Nov. 1, the Korean government implemented the “living with COVID-19” strategy to abolish all restrictions in three stages. As the restrictions are being lifted, the cultural industry is prep

With the pandemic raging around the globe, many outdoor activities and social gatherings have been halted by strict quarantine and social distancing measures. As a result, people have resorted to finding hobbies they can enjoy indoors. One of the solutions was reading, a hobby that was declining in popularity before the COVID-19 hit. According to Embrain, a private market investigation company, 46.9% of South Korean adults had reported an increase in yearly book count for reading. Also, 45.9% replied that a rise in time spent in their residential area had contributed to a surge in overall read

Warning: The synopsis below gives away important plot points.SynopsisTen-year-old boy Jojo Betzler grows up in Germany during World War Ⅱ (WWⅡ). He is extremely patriotic and yearns to live for Nazi Germany. Jojo even has an imaginary friend, whose name is surprisingly, Adolf Hitler—historically renowned as a notorious dictator, A-class war criminal, and sinister leader of the Holocaust. Jojo opens his heart to Hitler, confessing all sorts of secrets, including creative ways on how to torture the Jews.One day, Jojo goes to a training camp for the Hitler youth, where children are taught how to

Commonly referred to as “chabak”, car camping has gained massive popularity in Korea. Since COVID-19 broke out, people have searched for ways to travel while abiding by social distancing rules, and car camping surely met the needs of many. If so, what exactly is car camping? According to MtnScoop, car camping describes the act of driving up to a campsite and choosing to either sleep directly in one’s vehicle, or set up camp and use the car as storage.The campsites in which campers choose to park their car show wide locational diversity, from the standard, populated campsites to rural mountains

On Feb. 17, on an anonymity-based application “Blind”, a user known to be a Kakao employee posted a complaint about suffering from bullying in the workplace, along with the title “my will” which implied his desire to commit suicide. The victim posted his feelings online since no action had been taken by Kakao even though he had reported the violence to the company. As complaints on Kakao’s violence against its employees increased on Blind, Kakao apologized and announced it would solve the problem.Anonymity-based applications are drawing attention as a new platform for solving problems within o

Arrival (2016) is a film adaptation of Ted Chiang’s award-winning novella The Story of Your Life (1998), showcasing the story of a linguist Dr. Louise Banks, who tries to understand the language and text of an alien species.PlotDr. Banks is a linguistics professor, leading a normal life only to be interrupted by vivid flashbacks of her late daughter. Banks’ monotonous life is upended when the “shells” arrive. Twelve mysterious alien vessels nicknamed “shells” have appeared in 12 seemingly random locations around the world. Nobody knows where they are from and who has sent them. The world desce

As societies go through technological advancements, there is a shift in the industry from a primitive-needs base to one that is based on hedonic values. That is to say, most people eat not only for survival but also for gastronomic pleasure. People purchase automobiles not only for sheer transportation but also for comfort. People wear clothes not only for protection but also as an outlet to express their identity. It is also in this broad sense that the word “gimmick” could be applied to just about anything in life including houses, cars, fashions, and most importantly smartphones. In fact, t

At 8 P.M. on Sept. 15, SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, launched Falcon 9 with Crew Dragon at the Kennedy Space Center, with four civilians on board. After orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes for three days, the Falcon 9 successfully splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean off Florida’s coast on Sept. 18. Commonly known as the Inspiration4 project, the crew was the first private, all-civilian team ever to orbit the Earth without the accompaniment of a professional astronaut.The Inspiration4 team was led and funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old chief executi

The Big Short (2015) is a biographical drama film which portrays how a few financial industry professionals predicted the real estate bubble before the subprime mortgage loan collapse in 2008. Few investors were aware that the U.S. housing market was built on a bubble that might burst within a few years. The film explores the stories of these investors separately but also in parallel.SynopsisMichael Burry, a manager of the hedge fund Scion Capital, carefully analyzes the data of the subprime mortgage loan, a financial product designed to offer unlimited home loans to credit borrowers who lack

What we have seen over the past few years is the domination of short-form content, mostly in the form of videos that vary in length between 15 seconds and 10 minutes. One of the main reasons it became popular is through the widespread use of smartphones. While content used to be available only at certain times through traditional media, it can now be consumed anywhere, and at any time. As part of “snack culture”, a broad range of short, light online content is being produced to fill up spare time, from webtoons (online comics) to mobile games. Furthermore, tired of the flood of information inu