More than 530 years after Christopher Columbus led an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, many Americans still see the navigator as a symbol of their country’s origins. Others see him as a progenitor of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide. So the day that honors him, the second Monday of October, is unusually polarizing among federal holidays. Just 16 states will observe Columbus Day this year. Some states and many cities instead observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“What a great day for Korea!” my mom wrote to me on Thursday. “Nobel for Han Kang!”
For the past few decades, several South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who were both previously jailed for political activism. As an American-born writer of Korean ancestry, I liked these authors in theory, but their actual work didn’t jump off the page for me, an English-only reader.

The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, drags, goes baggy with the weight of being alive. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and combusted as he ages, the lungs working like bellows, the larynx shooting flames.

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Although Election Day is more than three weeks away, early voting is already under way in many states. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are ramping up their efforts to win over undecided and unlikely voters, especially in key swing states.

Politically, I’m a bit of a wanderer. I grew up in a progressive family and was a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q.

Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.