Signed essays and arguments
The word 'koreaboo' travels fast and lands hard — but nobody can define it, nobody who matters invented it, and it applies, with suspicious consistency, almost only to East Asian cultures. Drawing on the Francophile, the Anglophile, and a 1,555-day Duolingo streak, a guest essay on the double standard that calls Western cultural enthusiasm personality and Korean cultural enthusiasm a phase.
On 6 October 조희대 sat before the National Assembly's judiciary committee for two and a half hours, unsworn, defending a refusal to put forward a second name for a Supreme Court seat that has been empty since March. Then the Chief Justice went, and came back at ten to eleven at night to give closing remarks. Nobody voted to compel a return, and the seat is still empty.
At midnight on 1 October the 검찰청법 is repealed and the institution that has dominated Korean politics since 1948 splits in two: a 공소청 that charges and tries cases, and a 중대범죄수사청 that investigates serious crime. It is the largest change to Korean criminal justice in seventy years, and it begins with acting heads at the prosecution office, the justice ministry and the national police, no head at all at the new investigation agency, seven sets of rules still unpublished, four challenges pending at the Constitutional Court — and the President arguing on X, in the small hours, with his own party about whether a former prosecutor may run the agency that replaces prosecutors.
On 21 September, eighteen Korean soldiers cutting a new path through the DMZ for a UN Command inspection walked into two mine blasts a minute apart. During the evacuation, its own men reported that an object in the ground looked like a North Korean mine. The military said nothing of that for a week, refused to say it when asked, and confirmed it the morning a newspaper printed it. The opposition says the silence protected the President's speech at the UN; the President calls that a baseless conspiracy theory; a member of his own party told the cabinet to 'come down, we'll go in'. The record does not settle the motive. It settles the timeline, and the timeline is bad enough.
In July 2027 Korean artists gain a legal claim on the resale of their work. The statute says they may claim 'an amount according to a rate prescribed by Presidential Decree.' No such decree exists, and none is drafted. The law leaves two blanks, not one — it has not said which artworks are covered either. And the clause granting the right is word-for-word the copyright term clause with the number changed from seventy to thirty.
Chuseok's last day falls on a Saturday, and Monday is a normal working day. Eight days later National Foundation Day also falls on a Saturday, and everyone gets the Monday off. Same collision, two different answers — because the decree sorts holidays into three tiers, and the only two in the middle tier are Seollal and Chuseok. The government rewrote that exact clause in April to protect the two holidays it was adding. It left the biggest one where it was.
In August the Constitutional Court answered them, unanimously, and did not reach the question. It dismissed the case on the ground that the law they had challenged does not actually do anything — the exclusion lives in a different statute. The last time the court ruled on the substance was 1999, when it called the discrimination unavoidable at a stage of gradual institutional improvement. The improvement has since reached every size of Korean workplace except theirs.
Every Korean outlet ran the same story: food costs are hitting the poor three times harder than the rich. The finding underneath it is real. The number is not — there are at least four different 'three times' in circulation, and two of them contradict each other. Go one level down into the same government table and the poorest fifth's grocery spending barely moved. What moved was healthcare, housing and eating out, and what gave way was their children's education.
The Korean state's heritage register describes Chuseok through circle dances and rice cakes, and files ancestral grave rites under a different holiday in April. Its disaster-safety calendar treats the weeks before Chuseok as a formal September hazard window, with a brush-cutter injury series to match. Both documents are current. Only one of them looks anything like Thanksgiving.
At the June 3 local elections, dozens of polling stations ran out of ballot papers — and within hours the internet had declared it a stolen election. It wasn't. But the real danger to Korean democracy is quieter than fraud, and Korea has about one news cycle to get ahead of it.
The K-pop industry sells closeness at industrial scale — and a small, devoted minority takes the promise literally, escalating from devotion into surveillance, stalking, and worse. Drawing on BTS, NCT, and Jackson Wang, a guest essay on the machine that manufactures longing, and the people who pay for it.
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