Decoding America

My actual hometown market — not a national chain, just ours. The receipt from that day in 2021 — the date on the tag is the proof. I didn't grow up in America. I chose it. Maybe that's why its variety still catches me off guard in small ways — things a lot of people walk past without a second thought stop me every time. This series is a record of following that curiosity around, not a guide from someone who's got it all figured out. Just someone who keeps noticing things. We've been buying pork belly slabs from the meat counter at Adams Fairacre Farms in Poughkeepsie for at least 6-7 years now. I still remember the sound I made the first time I saw one. In 2021, we happened to film that particular slab for a video. The photo from that day is still around — the tag says 3.55 lb for $15.94, $4.49/lb. Adams isn't a national chain. It's a small, Hudson Valley-only market that happens to be mine. Looking back, this whole series probably started the day we...

The two of us filming — © 2026 Sumi Pak. All rights reserved. Between 9% and 17% of active YouTube channels ever cross 1,000 subscribers. Of the ones that do, only about a third ever reach the 4,000 watch hours monetization also requires. We started @miguktv in 2020 and crossed 1,000 on July 27, 2026. Six years, a year and a half of which we didn't post at all. Our most-watched video came out in early 2021. 23,000 views. Which means we published something twenty-three thousand people watched, and it still took five more years to reach a thousand subscribers. This is what we had wrong in between. 1. First, can you trust your numbers at all? The advice at the wall is always the same. Low click-through rate, fix the thumbnail. Low watch time, cut the intro. Both low, change your topic. All fine — and all of it assumes you have enough data to read. Five percent from 40 impressions and five percent from 4,000 impressions are not the same number. The first is just w...

A very nice room down the hall. Ten days ago, BTS stood on the biggest live broadcast stage on the planet — the World Cup final halftime show at MetLife Stadium, co-headlining at the same billing level as Madonna. Today they announced they won’t submit anything to the Grammys. The two facts are related, and the connection is the whole story. What happened On July 29, BTS posted to all of their Instagram accounts: “We have decided not to submit to the Grammys this year.” They added that they hope music “can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language.” What they’re not submitting is ARIRANG — their sixth studio album, released this March, their first work together since the 2022 hiatus for mandatory military service. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 641,000 units, the biggest opening week for a group album in more than a decade. By any normal reading, a serious Album of the Year contender. Instead it’s going t...

© 2026 Sumi. All rights reserved. Every summer, someone asks us about the impossibly blue swimming spot in our photos, and every summer the answer is the same: it's Peekamoose Blue Hole in the Catskills, it's as good as it looks, and no — you can't just show up anymore. Here's the actual how-to, from people who keep going back. A word for what this place is A swimming hole is a naturally formed pool in a river or creek — not a pool, not a beach, just water and rocks that nature happened to arrange perfectly. Peekamoose is the most famous one within reach of New York City, a spring-fed pool on Rondout Creek that stays bracingly cold even in a July heat wave. Step 1: The permit (don't skip this) From May 15 through September 15, you need a day-use permit — every day of the week, no exceptions: $10 per vehicle , covers up to 5 people Book online through ReserveAmerica (search "Peekamoose Blue Hole") — up to 7 days in advance, and same-day i...

The week as five sessions instead of seven scrambles. Note what's different in the corner. There's a chapter in the book I'm writing about the weekly rhythm — how to batch the work so it repeats without willpower. It has a section on burnout. Near the end of that section is a line I wrote months ago, in a confident voice, as advice: take a real day off. I have not been taking a day off. I've published something every single day since June 29th. Roughly thirty days. I made the change three days ago. This post is about why it took me that long to follow my own instruction, and what the system underneath it actually is. The part I did get right: batch by mode, not by post The instinctive way to blog is one post at a time, start to finish — research it, write it, find the images, format it, publish it, collapse, do it again tomorrow. That's five different kinds of thinking crammed into every day, and switching between kinds of thinking is the most ex...

August 12 into the 13th. Start planning now — the good spots aren't near the city. I get disproportionately excited about this every single year. Packing for a night of watching falling stars is, for me, one of the genuinely great small pleasures — the thermos, the blanket, the drive out to somewhere dark, the part where you lie back and your eyes slowly adjust and the sky quietly gets deeper. So: the Perseids peak on the night of Wednesday, August 12 into the predawn hours of Thursday, August 13 . That's just over two weeks out, which is exactly when you should start thinking about it if you want to do it properly. Why this year is a good one The single biggest factor in whether a meteor shower is worth your night isn't the meteors. It's the moon. Most years the Perseids are competing with moonlight washing out the sky. This year there's a new moon right at the peak — meaning essentially no moon in the sky at all. Pitch black, on the best n...

The week ahead in New York — hot start, wet middle, dry finish. Same disclaimer as always: I'm not a meteorologist and this isn't a weather channel. This is a New York weather report from someone who lives here and checks the forecast every morning for the same reason you're probably reading this — what to wear, and whether the umbrella is coming along. The week at a glance: Monday is the hottest day, mid-80s and sunny. Then it turns — Tuesday and Wednesday are the wet ones, with Wednesday looking like the heaviest of the two. Thursday clears up but stays grey around the edges. Friday is the nicest day of the week: dry, sunny, mid-80s. What to actually do with that Monday. The outdoor day. It's also the warmest, so if you're doing anything with real midday sun — Central Park, the High Line, a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge — go before noon or after four. Sunscreen and water, not optional. Tuesday–Wednesday. Umbrella in the bag, not by the door....

Arthur Ashe Stadium, August 31, 2021. We had no idea what we were about to watch.  © 2021 Sumi Pak. All rights reserved. Five years ago, Jinguk and I spent a day at the US Open. We wandered the outer courts the way grounds-pass people do — no plan, following the sound of whichever match seemed lively — and settled in a few feet from a lanky red-headed kid playing his first-round match. We didn't know who he was. We stayed because the tennis was good. The kid was Jannik Sinner. He had turned 20 two weeks earlier. This month he defended his Wimbledon title, and he's sitting at world No. 1 with the kind of lead that makes the rankings page look like a typo. The proof: M. Purcell vs J. Sinner, first round, August 31, 2021. We were standing right there.   © 2021 Sumi Pak. All rights reserved. I only found out this year, going back through our photos. There's his name on the scoreboard, plain as day. We watched the future No. 1 in the world from a standing rail, fo...

Episode three — a slower day, and a building that argues with itself. Episode three of the Jongshin series is up, and it's the quiet one. Breakfast is deli takeout eaten in a little park behind an UES apartment building — nothing special on the menu, everything right about the spot. Outside the deli, a Korean family stops Jongshin: they'd spotted him at MoMA the day before, too. New York is smaller than it looks. Then the Guggenheim — not for what's on the walls this time, but for the building itself. Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral looks different from every angle, top to bottom and back. If MoMA was a lesson in what counts as art, the Guggenheim is a lesson in what counts as a museum. Dinner is Howoo, the most upscale Korean BBQ in Koreatown — Sunjoo's pick. Worth noting: Sunjoo was not the one who ended up paying. Full chapters are in the video description if you want to jump around. Watch here: https://youtu.be/6B_XTlRMd2A (20 min) Sumi | NYC + Hudson Va...

The midway at Rhinebeck. 180 years of this.  © 2013 Jinkook Hwang. All rights reserved. Every town has its own way of marking the end of summer. Ours arrives in the last week of August, twenty minutes up Route 9, when the Dutchess County Fair opens its gates in Rhinebeck. This is the fair's 180th year. We've gone almost every year we've lived here, and I can tell you the feeling doesn't wear off. Something shifts in the whole county the week it opens — you see the hand-painted signs go up, traffic slows to a crawl on Route 9, and everyone you run into asks the same question: are you going this year? The answer, in this house, is always yes. A fair with presidential ribbons We live in Hyde Park — FDR's hometown. His estate is just down the road from us, and if you visit the coach house there, you'll find something I love showing people: rows of ribbons and medals the Roosevelt family won at this very fair. A Dutchess County Fair ribbon from 1928, o...

An American company when it's suing the Korean government. A Korean company when Americans try to sue it back. If you've seen a headline about Trump raising tariffs on Korea, or a House committee accusing Korea of "discriminating" against an American business, and had no idea what any of it was about — this one's for you. I've been sitting on this story for a while because the version making it into US headlines leaves out most of what's actually going on, and I think that gap matters. First: what even is Coupang? Coupang is basically Korea's Amazon — the dominant e-commerce and delivery platform there, the one nearly every Korean household uses. About 90% of its revenue comes from Korea. It doesn't operate here in the US, and most Americans have genuinely never heard of it. But on paper, it's incorporated in Delaware, listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2021, and backed by American investors. That paper status is the whole h...