Decoding America

Yoon, Jongshin Special Episode 2 - Roadtrip from New York to Florida Last week's video was a thank-you — to the Jongshin fans who found this channel and stayed. This week, the series quietly turns a corner. This one is ours. Summer 2020. Yoon Jongshin left the Hudson Valley for Florida to shoot a summer music video, and — there's a Korean expression, 친구 따라 강남 간다, tagging along with a friend all the way to the fancy part of town — Jinguk and I packed the car and followed him down. Here's the part that makes people tilt their heads. A flight from New York to Orlando is about three hours and a hundred-odd dollars. We spent seventeen hours driving instead. On purpose. The reason is a road: the Blue Ridge Parkway, 469 miles along the crest of the Appalachians, the kind of drive Europeans fly across an ocean to do just once. We love it enough that we've been making a travel book about it for ten years — and this trip was, at last, our chance to finish it, drawings a...

$1.50 combo / $4.99 chicken / $1.50 ice cream, vs a Manhattan lunch The stores everyone tells you to visit When people come to New York, they ask me about two places. Zabar's (ZAY-barz), the Jewish grocery on the Upper West Side that's been there since 1934 — smoked salmon, bagels, coffee, cheese. And Citarella (sit-ah-RELL-ah), the fish-and-meat market whose counter looks like an art installation. I love them. Thirty-plus years here and those counters still make me happy. That's the fantasy of shopping in New York. Then you get to the register The fantasy ends at checkout. A little smoked salmon, some cheese, bread — one bag hits $60, $70 without trying. It feels less like groceries than like buying a gift. The quieter problem is the corner bodega. A single banana, a dollar. You grab it because you're in a hurry, because it's right there. I call this the convenience tax — and I don't mean the bodega is cheating anyone. It sells rent, smal...

The Grammys Deleted BTS When BTS turned down the Grammys, the Academy's first move was to quietly scrub BTS from its own website. Weeks later, that same Academy is reconsidering an entire award category. Call it whatever you want. This was never the Grammys' decision to make — it was BTS's, from the first day. The award in question In June, the Recording Academy invented a new category: Best Asian Pop Music Performance . To qualify, a record has to make “meaningful use” of an Asian language. On paper it read like generosity — a spotlight for Asian music that the main categories had ignored for years. I didn't buy it for a second. Building a separate room isn't inclusion. It's exclusion with better manners. It draws a line: you go in there, the real show is out here. We have seen this movie. MTV launched in 1981 and, deeming Black music a poor fit for its rock format, barely aired Black artists. It initially refused Michael Jackson's “Bill...

There's a version of the American nuclear-revival story that gets told a lot right now — small modular reactors, Bill Gates, sodium cooling, the grid of the future. Here's the part that version usually leaves out: some of the most safety-critical hardware for that future is going to be built in Korea. On August 14, 2026, Doosan Enerbility won a contract to supply core components for TerraPower's Natrium reactor — the one under construction in Kemmerer, Wyoming. TerraPower is the nuclear company Bill Gates founded. This is Doosan's first order for core equipment from them, which is the kind of "first" that tends to lead to a second and a third. What Doosan is actually making isn't the glamorous part. It's the guard vessel — the outer shell that contains the reactor if anything ever leaks — plus the structures that hold the reactor up and hold it together. Nobody puts that on a magazine cover. But it's the hardware everything else is sta...

Ulchi Freedom Shield, the annual U.S.–South Korea exercise held every August since 2022. ( https://www.army.mil) It was Sunday night. The drills were set to begin the next morning. With less than half a day on the clock, Trump posted to his social media account that he’d ordered his defense secretary to “substantially reduce” the joint military exercises with South Korea. The exercise — Ulchi Freedom Shield — has run every August since 2022. It started Monday anyway. But the message had already gone out. Read his reasons back to yourself He gave three. His relationship with Kim Jong Un is very good. The drills are expensive, and the United States pays for most of them. And they send a signal that is “totally inappropriate and hostile.” Notice who all three sentences are about. North Korea. The exercise he wants shrunk is the one Korea runs with the United States — and the reason he gives is how it makes Pyongyang feel. The ally doing the drill doesn’t appear in the ...

Good news if you're heading into the city this week: it's about as easy as August gets. Mostly sunny, highs in the low-to-mid 80s, and — the part that matters most in New York — not muggy. This is a walking week. The week at a glance (Aug 17–22) Mon 8/17 — PM showers/t-storms possible · 82 / 73 Tue 8/18 — Sunny · 83 / 71 Wed 8/19 — Sunny · 86 / 72 Thu 8/20 — Showers likely (40%), partly sunny · 83 / 68 Fri 8/21 — Mostly sunny · 81 / 67 Sat 8/22 — Mostly sunny · 80 What to wear, what to pack Short sleeves are plenty in the daytime. Highs sit at 81–86°F, but with low humidity the shade actually feels good — a real change from the last few weeks. Mornings and evenings dip into the high 60s, so a light layer earns its place if you're out early or late. It's a sunny stretch, which means UV is doing work all week: sunscreen is the one thing I wouldn't skip, plus a hat on the long-walking days. Keep a small folding umbrella in the bag for Monday aftern...

You'd be forgiven for thinking the Jongshin New York series was over. Five episodes, museum after museum, and a farewell in our garden. The end. It wasn't the end. It was the middle. This week's video goes back to the beginning — the spring of 2020, when a global lockdown quietly stranded one of Korea's most famous songwriters in the town next to ours, for the better part of three months. Without those three months, none of the New York series you've been watching would exist. Here's how it happened. Jongshin was in the middle of crossing America — his Nomad Project, a long-planned drive from Los Angeles to New York, making music at his own pace. The plan was a leisurely two-week trip. Then came the rumors that COVID might shut down travel between states, and a leisurely trip turned into a sprint. He booked the first place he could find on short notice. That place happened to be one town over from Jinguk and me. We've known him since we were chil...

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 On Korea's Liberation Day, a group of Korean New Yorkers is going to stand in the middle of Times Square and play pungmul — the gongs and drums of traditional Korean percussion. Saturday, August 15, 4 PM. The person who taught them is a friend of mine — a devoted protégé of my late relative, Yong Sok Chung, who passed away tragically young not long ago. What's actually happening It's the 8·15 National Day of Action , held the same day in cities across the U.S. This one's organized by Nodutdol and BAYAN , and the ask is straightforward: withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea, and no war in the Pacific. If you're around Times Square Saturday afternoon, stop by. You'll hear the gongs before you see the crowd. What are you doing for Liberation Day? I'll probably be standing in Times Square. Tell me in the comments — and subscribe if you want more of these. 📍 From New York | 📺 YouTube: @miguktv

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 Purgatory Funeral Cakes (연옥당) | Dark Horse Comics, darkhorse.com   American comics have a prize called the Eisner Award — the one people call the "Oscars of comics." It's handed out every year at San Diego Comic-Con. I know this one from the inside. I studied Character Animation at CalArts and then worked in American comics (Wildstorm, CrossGen). In that world the Eisner isn't just a trophy — it's the name that gets attached to work colleagues poured years into, the kind of award that leaves people choked up at the mic. This year, for the first time, a Korean creator won one. What actually happened July 24, 2026, San Diego. Sanho's Purgatory Funeral Cakes (연옥당) took an Eisner at the 38th ceremony. It's a fantasy: a shop that sits in the 49 days a soul spends in purgatory before crossing over, baking cakes for the departed. It started as a crowdfunded project (2,505 backers) and ended up at th...

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 America's first FLNG vessel — built by Samsung Heavy Industries in Korea, headed for the Gulf of Mexico. Off the coast of Louisiana, in the Gulf of Mexico, a giant vessel is going to sit in the water and act as a factory. It pulls up natural gas, chills it into liquid (LNG) right there, and loads it onto ships to export. It's a floating LNG plant — FLNG for short. This will be the first one in U.S. waters. America has been the world's biggest gas producer for years now — and yet the thing that liquefies gas out at sea is something the U.S. has never built for itself. Samsung Heavy Industries , of Korea, is building it. The contract is about $2.9 billion . The buyer is Delfin Midstream, an American company; the vessel is Delfin FLNG 1; it'll be built at the Geoje shipyard in Korea and start up around 2029–2030. Why this one stuck with me "America First." "Make it here." It's the loudest me...

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 Six weeks into writing a "blogging for money" series in public, I have a slightly strange confession. The blog you're reading right now is quietly becoming a book. Not in the grand way that sounds. I didn't sit down one day and decide to write one. I just kept posting every week — and at some point I looked in the folder and there were dozens of pieces sitting there. I looked a little longer and realized: oh. That's a book. The moment it actually landed This week I put together a six-part series on grocery prices in New York. Where did the six parts come from? An old post about pork belly. An old post about a 49-cent croissant. An old post about Manhattan grocery prices. I gathered the scattered pieces into one place, put them in order, filled the gaps — and it was a series. I didn't make something new. I re-wove something I already had. A book turns out to be the same trick, one size up. Any single blog...

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 The U.S. National Weather Service forecast, read by a New Yorker who actually lives here. This week splits into three. The front half (Mon–Tue) is hot and sticky. Monday hits 87°F, and with the humidity the heat index — what the air actually feels like once you factor in moisture — runs several degrees higher. There's a Heat Advisory up right now, and it's the humidity, not the raw number, doing it. The middle (Wed) is wet. Wednesday clouds over with a 50% shot at evening thunderstorms. If you're carrying one umbrella this week, carry it Wednesday. (Stargazers: Wednesday night is the Perseid meteor-shower peak, and the clouds are going to fight you for it.) The back half (Thu–Sat) cools off — highs easing to the low 80s, and the nights are the real gift: down to 67°F by Friday. The best walking days in the city this week are Thursday, Friday, Saturday. 🧭  Weekend-trip note (Hudson Valley): If you're pairing...

Posted by Sumi | @miguktv | August 2026 It was Jongshin's last day in New York. A family graduation in Connecticut, then a flight home to Korea out of Boston. Deciding where to spend the final day took about ten seconds. The Hudson Valley. It's where he first came, back during Covid. Three things happened that day. One. He stood in our garden again, in the same spot he'd stood in years ago. Two. At the museum he pulled up his old photos and retook them — same spot, same pose. Then held the two side by side for a long time. Three. After five episodes of king crab and Broadway and a Sicilian dinner in Hell's Kitchen, the last meal of the whole trip wasn't at a restaurant. There's also an artist I saw for the first time in this episode, and I couldn't speak for a while afterward. I'd rather not explain that one here. It's the kind of thing that stops working the moment someone describes it to you first. This is the final episode...

My garden, this week. The problem and the solution in the same frame. My kale bed has gotten out of hand. I picked a full colander on Monday, and by Wednesday the plants had closed the gap like nothing happened. Anyone who has grown kale knows this feeling — it isn't a harvest, it's a standing obligation. So I did what my mother would have done, which is not what most American kale advice tells you to do. I blanched it, squeezed it dry, and dressed it with garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Kale namul. In Korean, 케일나물. And standing at the sink squeezing a green ball of leaves the size of a tennis ball — down from an entire colander — I realized something. Korean cooking already solved the abundant-leafy-green problem. It solved it a long time ago, at scale, for a whole category of vegetables. The technique is called namul, and it exists precisely because a farming household in autumn has more greens than it can eat that day. Americans discovered kale about fifteen y...

One pastry. Three countries. Three names, and two of them are arguing. There's a pastry you already know: crisp puff pastry, pastry cream, more pastry, more cream, powdered sugar or icing on top. In Korea it's 밀푀유 . In Italy it's millefoglie . In an American bakery, it's a Napoleon . Same dessert. And the three names disagree with each other in a way I find genuinely funny once you pull the thread. The two names that agree Mille-feuille is French for "a thousand leaves" — the layers. Millefoglie is Italian for exactly the same thing. Two languages, same image, same dessert. No argument there. I met the Italian one first, years before I ever heard anyone say the French word out loud. So my instinct has always been that Italy has a real claim here, and it turns out that instinct isn't baseless — Neapolitan pastry cooks had been layering cream into flaky pastry for a long time. The dessert as a named, codified French thing shows u...

The Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street. Still standing, still booking shows. If you meet a Korean man old enough to have gone to school before 1945, and the conversation runs long enough, he will find a way to let you know that his Japanese is fluent. He will not announce it. It arrives sideways. A phrase he doesn’t translate. A remark about a Japanese newspaper he can still read without effort. A small, careful pride, offered to you like something he isn’t supposed to have. He learned it because Korean was taken out of his classroom. That was the point of the classroom. I have never understood the sentiment. I have watched it my whole life and I still don’t. The word for it Korean has a term for the things the occupation left behind: 식민잔재 — colonial residue. It gets used in ordinary public argument, about street names and school songs and legal vocabulary that is still, if you look at it closely, Japanese. It is a merciful word, and I think deliberately so. It pu...

Three weeks of this in Korea. They're still arguing on the way out. Three weeks ago I wrote about a movie I wasn't allowed to see yet. Hope — Na Hong-jin's first film in a decade, the most expensive production in Korean history — opened in Korea on July 15, and America has to wait until September 9. I said I'd spend the gap avoiding spoilers while Jinguk translated the noisy parts of the Korean internet for me. He did. It got very noisy. And the story that came back isn't the one I expected. I expected either a triumph or a flop. What actually happened is a fight — one that's been running for three weeks and shows no sign of resolving, while the movie quietly makes back every won it cost. The verdict, and there isn't one Korean audiences landed hard on both sides. CGV's Egg Index — the audience score Korean moviegoers actually check before buying — opened at 89%, slid to 81%, and has crawled back to about 83%. Naver's verified-vie...