The culinary industry around the world makes US$ 9.67 trillion. There is no doubt that culinary has turned into one of the most important parts of tourism – whether you are dining while travelling or travelling to dine, culinary has evolved over the years and turned into a representation of culture and an art form.

Innovative and creative restaurants have been on the rise, and one of the most remarkable achievements for chefs is the world-renowned Michelin Star. Any restaurant around the world can qualify for a Star, and it will hold the same weight; if the restaurant is in Tokyo, São Paulo, or another location, it will always be judged with equal standards. 

But how were the Michelin Stars and the Michelin Guide created in the first place? In 1889 in France, the Michelin tyre company was founded by Andre and Edouard Michelin. In order to boost their tyre sales, the company began producing guides with helpful tips for drivers. But, in the 1920s, the guide changed – for the first time, it included restaurants and hotels. As the dining section became more popular, Michelin began hiring restaurant inspectors to review restaurants anonymously. And with that, the Michelin Guide was born.

In 1926, history was made: the Michelin Guide began to give stars to restaurants. What began as simply one star turned into a ranking of zero, one, two, or three stars, five years later.

Nowadays, over 24 territories have had restaurants rated by the Michelin Guide. Over 30 million Guides have been sold since their release. World-famous restaurants have been mentioned and awarded in the guides. The French Laundry, for example – a contemporary French cuisine in California which has been awarded three Michelin Stars. Or, before its closure, the Copenhagen restaurant Noma was considered one of the best restaurants in the world and consequently had 3 Stars too. 

Hence, what began as a marketing plan to sell more tyres turned into much more than that: a worldwide symbol of culinary excellence and fine dining.

Many things and experiences can connect us all. But is there something rawer and more natural than art? It is quite literally everywhere: the TV show you’ll watch tonight, what you put in your earphones on your way home, advertisements you skip, the text you study in English. And it just serves as a natural response; it has become part of the human experience to try to assimilate what we feel and maybe even transform it into something. While it’s impossible to know precisely where and when these early forms of art began, we can trace them to multiple eras.

Visual art is perhaps the most complicated one. The evidence is very varied, with abstract paintings being found in Indonesia, South Africa, and various locations in Europe. Much like and unlike today, these drawings described their daily lives, almost like a diary. With the rise of early civilizations in Greece, Egypt, and China, these paintings encompassed broader concepts, such as religious beliefs, government projects, and daily depictions, also beginning to be included as sculptures and vases. With many rises and many falls of civilizations later, visual art became entwined with monarchies and churches, but also began to include deeper introspections and diverged into more abstract concepts. From the 1600’s onwards, art expanded immensely, going through various phases. Today, there is more representation and accessibility to different art forms than ever.

Music is quite hard to trace. There is evidence of flute-like ivory and bone pieces from Germany dating back 40,000 years, but chants and percussion have always been a part of human tradition and rituals. Harps and lyres surged not much later, and it wasn’t until the Renaissance era that orchestral instruments as we know today fully began to take shape. The versions of pianos we see today only became a reality in the 1700s, with earlier models having very distinct sounds. The oldest piece of music dates back 3400 years, with the earliest attempt to try to transcribe sounds being found in Syria. Sheet music as we know it today only began to take shape in the 11th Century, as the math of it all was slowly discovered. By the 21st century, it is safe to say we saw perhaps some of the biggest changes, but it is still, at the end of the day, trying to achieve the same goal.

Theatre, or drama, also has mysterious origins. It is especially hard to pinpoint how it originated. After all, storytelling is something essential for our day-to-day lives. To tell something, and more importantly, how you tell it, can change everything. Ancient theatre evolved simultaneously with dance and rituals. These pieces later grew into Greek tragedies, which later set the ground for some of the most relevant and influential pieces of today’s times. Japanese and British cultures evolved differently, for example, but still found middle ground on what they were trying to express.
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It is quite obvious that many of these act together. They each complement each other in countless forms. And is not only about entertainment (though that is great as well). It serves a bigger purpose. It is about transforming everything you already know into something yet undiscovered; putting what you feel into something for other people to connect to as well. And art has possibly one of the most powerful impacts. In a world such as the one we live in today, we must pay attention to it and appreciate it a bit more. Who knows? We might discover something about ourselves that we did not expect. 
 

Min Jin Lee opens Pachinko with the line “History has failed us, but no matter,” and that sentence encompasses what the book discusses. That being the realities of those who are left ignored by history textbooks. War is not only battles and empires, but it also has a much larger scale and carries much more stories than we tell. The book focuses on a family that struggles by being given no good options, and although the book doesn’t have a big plot or climax, that is the exact reflection of what war looked like for most families and individuals. 
Colonial rule in Korea meant Japanese became the language of schools and government, Korean cultural practices were suppressed, and land was reorganized in ways that pushed many Korean farmers and fishermen into poverty or off their land entirely. That's the world Sunja's family occupies at the start of the book, running a boardinghouse in a fishing village near Busan. Their poverty reflects the actual economic squeeze colonial policy put on rural Koreans in the 1910s and 20s. 
The bigger historical shift in the novel is emigration to Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans moved there in the colonial period, some voluntarily seeking work in Japan's industrial cities, others conscripted for forced labor as Japan's wartime economy expanded through the 1930s and into World War II. By the war's end, an estimated two million Koreans were living in Japan. Sunja's move to Osaka after marrying Isak places her inside this larger migration. 
Once in Japan, Koreans faced legal and social status that was never simple. Under Japanese law at the time they were technically imperial subjects, but they were treated as a distinct, lesser category and were subject to registration, surveillance, and open discrimination in housing and employment. Min Jin Lee explores this in the novel through various way. When Sunja and Isak first arrive in Osaka, they settle in Ikaino, a real neighborhood that was in fact a designated Korean slum, packed and underserved, because Koreans were effectively barred from renting in most other parts of the city. Later, when Kyunghee and Yoseb try to find steady work, Yoseb's factory job pays him less than Japanese coworkers doing the same labor, and Lee makes a point of showing how casually this is accepted as normal by everyone around them.  
Japan's surrender in 1945 didn't resolve the situation as Korea was divided, occupied separately by Soviet and American forces, and then split permanently after the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. Koreans in Japan suddenly had to choose an allegiance to a peninsula now cut in two, while Japan itself stripped them of the imperial citizenship they'd previously held. Under a 1952 policy, Koreans in Japan lost Japanese nationality overnight and became foreign residents in the only country many of them had ever known, without automatically gaining citizenship in either North or South Korea. This is the origin of the Zainichi Korean population and the specific kind of statelessness the later chapters of Pachinko depict where Noa and Mozasu are born in Japan, speak Japanese, know no other home, and are still legally and socially foreign. 
This postwar status came with real, concrete restrictions. Zainichi Koreans needed alien registration cards and had to carry them at all times. They were barred from many civil service jobs and large corporate positions. Naturalization was possible but required adopting a Japanese name and was often treated as a betrayal within Korean communities and with suspicion by Japanese ones. This is why the pachinko industry mattered so much economically: it was one of the few businesses genuinely open to Koreans, partly because mainstream Japanese companies avoided its association with gambling. By the 1960s and 70s, Koreans owned a large share of Japan's pachinko parlors, not by choice exactly, but because so many other paths were closed off. Mozasu and Solomon's storylines reflect this economic reality.  
Lee captures the different realities through the different characters and their historical backdrop. Isak, the minister who marries Sunja, is eventually arrested and imprisoned for refusing to participate in Shinto shrine worship, which the colonial government required of all subjects, including Christians, as a loyalty ritual in the years leading up to the war. His imprisonment and the toll it takes on his health is fiction, but the shrine worship policy and the resistance some Korean Christians mounted against it were real, and it was a serious point of conflict between the colonial state and Korean religious communities. 
Noa, Sunja's older son, is the character who carries the weight of assimilation most directly. He's academically brilliant, gets into Waseda University, and spends years trying to pass as fully Japanese, going so far as to take a Japanese name and cut off contact with his family once he learns the truth about his biological father, Hansu, who has yakuza ties. Noa's arc, which ends in suicide, is Lee's way of showing the psychological cost of the assimilation option that was technically available to some Zainichi Koreans but required erasing everything about where you came from.  
Mozasu, by contrast, never tries to pass. He drops out of school after a fight, defends his Korean identity even when it makes his life harder, and ends up finding real financial success running pachinko parlors. Lee uses the difference between her two brothers, one who tries to disappear into Japanese society and one who doesn't, to dramatize two different survival strategies that were both genuinely available to Zainichi Koreans in the postwar decades, with very different costs attached to each. 
The novel's final section, following Solomon in the 1980s, lines up with a period when Japan's economy was booming and some doors were opening for Koreans in international finance and business, at least on paper. Solomon works for a foreign bank in Tokyo, which reflects a real pattern where multinational firms were sometimes more willing to hire Zainichi Koreans than Japanese companies were. But his storyline, where he's ultimately let go over a land deal involving an elderly Korean woman who refuses to sell her property to a golf course developer, shows how thin that openness could be.  
Lee has said in interviews that she spent close to thirty years researching and writing the book, including interviews with Zainichi Koreans in Japan, which is part of why the historical texture feels so authentic. The family in Pachinko is invented, but almost every major turn in their story corresponds to something that happened to real Korean families living through the same century. ​

Have you ever wanted to go around the world? Maybe visit some countries in Europe, go look at some cool landmarks in Asia? Well, imagine wanting to do that – except you live in the 1500s. One man did do that. He also did it in the 1500s.

Fernando Magalhães (or Ferdinand Magellan) first set sail in September 20th 1519, with only 5 ships to travel around the globe.

He ventured through storms, winds and tall waves before arriving in what today is Rio de Janeiro.
They received a warm welcome from the Tupi people, and they traded European trinkets such as fishhooks and mirrors, for fresh meat and water.

Unfortunately, tragedy struck. Despite Magellan’s dreams to complete his expedition, he sadly was killed by the natives in the Philippines.

The expedition carried on, with João Lopes de Carvalho and then by Juan Sebastián Eleano. Only one ship returned to Europe in 1522, only their leader never did.
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Ferdinand’s legacy still lives up to today, and he is known as the man who had the dream to circle around the globe.

​ The 1993 Halloween classic is celebrating its 25th anniversary, with the stars reuniting and people rewatching it for the millionth time. The classic tells the story of Max, his sister Dani and their new friend, Allison, as they explore an abandoned house; one which hasn’t been inhabited since long before. After dismissing Allison because she describes the house as haunted, Max inadvertently frees three villainous, evil witches, who used to live in the house. With the help of a magical cat, they must steal the witch’s book of spells, before they turn themselves into immortals. 

    Most of today’s younger generation, grew up watching this film. It has been a Disney classic, appearing on screen every 31st of October, bringing viewers to the edge of their seats and scaring children. Through countless screening on television networks, Hocus Pocus became the favorite Halloween movie of thousands. The popularity of Hocus Pocus came from the witches divine acting, sending you into a frightening experience, whilst still being entertaining and humorous. Their inability to control their emotions represents some of the main personality traits, which are generally amplified for an extra comedic effect. It’s one of those movies that will have you laughing and terrified at the same time, of the witches themselves. It contains lots of special effects, including flying brooms and a flying vacuum cleaner, whilst also having a great song performance by the withes, a crazy zombie and a talking cat.

     Hocus Pocus is a great adventure, with a different fantasy atmosphere, bringing memories to those who used to watch it as a kid; a bewitching must-watch movie, recommended for all ages. The movie itself is not supposed to be serious as it was made to make people laugh and get into the spooky Halloween mood. It's a quite good family movie, with some plot holes and some violence, but nothing too bad. Some of the most amazing scenes are when the witches realize that they are in the modern world and they have been dead for 300 years, therefore they think the dark cement ground is a river and are afraid to step on it. The whole movie is great and is definitely worth a rewatch.