TOM PLATE WRITES – This column seeks to contrast and compare Richard Falk, Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump with the outlook of young people we teach at universities. Don’t think that’s so easy to do! Our young students get plenty of lectures. Consider nuclear apocalypse. Princeton University emeritus professor Richard…
TOM PLATE WRITES — The way it is going now, I might have been wrong. The professor had written a good book but (in my mind) smudged it with an ethically snarky title: Destined for War. A few critics (okay, mainly me) pointed out that the addition of a simple question mark (Destined for…
TOM PLATE WRITES – I wouldn’t mind being 20-Something again. It was the only time in my life that I had not yet made blunders of which I was aware, and – as best as I can recall – it was the only time I felt sure I knew just…
TOM PLATE WRITES — Lockdown. Many of us have just been through it; others of us are still stuck in it. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the term usually meant the kind of harsh confinement that befall inmates of a penal institution in the wake of a prison riot. Slight…
COLUMNIST TOM PLATE WRITES – The decline of the coherence and acumen of American foreign policy would appear to present Beijing with the potential for a century of anything and everything but humiliation. To be sure, historically, the U.S. has demonstrated Olympian bounce-back ability from near-death experiences (from bad economies…
From News Service Reports — No sooner had after China signaled it would impose new national-security laws on Hong Kong than markets throughout the world trembled. By early afternoon Friday in Hong Kong (22 May), the Hang Seng Index had lost 5.6%, with property, financial and infrastructure stocks retreating between…
Project Bridge was established in 1993 after the Los Angeles Riots (SAIGU) took place by the Los Angeles based Pacific Century Institute in conjunction with New York based the Korea Society. The cross-cultural program selects 16 students (eight from Los Angeles and eight from New York) each year to participate…
THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS COLUMN BY TOM PLATE WAS PUBLISHED EARLIER THIS WEEK BY THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST – No time to be polite: the most disgraceful and unnecessary deterioration amid the global health and economic crisis is the China-U.S. relationship that continues to sour. Casualties from a…
While spring semester study abroad and global immersion trips have been canceled due to the ongoing pandemic, Tom Plate, clinical professor and Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific studies, is continuing to facilitate cross-cultural learning experiences for Loyola Marymount University students. From opposite sides of the Pacific, LMU students collaborate with Yonsei University students…
TOM PLATE WRITES – On one hand, let me ask you: Would you be foolish enough to persist in advocating a balanced-sensible approach to the People’s Republic of China amid this murderous coronavirus-crisis for which so many blame the PRC? At a time when global suspicion and recrimination converge on Beijing/Wuhan…
JAEWON LEE WRITES – It is undoubtedly clear that the COVID-19 outbreak led to nothing but a series of unfortunate events that stripped away my fantasies of life after the Air Force. Just as my mandatory military service was nearing its end, my discharge ceremony was canceled, I could not…
LUCIA TENSI WRITES – South Korea, 9th of March 2020 sometime around 2 a.m.: “Mom… MOM!… where are you? What is happeninng? Where is Dad? What about Leonardo and Claudio?” “Lucia do not worry, we are fine at home. Your brothers are safe in their houses. You worry about yourself.” It was…
TOM PLATE WRITES – Adept moral leadership at the top, whether in Washington or Hong Kong, is central to any serious public-health strategy. ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed on the world,’ famously wrote the poet William Butler Yeats in 1919. One hundred years later, here…
SENAY EMMANUEL WRITES — I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at a well-known university in Los Angeles, California. I am set to graduate in a few months and move to Washington D.C. to work at a non-profit. Life was all planned and prepared, and as commencement neared, I gradually filled…
TOM PLATE WRITES – How bad will the global-corona epidemic get? ‘Only the future will tell.’ The problem with that lame cliché is that the future is not only with us now but – to scramble the possibilities – the future actually influences the past. Astrophysicist-author John Gribbin, whose challenging new book ‘Six…
TOM PLATE WRITES (VIA THE KOREA TIMES OF SEOUL) — As horrible as the coronavirus spread looks right now, it may not be the worst that faces us. My worry is that even after the epidemic begins its remission, what happens is that everything returns to normal. And that’s the…
