There are two different Seouls. In the Seoul that exists in American headlines and imaginations, half of South Korea’s 50 million people are living in constant terror. This Seoul is blanketed by Pyongyang’s nuclear shadow and Washington’s gaseous emissions, caught between a geopolitical rock and a hard place: the bratty…

I sat uncomfortably on a small stool in front of a green screen that would end up depicting a still image of central Seoul. A small microphone poking out of my shirt enabled me to speak to a news anchor in Beijing about the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, specifically…

This was written in January 2018 for the now-defunct Summit Magazine. Only minor grammatical revisions have been made to indicate that I no longer live in Seoul. When I moved to Seoul in 2014, I grew accustomed to the hysterical concern that my family and friends back in Hawaii expressed…

Hurricanes, erosion, and hot, windless doldrums threaten to upend one of Hawaii’s most revered athletic events — Only three canoes dared to put in for the first Molokaʻi Hoe in 1952. The race was not yet the spectacle it would become more than 50 years later. It’s the Super Bowl of canoe paddling and a staple of the Hawaiian sports scene in which over 1,000 participants from…

On the impermanence of youth, health, and my crappy ankle — It happened again one night when my fiancée and I were walking home from work. One second we were side by side, mid-conversation about our days, and suddenly she was alone in the darkness. I dropped abruptly, as though I’d been hit by a sniper. Andrea took a few steps…

Thanks to the bottomless memory of the internet, I was able to search for pictures from when I turned 20, ten years ago. Thanks to my bottomless negligence toward taking photos, I don’t have any. …

Getting scared taps into something deep within the heart of man. The pure, primal adrenaline of fear is still as powerful a motivator for us as it was for our ancestors struggling for survival on some distant simian savanna. Embedded within that fear is a labyrinth of uncertainty, the same…

When I first started dating my fiancé, before we had a dog, we discussed this hypothetical: if a dog that belonged to you and a human stranger were hanging in peril, and you only had the time and ability to save one of them, which is more deserving of rescue…