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I wish I could say I have spent the past few days enjoying all that Seoul has to offer, from the majestic palaces and parks to the cultural shops and street cart food.
But I haven’t.
Instead, I’ve spent much of the two and a half days that we’ve been here hiding from the rain, which has been almost constant since our first morning here. It has fallen at a steady pace, continuously, with minor spurts of a smaller drizzle or a harder downpour.
The worst part: The forecast for the next five days, the duration of our stay, calls for…rain every single day.
According to Wikipedia, South Korea has a short rainy season, but it was supposed to end last month. I guess we’re just unlikely.
Fortunately, through the rain, I have gotten to take in a couple of cultural experiences. My dad and I spent several hours exploring Gyongbokgung, the great palace of the last Korean empire. It was massive and breathtaking.
We also walked through Insadong, a street and antique Korean market. And I even stumbled upon a Korean baseball game (didn’t have time to attend the game, but plan to go to one another day if the rain ever clears up).
We’ve also met some really interesting and kind Koreans. More on that in an upcoming blog post.
For now, I’m going to grab and umbrella and venture outside. I’m only here for a few days, right?
If you were to fly completely around the world, you would cover a distance of about 15,500 miles. So at nearly 7,000 miles apart, the eastern coast of the United States and Seoul, South Korea, are about as far apart as you can get on this planet.
But somehow, just a few days after leaving Washington D.C. (more on that in a later post), I’ve found myself here, in a downtown hotel in Seoul. I’ll be in the city for the next week, as my dad participates in a conference about environmental health.
As you can imagine, it took quite a while to get here. The flight, which left from Chicago, lasted about 15 hours.
It went by faster than I thought it would. The crew was fantastic - frequently bringing by snacks and running to get us wine if we asked (and we did). The food was legitimately very good. And the in-flight entertainment system included about 100 movies and a dozen video games.
I didn’t watch any movies or play any games. I didn’t even sleep very much. Instead, most of our time was spent eating and chatting with the pleasant Korean man sitting next to us. I also read a book (Fahrenheit 451 - yes, I know I’m in 7th grade).
I also did a little bit of thinking. But the key word there is “little” (and “bit,” I guess).
I don’t know about you, but I always think I’m going to spend most of my flight time pondering the world and life. If I have a problem I need to tackle and a flight coming up, I save the thinking for the airplane. Same with long car rides and to some extent, showers.
It never really happens, and I’m not sure why. There are things to do in each of those situations, but they’re more or less automatic at this point. I guess simply living takes up a good chunk of brain power. I think the lesson is to treasure the time you have to think when you do have it.
In this strange city for the next week, I plan to just do that.
Editor’s Note: I promise to update this blog with more regularity as I report on my time in Korea.
In U.S., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity -
Another study has come out showing ridiculously low “confidence” in newspaper and TV news among the American public. In Gallup’s annual poll, just 25 percent of those surveyed reported a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspaper (TV news got 22 percent; it’s heartening to see the public is finalizing realizing how pointless TV news is…)
But buried in the poll results is an interesting finding, which may prove good news for the journalism industry: By age group, by far the category with the most amount of confidence is also the youngest: 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence.
As a journalist, we’re always bombarded with the fact that newspaper readership among the young adult demographic is much lower than that of older adults, supposedly spelling catastrophe for the industry (my personal opinion - young people have never read newspapers, because they can’t afford it and don’t care about the news). It’s good to see that maybe the future will have more respect, or at least “confidence” in our reporting.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” —
This quote by 18th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is one of my “favorite quotes” on Facebook. But with the recent flurry of news about the legal challenge to California’s Prop 8, I’ve been thinking about the quote in terms of gay marriage.
In that case, the “truth” is, of course, that marriage is a fundamental right, no matter the genders of the people pledging their lives to each other.
At this point, we’re squarely in the second stage of Schopenhauer’s quote; for years the possibility of gay marriage was ridiculed, and in recent years it has been violently opposed by a variety of religious groups and conservative individuals.
Now I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Prop 8 challenge (background: Prop 8 was a California ballot initiative which banned gay marriage; it passed, gay marriage advocates challenged the law (saying it was unconstitutional, last week a federal judge agreed and struck down the law and it is now being appealed to an appellate court). The consensus, and my sneaking suspicion, is that the case will end up at the Supreme Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy casting the deciding vote in favor of gay marriage as a constitutional right. But there’s no way to know.
Still, as these legal proceedings unfold, I can’t help thinking that gay marriage - like the abolition of slavery and adoption of women’s voting rights - is headed for the third stage of Schopenhauer’s quote at an increasingly fast rate.
In 20 years, (or 30, or 40, or whatever), will any significant group of people really still oppose gay marriage? Will our children even believe how we could have denied the right to marriage simply based on sexual orientation? I don’t think so.
Until then, this silliness is just that: silliness.
“
When our individual rights are taken away - when the majority decides that an unpopular group of individuals should be treated differently and they can’t succeed at the ballot box because they are unpopular - because they are a minority, because they are viewed differently by a number of people in the populous - they turn to the courts of the United States.
And we have a spectacular Constitution that values equality, that values fundamental rights and values an independent judiciary to protect and vindicate those rights.
” —Attorney Ted Olson, one of two lawyers who led the fight against Prop 8 (California’s gay marriage ban), in a press conference after a federal judge ruled the law was unconstitutional.
As my brother, Harvard law student Danny Rosenthal, said: “It feels good to be a future lawyer today”
Edelman exec Steve Rubel recently wrote a bold column, asserting “It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It.”
I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t Web journalism just get here? It may seem like it did, as least to traditional journalists who were shamefully slow to react to the emergence of the Web as a viable place to publish content.
But in this fast moving world, the shift of one technology to the next is happening faster than could have been thought possible in the past. And so by 2015, more people will use the Internet on their phones than on the computers, according to a Morgan Stanley survey quoted by Rubel. Study after study shows this trend will soon apply to journalism, too.
It appears that just as the media has adopted to publishing on the Web, the medium is shifting away from them (Then newspaper I work for, The Orange County Register, is currently “Web-first” — reporters write primarily for the website and then the best of that is taken for the print product. What is next - “phone-first”?)
Frankly, as a journalist, I’m saddened by this development. Reading news on a computer instead of a paper is one thing, but on a phone? People mostly scroll inattentively through their phone when they’re bored. What kind of attention will actually be paid to news?
But there are (apparently) good things about this. First, it seems that for once the media has actually been on top of this trend. Publications like the New York Times have already developed very popular and effective iPhone apps (this is even expanding, quickly, to college campuses. My college paper, The Daily Northwestern, will probably be trying to get an app this year).
Even better, there is a growing feeling among digital journalists like Kendall Allen that mobile devices provide an opportunity for journalism to absolve itself of its greatest sin: giving away content on the Internet for free.
Many people blame that decision, made by media execs at the front of the race to the Web, as the reason why nobody can ever charge anything for news online. After all, it’s very difficult to make something cost money when it’s been free in the past and is still free at most places (we’ve seen what has happened with subscriptions - Newsday famously garnered just 35 in the first three months of their paywall).
As less people read news online and more people read it on their phone, it gives journalists a chance to do things right: by charging for content. It appears this is the way the model will take shape.
Whether is saves journalism, only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure: “time” won’t be very long.
College Journalists Are Good at Consuming Multimedia but Bad at Making It. Why? -
A fascinating and very true column on journalism students and new media.
“I think Alex is cute, but Alex isn’t cute. He looks like a cross between dumbo and Jesus.” — Sophia discussing Alex
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“Another thing we can do for jobs is make toys of me, especially for the holidays. Little dolls. Me. Like maybe little action dolls. Me in an army uniform, air force uniform, and me in my suit. They can make toys of me and my vehicle, especially for the holidays and Christmas for the kids. That’s something that would create jobs. So you see I think out of the box like that. It’s not something a typical person would bring up. That’s something that could happen, that makes sense. It’s not a joke.” — South Carolina Senate candidate Alvin Greene, responding to a question about how to create jobs in this recession
I have this habit when listening to music: I try to put myself in the shoes of a person described in each song. I think it helps me to appreciate and feel the song more. But it’s caused a problem this past year.
You see, there’s a song by Placebo called “Running Up That Hill” that ended up on my current favorite CD, so I’ve been hearing it a lot. I want to like “Running Up That Hill.” But I can’t. There’s a line in it that goes “If I only could/make a deal with God/and get him to swap our places…” Every time I hear that line, I flip to the next song.
It’s because it doesn’t fit with my habit. I would not swap anything from the last year of my life with anybody.
I’ve spent exactly eight days at home in the past year. That’s only a bit more than a day for every country I’ve been to this year (six). I lived in four different cities, three of which I had never before set foot in, in two continents, each for neat nearly equal 3-month intervals. And I wouldn’t change a thing.
To recap, I spent the spring completing sophomore year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.; the summer interning with the Reno Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nev.; the fall studying abroad in Sevilla, Spain and the winter working for The Seattle Times in Seattle, Wash.
Now I am driving home, at this very moment sitting in the passenger seat of a minivan that has not been off the road for more than 10 minutes in nearly 30 hours.
The 2,250-mile drive from Seattle to West Lafayette (my twin brother David and I are on mile 1,894 right now) has left me a lot of time to think. A lot of time to reflect.
I’ve learned an incredible amount in the past year. Many of these life lessons have been relayed on this blog. I don’t have room to detail all over them now, but I would like to elaborate on one:
About a month into my time in Seattle, I went to lunch with an acquaintance. Just before desert, he asked me what was the most surprising thing about Seattle up until then. I thought for a moment and then replied that the most surprising thing was that Seattleites are exactly the same as people in Evanston, Indiana, Reno, and yes, Spain.
I think my lunch partner was a little taken aback. After all, we all like to think that we are unique. And we are, of course. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my travels, it’s that we as humans are more alike than different, regardless of location or language. Because of this, I’ve found it’s extremely important to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and think about how they feel.
But I’d like to focus on myself (that’s no surprise) and how the last year has changed me. Certainly everybody changes every year. But I think there is something especially changing about traveling, especially alone. I think there’s something especially changing about confronting new cultures. I think there’s something especially changing about creating an identity for yourself in a new place. And then doing it again. And again.
It’s no big secret to my friends that last spring was my worst quarter at Northwestern – certainly academically and probably personally as well.
I drove out of Evanston last June exhausted, nervous, yes a little hung over, and most of all, not knowing what to expect.
The nine months that followed were some of the best of my life. I saw the world. I somehow managed to put aside my workaholic tendencies and enjoy three months of fun in Spain (surprising some of my friends). I did work hard, and I found success. I reaffirmed my desire to do newspaper journalism, and I proved to myself that I can do it.
This is just the beginning, of course. Even my traveling tendencies aren’t yet over. After returning to Evanston for spring quarter, I’ll almost immediately head for Washington, DC for an internship in the DC bureau of the Orange County Register.
But for now, I’m excited to return to Northwestern later this week. Through all of my travels, I couldn’t shake my desire to play Hover Disc on South Beach and eat Buffalo Chicken Wraps in Norris.
All that stands in my way of that are some final preparations. It should be no problem. I’ve gotten pretty good at packing.