seoulz

It is a Sunday afternoon in a Mapo-gu apartment, and Kim Soo-jin is cleaning out a drawer she has not opened in two years. Inside, beneath a tangle of charging cables and dead earbuds, sit three old smartphones. One is a Galaxy from 2021. Another is an iPhone with a hairline crack. The third she cannot even identify without charging it first. All three still switch on. None o...

When Kim Chan-hoe arrived at his Seoul studio each morning, the first thing he did was lock the door. Then he checked the security cameras to see whether any police officers were lingering nearby. He could not list his real profession on a bank loan application, because lenders would have rejected him instantly. For seventeen years he had been reported, raided, and fined so o...

It is a little after eleven on a weeknight in a one-room officetel in Mapo-gu. The desk is barely a meter wide, shared between a monitor, a half-finished cup of instant coffee, and a stack of textbooks. There is no tower humming under the table. Instead, bolted to the back of the monitor and hidden from view, sits a silver box smaller than a paperback novel. Notably, it draws...

It is just past 3 p.m. on a Friday in the financial district of Yeouido, and a small crowd has gathered outside the Korea Exchange. Employees are unfurling a banner that reads “KOSPI 8,000.” Phones are out. Someone is filming. A year earlier, this same benchmark sat below 2,400. It had been bruised by a year-end political crisis and decades of investor indifference. Yet now i...

It is a Saturday afternoon in Seongsu-dong, and a French Bulldog is not the most pampered creature on the block. That title belongs to a three-year-old named Seo-yun, who is being wheeled past the cafés in a stroller that costs more than a used car. Her jacket is Moncler. Her tiny sneakers are Golden Goose, scuffed on purpose at the factory and priced at 380,000 won. Around h...