I first moved to London in the late 2000s, and my memories of those years are tangled up with steam rising from bowls of noodles. It was a time before Asian food had become the bright, loud, everywhere presence it is now. You could find Chinese takeaways and Thai restaurants, but Japanese food still felt like a novelty, a special occasion rather than a Tuesday night. It was not as popular, accessible, or unburdened by tradition as it is today. Back then, if you wanted a little taste of Japan without flying to Tokyo, you did not have many options.…

On the morning of October 15, the quiet, orderly world of South Korea’s election administration was suddenly anything but quiet. At 9:10 a.m., special counsel investigators fanned out across the country, executing search-and-seizure warrants at seven locations tied to the National Election Commission, or NEC. The operation was not a small one. It involved three prosecutors, twenty investigators, and eight digital forensics specialists—thirty-one people in all—who moved through the NEC’s headquarters in Seoul, four provincial and metropolitan election commissions in Chungnam, Gwangju-Jeonnam, Gyeongnam, and Gangwon, and two more local commissions in Nam-gu, Busan, and Seogwipo, Jeju. For the investigators, this…