I wanted to follow up on my previous post about the CLS alumni seminar in Gwangju to spotlight my favorite excursion of the week: our visit to the 88.9 Gwangju FM community radio station. Gwangju FM has no particular theme, but they dedicate part of their schedule each week to programming related to the Gwangju international community. When our group of twenty-five showed up, the staff divided us into five groups and gave us two hours each to produce a one-hour broadcast on a topic of our choice.

The task seemed impossible when the guide explained it to me (at work, we routinely spend weeks choreographing what amounts to a brief slideshow presentation), but the time pressure worked to our group’s advantage: all we could really do was create a list of discussion questions and songs to provide forward motion, then improvise from there. We ended up having a spirited discussion about media literacy and news consumption. (Email me if the link breaks and I will upload an MP3 instead.)

After our group disbanded in Gwangju, I got to spend a few days in Naju, my “second hometown” where I taught English for two years as a Fulbright grantee. I tried a new (to me) gomtang place called 나주곰탕사매기, which has a cool aquarium, a garden, and even birds! A few pics below.

I had the honor this week of participating in the first ever Critical Language Scholarship Alumni Seminar (archive.org mirror) at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea. The seminar focused on media literacy and democracy, and I can’t think of a better time or place to study the topic.

Koreans take their democracy very seriously, as evidenced by the high degree of civic participation (there is virtually always a protest going on in front of all the major government buildings in Seoul) and high voter turnout (77% in the 2022 presidential election). One reason is that Korea didn’t adopt a democratic constitution until 1987, which puts Korea’s long struggle against authoritarian rule well within living memory. The memory is especially fresh in Gwangju, the site of the 5/18 (1980) independence movement, in which hundreds of activists (many of them CNU students) lost their lives to state violence.

As we learned, throughout the 1980s, citizen journalists played a pivotal role in resisting media censorship and spreading the true narrative of 5/18 via informal publications; their contributions were arguably a key factor in the eventual success of the 1987 democracy movement. I was encouraged to hear from a panel of CNU student journalists about their efforts to document important issues in the community and carry forward CNU’s tradition of advocacy through journalism.

Our discussions during the seminar also reminded me of the important role that art plays in shaping the collective narratives that energize and sustain a democratic society. Today is another special moment in Gwangju’s history as the city celebrates the author Han Kang’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Han Kang was born in Gwangju, and one of her novels, Human Acts (소년이 온다), memorializes the 5/18 independence movement. I have to add this book to the stack, as I have only read The Vegetarian (채식주의자), and only in translation. Our group also viewed, at the Gwangju Museum of Art, a pair of paintings by a then student activist, now senior citizen who began in retirement to paint scenes from the 5/18 movement to preserve his memory and perspective. (Unfortunately, I can’t find this artist’s name on the website.) Such images create a relationship between the viewer and the events of 5/18 that rings “true” in a way that journalistic accounts cannot.

As for me: Participating in this seminar meant that I got to return to the exact institution where I did CLS in 2016—my first visit to Korea—with the added perspective of eight more years of Korean study and four years of living in the country. It was a delight to show the other participants around and see Korea again through the eyes of a newcomer.

During CLS in 2016, I was too shy to explore much of the city, but on this visit the only limiting factor was time. After the seminar, I took a day to walk all around the Asian Cultural Center, an endless arts complex. My highlight was Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, a massive video installation from the studio of science fiction creator Ayoung Kim (김아영). I also enjoyed the ACC’s library, which has a slick reference area with art magazines and comfy chairs.

These lecture notes (PDF) from Asu Ozdaglar give a bilinear program whose solution is the mixed-strategy equilibrium for a two-player, non-zero-sum game with finite action spaces—also known as a bimatrix game. I wanted to reproduce this highly practical result in a more accessible format and offer some implementation notes.

Most cafés have separate lines for placing your order and picking it up. After you order, you move to the next line, and since drinks come out in more or less the order they were requested, the barista usually announces your drink around the time you get to the front of the second line.

However, for simple drinks like drip coffee, all the barista has to do is fill the cup, so they can often hand it to you right at the order counter. This also applies to pastries. If you are a rule-follower and immediately move to the second queue after ordering one of these items, it can actually slow things down, because your drink will typically be ready before those of the people ahead of you in line, and you’ll need to elbow your way to the front.

Advanced combinations such as “coffee and a hot croissant” are marginal. This could be a one- or a two-queue order. Such situations require careful planning and deft execution.

I live near a one-way street, and drivers keep turning into it the wrong way by mistake. Most react by getting flustered and backing dangerously into the arterial, perhaps following an instinct to “undo” the error. The safer solution (in my eyes) is to park the car, wait for traffic to clear, then use a driveway to point yourself in the right direction.

Unfortunately, driver’s ed doesn’t teach you how to recover from mistakes like this—at least, mine didn’t. Instead, driver’s ed teaches the rules of the road and how to follow them. Once you have violated the law, even if by accident, you are in undefined territory. Hence, drivers develop a strong impulse to immediately “reverse” errors rather than identify a safe course of action.