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E. Tammy Kim

E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter, former attorney, and contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.
 (March 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

#KoreaToo

Cho Nam-joo, Seoul, November 2018

82 nyeon saeng Kim Ji-young [Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982]

by Cho Nam-joo
It is curious that a book not primarily focused on sexual violence has become a cultural touchstone for Korea’s version of the Me Too movement. But the local activism grouped under the American label of Me Too must be understood as a total rebellion against deeply patriarchal, Confucian structures that, in the digital era, have found cruel new forms.

Moon Over Korea

Moon Jae-in

Moon Jae-in eui Unmyeong [The Destiny of Moon Jae-in]

by Moon Jae-in
In Singapore on June 12, as Donald Trump vigorously shook hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the man behind this improbable meeting leaned forward in his chair and smiled. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, just thirteen months into his five-year term, had helped arrange the first-ever summit between an American …

NYR DAILY

Moms 4 Housing: A Dramatic Eviction Revisited

Carroll Fife, director of the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and a representative of Moms 4 Housing, in front of a homeless encampment in Oakland, California, January 28, 2020

My story “Moms 4 Housing: Redefining the Right to a Home in Oakland,” published by the Daily on March 9, was about a collective of African-American mothers who had occupied, and were then dramatically evicted from, a vacant house in the west of the city. At the time of publication, I was waiting on responses to several public information requests. On April 9, I received a batch of one hundred and seven emails, revealing a struggle to coordinate a response to mass protest—in the context of an otherwise ordinary eviction.

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

A running series of brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak with regular updates from around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham, Tolu Ogunlesi in Lagos, Merve Emre in Oxford, Yasmine El Rashidi in Cairo, Keija Parssinen in Granville, E. Tammy Kim in Brooklyn, Adam Foulds in Toronto, Tom Bachtell in Chicago, Ivan Sršen in Zagreb, Sue Halpern in Ripton, Michael S. Roth in Middletown, Ben Mauk in Penang, Martin Filler in Southampton, Eula Biss in Evanston, Richard Ford in East Boothbay, George Weld in Brooklyn, Nilanjana Roy in New Delhi, Ursula Lindsey in Amman, Zoë Schlanger in Brooklyn, Dominique Eddé in Beirut, Lucy McKeon in Brooklyn, Yiyun Li in Princeton, Caitlin L. Chandler in Berlin, Nick Laird in Kerhonkson, Alma Guillermoprieto in Bogotá, Lucy Jakub in Northampton, Rachael Bedard in Brooklyn, Hari Kunzru in Brooklyn, Minae Mizumura in Tokyo, Jenny Uglow in Keswick, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome, and more.

Moms 4 Housing: Redefining the Right to a Home in Oakland

Moms 4 Housing activist Dominique Walker standing in front of 2928 Magnolia Street, the house the group occupied starting in November 2019, declaring that housing is “a human right,

Globally, homes are increasingly treated as commodities. We are so accustomed to trusting brokers, bankers, and landlords to buy, sell, and rent as they see fit that we have stopped expecting our governments to ensure decent, affordable shelter. How is it that social housing now seems less natural than trading in tranches of residential debt? Moms 4 Housing, an Oakland-based collective of black mothers, is a growing movement inspiring change: community control of land, redefinition of private property through cooperatives and land trusts, and a constitutional right to housing.

The Fight Against Trump’s Other Family Separation Policy

Maribel Hernández Rivera and her husband, Giddel Contreras, a TPS holder from Honduras, Queens, New York, July 20, 2019

This week, on August 14, a federal appeals court will hear oral argument from attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security, on one hand, and Temporary Protected Status holders, on the other, as to whether the terminations should occur as originally scheduled. For Maribel Hernández Rivera, the litigation is personal: her husband, Giddel Contreras, is a TPS holder. A native of Honduras, Contreras has been in the United States for nearly twenty-five years, but was undocumented until he got TPS. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Madison, Hernández Rivera’s stepdaughter, is a US citizen. “We’re going to fight,” Hernández Rivera told me. “We’re going to do everything we need to do.”

Do Corporations Like Amazon and Foxconn Need Public Assistance?

Activists and community members who opposed Amazon's plan to move into Queens rallying in celebration of Amazon's decision to pull out of the deal, Long Island City, Queens, February 14, 2019

With the Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal still drawing skepticism, Amazon’s HQ2 plan for Long Island City canceled, a national conversation about corporate subsidies is underway—at a moment of broader reevaluation of our welfare state, climate policy, wealth distribution, and government accountability. Rules-based incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises are one thing; rubber-stamped agreements with trillion-dollar companies are another. Could the divergent paths of the Amazon and Foxconn projects mark an inflection point in the nation’s approach to economic development?

The Striking Demands of LA Teachers

Striking teachers and their supporters rallying on the second day of the teachers strike, downtown Los Angeles, January 15, 2019

There’s a growing sense in Los Angeles that communities are being cleaved and traditional schools underfunded by the flashiness and promised innovation of charter schools. I was surprised by the extent to which striking counselors and teachers brought up these issues of funding and privatization. The union’s demand for more school counselors has emerged more strongly than in other recent teacher strikes—because, teachers said, of the increasingly acute needs of the majority brown and working-class student population. In this sense, the strike was as much about an ideological question as a labor dispute: Who is the public being served by public education?