The Algorithm Age

In the world of K-pop, where idols are often held to a sleek, controlled, and consensual image, Nayeon, a member of the group TWICE, stands out as an exception. At 29, the South Korean artist cultivates an image of a free, confident, and sometimes provocative woman, some would say. This stance has earned her the admiration of many fans, but also accusations of narcissism from a segment of the public. A declaration of love to oneself Her debut solo album, "IM NAYEON," released in 2022, already sets the tone. The title is a play on words: "I am Nayeon" but also her real name, Im Na-yeon. This double meaning perfectly sums up her intention: to assert herself without hesitation. One of the most iconic tracks on this project takes this approach even further. In "MEEEEEE," Nayeon describes herself as irresistible, bold, and the master of her destiny. She sings about her beauty, her inner strength, and her ability to play with the codes of seduction w...

Look, I get it. Reading subtitles is hard. Your eyes have to move down to the bottom of the screen, then back up to the action. You have to read while simultaneously trying to watch. And don't even get me started on the mental gymnastics required to appreciate a story that wasn't specifically crafted for Western sensibilities. Positively exhausting, if you ask me. But here's the thing: Squid Game was literally the biggest show on the planet. Not just in Korea. Not just in Asia. Everywhere . Including places where people speak English AND somehow managed to survive the absolutely excruciating ordeal of reading words whilst watching television. It's mind-blowing, really. So, naturally, Hollywood's response to this unprecedented global success was: an English remake. Watch the trailer for Squid Game season 3. Article continues after video. Video via YouTube/Netflix According to multiple reports, David F...

Recent cases of prolific alleged child sexual abuse in Melbourne and other Australian early childhood education and care settings have shocked even experienced people who work to prevent child sexual abuse. Parents are right to be outraged, scared and uncertain. The most pressing issue, then, is what we do about it. Regulation and practice is still falling short, despite all our knowledge and prior recommendations. We have the benefit of the gold-standard Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (including Volume 6 on making institutions child-safe). We can also draw on rigorous scientific work about how best to prevent child sexual abuse in child and youth-serving organisations. Criminal history checks are essential, but many offenders will not have a criminal record. These checks are only one part of an entire safety system. Other measures are arguably even more important. The federal government, together with states and territories,...

Creative Australia’s decision earlier this year to rescind the selection of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia’s 2026 representatives at the Venice Biennale sent shockwaves through the arts sector. For many artists and arts workers, it reinforced concerns around participation and access for those from culturally and racially diverse backgrounds. This week’s reinstatement of the artistic team offers some comfort. However, the entire incident has reinforced that, while diversity in the arts is celebrated, inclusion at the highest level can’t be taken for granted. Some worrying stats Our 2024 survey of more than 900 visual and craft artists, and visual arts workers (who we define as workers who support the visual arts sector), revealed several concerning findings in relation to opportunity and inclusion for culturally and racially diverse creatives. The first key finding was more than 67% of artists and 78% of arts workers felt there wer...

READ MORE: The ten key signs someone in your life is a narcissist Those who have an extreme competitive streak may have been raised by parents with toxic narcissistic traits, psychologists have warned. Being a chronic people pleaser is another telltale sign that a person's parents carry the disturbing personality traits that are linked to mental illness and relationship problems. Professor Wendy Behary and Dr Craig Malkin say there are six tell-tale signs your parents may have these characteristics, and revealed, in a recent interview, how to 'break the cycle' and not copy their behaviour. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a mental health condition characterised by a 'pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy', according to official sources. It is estimated that up to one in 20 people in the UK may suffer with the disorder to some degree, with experts such as Prof Behary claiming it is underdiagno...

READ MORE: The ten key signs someone in your life is a narcissist Those who have an extreme competitive streak may have been raised by parents with toxic narcissistic traits, psychologists have warned. Being a chronic people pleaser is another telltale sign that a person's parents carry the disturbing personality traits that are linked to mental illness and relationship problems. Professor Wendy Behary and Dr Craig Malkin say there are six tell-tale signs your parents may have these characteristics, and revealed, in a recent interview, how to 'break the cycle' and not copy their behaviour. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a mental health condition characterised by a 'pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy', according to official sources. It is estimated that up to one in 20 people in the UK may suffer with the disorder to some degree, with experts such as Prof Behary claiming it is underdiagno...

READ MORE: The ten key signs someone in your life is a narcissist Those who have an extreme competitive streak may have been raised by parents with toxic narcissistic traits, psychologists have warned. Being a chronic people pleaser is another telltale sign that a person's parents carry the disturbing personality traits that are linked to mental illness and relationship problems. Professor Wendy Behary and Dr Craig Malkin say there are six tell-tale signs your parents may have these characteristics, and revealed, in a recent interview, how to 'break the cycle' and not copy their behaviour. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a mental health condition characterised by a 'pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy', according to official sources. It is estimated that up to one in 20 people in the UK may suffer with the disorder to some degree, with experts such as Prof Behary claiming it is underdiagno...

It is a long way from the Netherlands to London’s O2 arena, but Megan Jansen wasn’t feeling like a foreigner. “I said to my sister, finally I am home,” the 23-year-old Dutch psychology student declared, as she mingled with the throng who had gathered outside the venue hours in advance of the weekend’s SMTown Live concert . SMTown Live is a kind of enormous travelling K-pop circus featuring a panoply of acts from South Korea’s major SM Entertainment label. Its 2025 world tour has a line-up that ranges from veteran boyband TVXQ to newly minted girl group Hearts2Hearts. It also marks 30 years since the agency formed, a significant anniversary for the South Korean music industry that, with its famously demanding training system and huge online fan communities, has since 1995 grown into a global powerhouse. Jansen and her sister had travelled to the UK with three friends to mark this moment, jumping at the chance to attend the first SMTown show on European soil in 14 years. While ...

Gus Balbontin says he was “born with FOMO”. After a successful career as an executive director at Lonely Planet , he decided to quit his job and seek out the new and exciting. “We push novelty away from our lives the older we get. We stop doing new things. We stop doing new things for lots of reasons: because we’re comfortable; we’re scared of failing; we’ve got more to lose; our knees hurt; we claim we have no time,” says Balbontin. “We put all these excuses, and bit by bit, our lives become more repetitive. When you don’t feed your brain novelty, your brain loses its tolerance to change.” Balbontin is passionate about seeking out the new to maintain a healthy brain and positive outlook . Now on his seventh round of a personal challenge to try something new every year, he has tackled activities as varied as competitive pinball, drumming, underwater photography and astrophysics. This year he’s taking on glassblowing. “I started Goo...

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph. Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis,” writes Kundera, “but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.” Review: Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember – Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy (Princeton University Press) Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citi...

Liam Gallagher has been forced to apologise to South Korean Oasis fans on social media after appearing to publicly tweet out a ‘racial slur’. The Oasis frontman, 52, will be taking to the stage again with older brother Noel, 58, from Friday, July 4 when the worldwide Oasis Live 25 tour gets under way in Cardiff. After originally splitting up in 2009, the Gallagher brothers are back together for the first time in 15 years – they announced their sold-out reunion gigs last year. On the tour, the duo will be stopping over at the Goyang Stadium in October – a 41,000-capacity arena situated to the northwest of South Korea’s capital city, Seoul. However, Liam has left some South Korean Oasis fans feeling hurt after screenshots posted on X appeared to show him tweeting the phrase ‘chingchong’. ‘Chingchong’ (believed to have originated in the 19th century) is understood as an offensive or derogatory phrase that’s used to mock or denigrate East Asian languages. ...

Swimming is not a rite of passage for most multicultural women living in Australia. While children born in Australia are likely to be exposed to swimming lessons as toddlers, and again throughout school, that is not the norm for women such as Tira Avery, who moved from Thailand to Australia almost a decade ago. After getting married, Ms Avery settled in Gippsland in eastern Victoria and soon realised a life in the country meant being around lots of water. "My husband loves to go camping near rivers," she said. "If I would like to join my husband [camping], it's better for me to know how to look after myself before help arrives if I happened to be drowning." In Victoria, people born overseas are five times more likely to drown than people born in the state. That was why Ms Avery signed up for multicultural women's swimming lessons at the Warragul Leisure Centre along with 19 other women from her multicultural frie...

For more than a decade, South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk couldn't convince a studio to fund his film project about a brutal game show that preyed on society's most vulnerable. It wasn't until the late 2010s, after Hwang became a household name in South Korea, that Netflix took notice. They convinced the director to elongate his proposal, and he created an eight-episode miniseries that would become Squid Game. When he was writing Squid Game, he had one goal: to make the show rank "No 1 on the Netflix US chart for at least a day". The success of the show's first outing resulted in a second season, released while South Korea was in the middle of political unrest. Now, the third and final season has arrived. K-drama-mania While the international interest in capitalism-critical dramas from Korea might seem to have come from nowhere, appetite has been steadily growing in the country for decades. To understand its rise, ...

Prahlad Narasimhan Chari, 30, an Indian citizen, considered applying for an MBA in the US . After getting accepted to a business school in Barcelona, he withdrew his application to an American school. He said that Europe was the right choice for him as an international, self-funded student. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Prahlad Narasimhan Chari , 30, an MBA student who was applying to a university in the US but withdrew his application and went to a school in Barcelona. His words have been edited for length and clarity. Everyone around me in Hong Kong — and my relatives in India — seemed to think that pursuing an MBA in the US was the obvious choice. Friends and cousins who had gone before me raved about their experiences. But I didn't do it. Instead, I pulled the plug on my US application . The decision felt big at the time — even a little risky. I grew up i...