Bogwang-dong & Baseball Chewing
How a unique neighborhood will soon disappear. Also, what's up with baseball players always eating something?
Featured Articles
Seoul to Squeeze
The New Inquiry • 30 Oct 2024 • ~3750 words
Speculative capital will soon destroy one of the South Korean capital’s most vibrant and diverse working-class neighborhoods.
The neighborhood has since served as home to generations of people on the margins of Seoul. North Korean exiles settled in Bogwang-dong, followed by sex workers catering to U.S. soldiers in the nearby Itaewon red-light district and laborers at small factories that dotted the hill. Since the 1990s, a sizable Muslim immigrant community has grown around the Seoul Central Mosque, which sits at the edge of the redevelopment zone. More recently, a small cadre of bohemians opened galleries and coffee shops along ramshackle Usadan Road, drawn by some of the cheapest rents in central Seoul. When “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho showed a New York Times reporter around Seoul in 2015, he made a beeline for Bogwang-dong.
Why Are Baseball Players Always Eating?
The Atlantic • 29 Oct 2024 • ~2850 words • Archive Link
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to be fascinated by this piece.
The chewing habit is unique to baseball, America's best sport. You don't chew anything while playing football because you're probably wearing a mouth guard so that you don't accidentally bite off your own tongue. You wouldn't want to run around on a basketball court with something in your mouth, because you could choke on it. Even golfers and soccer players, who sometimes chew gum, do not commonly have pockets full of loose seeds, or barter with children for bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.
Recommended Articles
On spooky animals
Going Medieval • 30 Oct 2024 • ~2600 words
Eleanor Janega writes about ghosts in medieval times, and why animals were portrayed as spooky figures more back then compared to modern times.
I also think it has something to do with the material realities of medieval culture. Medieval people appear to have imaginations firmly rooted in the world around them. They are around animals all the time, and quite intimately connected to them. This allows them to read animals as scary in a way we currently lack.
