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Korean elections are no longer driven by the old.
For more than 16 years, older voters in Korea dominated politics, giving the conservatives a big advantage—and a majority in the national parliament.
Then, in the April elections this year, conservatives unexpectedly lost their majority. The reason: Younger voters turned out at ballot stations like never before. They had been mobilized by new uses of social media …

To understand the disturbing connection between San Bernardino schools and prison, consider this: Our school district is one of only two in California with a police force that can arrest students on criminal charges. Over a 16-year span, from the time this wrong-headed policy was enacted in 1997 through 2013, school police in San Bernardino arrested and criminally charged close to 60,000 children. Of those, …

Where does an economist who works in the Pacific Rim go on vacation? This summer, I chose Mongolia, and not only because it is remote, interesting, a bit exotic, and has beautiful glaciated mountains. I also chose it for having a reputation for economic potential.
I went with some preconceptions. For one thing, I had read that ayrag, home-fermented horse milk, was widely consumed and not …

It was a Friday morning in July, and Guadalupe, Maria, and Dawn were at Wild Cat Creek in north Richmond, California, clipping and tearing invasive ivy out by its roots. They were obsessed with making sure every cottonwood tree thrived and had the chance to reach its fullest potential. A few yards down there was a cottonwood tree covered with ivy all the way up …

It might seem odd to try to attach a dollar value to health—like trying to quantify love or happiness. But, in fact, a recent study did attempt to measure the value of the health created or supported by California’s county public health departments. Led by UC Berkeley Health Economist Timothy Brown, the study noted that a year spent in good or excellent health instead of …

Kern County is home to two seemingly opposite realities.
First, it’s famous for producing food. In 2014, it grew $7.5 billion worth of grapes, almonds, milk, citrus, and beef. The county’s carrots alone were worth $288 million.
Secondly, in a national survey by the Food Research and Action Center, the county seat of Bakersfield consistently comes in as the hungriest city in America, with about …

In the Lamy train station, passengers lean stiff
hips against wooden benches. Hear that old creak.
An attendant heaves my green trunk onto an antique
scale made of wood and iron—its needle leaps,
then floats between two numbers and their tiny arrows.
______________
A pickup in the distance drags a cloud of dust
down the road, its motion slowed by our shared direction.
Alongside us run the freight lines—all the trains
shaped like their …

“If NOAA is lying to us about the existence of mermaids then they’re definitely lying to us about climate change.”
It was August 2014 and I was flying home from the Third International Marine Conservation Congress in Glasgow, Scotland, where I has just chaired a session on the impact of fake documentaries on public understanding of science. When my seatmate—a fifth-grade schoolteacher—found out that I’m a …

Katy Perry’s new Rock the Vote video offers a great strategy for encouraging engagement in democracy—prurient interest. She tries to vote naked, and ends up being arrested and taken away. But a strong message is left: You can vote wearing whatever you want—“Just wear clothes.”
Perry’s home state, California, is full of celebrity calls to get to the polls, clothed and unclothed. But such stunts obscure …

Peter Drucker was prescient about most things, but the computer wasn’t one of them. “The computer … is a moron,” the management guru asserted in a McKinsey Quarterly article in 1967, calling the devices that now power our economy and our daily lives “the dumbest tool we have ever had.”
Drucker was hardly alone in underestimating the unfathomable pace of change in digital technologies and …