As Lunar New Year begins, I wanted to reflect on my wonderful experience last year voluteering with the Refugee Union in Hong Kong. I was privileged enough to be able to perform with my band twice for two different audiences, the first for underprivileged children in Hong Kong and the second at a local church for domestic helpers. I performed the same songs for both audiences, yet they felt like different experiences; playing for the children showed me the power of joy and th

In the summer of 2024, a song called "Save the Whales—Again" went viral on TikTok before anyone noticed the fine print: the vocalist, the composer, and the lyricist were all algorithms. Six months later, the artist who released it was dropped from his label—not because he had cheated, but because the label realized they could generate the same output internally without paying him royalties at all. This is the new political economy of music, and it is moving faster than the la

While international headlines often focus on South Korea’s world-beating birth rate crisis as the primary symptom of national despair, they often miss the immediate mechanical cause: an unprecedented, accelerating divergence in wealth that has turned generational economics into a zero-sum game. As of early 2026, the data paints a picture of a society cleaved not just between rich and poor, but between Seoul and the provinces, between those who bought property before 2020 and