Kim Jae-geun, a softly-spoken 59-year-old man in South Korea, had spent many years in advertising before he no longer had the strength for it. So during the past seven years, instead of spending his days writing copy, Mr. Kimhas spent his evenings behind the counter of his bar, Seochon Blues, near Seoul’s government district. The place is also home to thousands of vinyl records (黑胶唱片) that he began collecting as a teenager. Customers can request their favourite songs there. The bar is often full of tired office workers, and 20-something people and local artists at weekends. “There’s a special wave,” Mr. Kim observed. “All the young people ask for very old songs.” he said.

Mr. Kim’s Seochon Blues is one of the dozens of “LP bars” in South Korea’s capital, many of which are run by men with similar stories. South Korean companies offer few opportunities to middle-aged workers who haven’t climbed through the ranks. Leaving their jobs in their fifties, with music collections becoming too large for their living rooms, a few who haven’t taken up work as taxi drivers or security guards began to make a living by opening such bars.

The first LP bars opened in the 1990s, possibly inspired by the “listening bars” that originated in mid-20th century Japan. Music enthusiasts would come to these bars to listen to imported records that were otherwise hard to come by. The LP bars have proliferated in recent years with more and more people loving going there, thus greatly benefiting the middle-aged owners.

All LP bars encourage nostalgia (怀旧). “I don’t like digitization or the isolated way people have now,” said Lee Jae-jun, who left his job and also opened such a bar. He likes recalling the eighties and nineties and playing songs from people’s youth. “On the best days, regulars arrive for just one drink, and then I play old songs they like. And before you know it, it’s midnight and everyone goes home, drunk and happy,” said Lee Jae-jun.

Years of unbalanced investment in public parks has left 100 million Americans without access to decent nearby green spaces during the coronavirus lockdown, a new report reveals.

Local parks have been a godsend to many people during the disease as schools, gyms and walking trails have closed to minimize physical contact and check the spread of the virus. But the annual parks score index by the Trust for Public Land (TPL) has revealed wide gap in access. For instance, 98% of residents in Washington and Minnesota are within a ten-minute walk of a park, compared to less than 50% of those in cities like Arizona and Oklahoma City.

Even within cities, access to green spaces – like access to healthy food, healthcare and good schools – is also unfair, with low-income households and people of colour least likely to live close to parks with basic facilities like toilets, playgrounds and basketball courts.

As summer edges closer, it’s clear that public parks will play a crucial role in providing safe, affordable leisure spaces for millions of people unable to work or travel. Yet, evidence detailed in the report suggests park services could face dramatic cutbacks as local governments face unprecedented economic challenges as a result of the shutdowns.

A survey of 300 park officials in mid-April by the National Recreation and Park Association found that about half had already been instructed to cut budgets by 10% to 20% for the current financial year. Nationwide, the parks system took years to recover from budget cuts after the Great Recession that upset planned improvements and expansions. The economic consequences of the coronavirus disease are expected to be both deeper and longer.

For environmental justice activists, there is some hope. The unprecedented crisis could enhance appreciation for parks – and encourage a wave of local activism to fight for fair access. Rue Mapp, the founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, said, “This is an opportunity for us to rethink public lands and to get people out of the mindset that nature is somewhere that you have to drive to.”

The world’s first telephone call — “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” — was a request for a face-to-face meeting. In Brantford, the “Telephone City”, there’s a giant memorial to Alexander Graham Bell that includes a bronze casting with figures meant to represent Knowledge, Joy and Sorrow — the information spread by the telephone.

Today maybe we should have a bit of sorrow for the weakening of the personal connections developed by Bell’s great invention. We own more “phones” than ever, but we don’t use them primarily for voice calls. In 2010 Americans spent 2.24 trillion minutes talking on their mobile devices — which averages out to 7, 813 minutes per mobile line. By 2017 that had dropped to just 5, 539 minutes per line. That’s still 18 minutes per person per day, but it’s a small part of the five hours a day we spend doing other things on our phones: watching videos, browsing Twitter and Facebook, sending text messages, — and all the rest.

So what leads to the fall-off in voice communication? One is digital data. We consumed 28.6 trillion megabytes of data on our phones in 2018, a dramatic 82 percent increase over 2017 levels. The other is robocalls (机器人电话) . YouMail, which makes a robocall-blocking app, says that 4.7 billion calls were placed to U.S. phone numbers in July 2019 alone. My own phone shows that I got 36 robocalls that month — so many that I’ve ignored all strange calls.

Then, what’s lost when texts and posts replace conversation? Briefly put, it is Joy and Sorrow: the emotional content conveyed by the human voice. Without this real-time engagement, we’re left only with Knowledge, which, as the past few years have shown, is so easily misrepresented. Our telephones may have evolved into machines for 24/7 tweeting and texting, but we’re more alone than ever.