Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time Podcast

This podcast episode is the audio companion to my newsletter essay: “Two Desires, One Nation, Part 3: The City That Would Not Stay Silent” Read first? You’ll get the photos, timelines, and historical context. Listen first? You’ll get the feeling , the emotional core I couldn’t fit into 3,000 words. Both together? That’s the full experience. Here’s a question: Why do Koreans protest so much? No, se...

Hello, everyone. Last week, we stood at “Ground Zero.” This week, we enter the “Barracks State.” In this week’s newsletter (Part 2) , we covered the history of the 1960s and 70s—the economic explosion, the dictatorship, and the tragic death of Jeon Tae-il. But in this podcast episode, I want to go behind the text. I want to talk about the emotional and psychological weight of living in a country t...

Hello everyone! Last month, I started a monthly K-Book Uncovered series , where I explore essential Korean books that haven’t yet been translated into English. We began with historian Kim Won’s The June 1987 Uprising (87년 6월 항쟁) , a vivid chronicle of the democracy movement that forced Korea’s military regime to accept direct presidential elections. This month, we moved one step wider in scope...

Dive into South Korea’s turbulent cultural history under authoritarian rule. This episode unpacks how dictators used censorship alongside the 3S Policy—Sex, Sports, and Screens—to control pop culture, silence dissent, and inadvertently spark a resistance movement. Hear stories of banned songs, erotic cinema, rigged baseball leagues, and hidden books fueling democracy. Includes short clips from ban...

A Nation in Uniform: How Emergency Became Everyday in South Korea Summary After the 1968 shocks, South Korea rebuilt everyday life around emergency. This episode looks at how the state turned men into reserve soldiers, schools into drill grounds, and citizens into trackable numbers. It is the “hardware” of the garrison state that sat on top of last week’s “software” of laws, policing, and ideology...