Sam Lee is the editor of Woven, an independent publication covering Asian American culture, food, career, and identity. Sam writes about the experiences of the 24 million Asian Americans whose stories are too often relegated to footnotes in mainstream media. Follow Woven on X @readwoven and Instagram @thewovenmag.
K-pop has conquered American music in one of the most improbable stories in the history of the industry. A genre built on the systematic manufacturing of pop perfection, training programs that last years, synchronized choreography, visual aesthetics governed by very specific standards should not have crossed cultural lines that have historically been nearly impermeable. That…
The Asian American family business is one of the most consequential and least examined institutions in American economic life. The dry cleaning shop, the restaurant, the convenience store, the nail salon, the motel. These are not merely businesses. They are survival strategies, community anchors, vehicles for intergenerational wealth transfer, and sites of enormous complexity for…
Knicks-Spurs is back. Linsanity returns to Madison Square Garden, this time at the broadcast desk. A lifelong Knicks fan and Taiwanese American writes on the night that compresses three things he’s waited his whole life to see.
The technology industry has a specific version of the bamboo ceiling. Asian Americans are dramatically overrepresented in technical roles at major technology companies — making up a significant share of engineering, product, and data science teams at Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — and dramatically underrepresented in the executive and board roles that set…
The three-time Emmy winner is back with an interactive murder mystery that runs on AI — and is forcing the entertainment industry to figure out what AI storytelling can responsibly look like.
The dating-app experience for Asian American men is a specific kind of bad — not in ways the data fully captures, but in ways most of them recognize on sight.
Los Angeles has the largest Korean American population outside of Korea, and Koreatown — the dense, extraordinary neighborhood at the heart of the city — is the culinary center of that community. The best Korean restaurants Los Angeles are not just good Korean restaurants. They are some of the best restaurants of any kind in…
Everything Everywhere All at Once did not just win awards. It won them in a way that felt, to many Asian American viewers, like a kind of recognition that had never quite arrived before. The film swept the 2023 Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best…
Five independent writers shaping the conversation, one inbox at a time.
The best boba shops Los Angeles has to offer span a range that no other American city can match — from the founders who turned boba into a national institution to the Taiwanese tea houses taking the drink back toward craft. Los Angeles has the deepest relationship with boba of any American city. The drink…
Asian American code-switching is the practice of adjusting language, tone, behavior, and self-presentation depending on the social context. For many Asian Americans in professional environments, it is not an occasional adaptation but a constant, exhausting performance — a daily recalibration of how much of themselves to reveal, suppress, or amplify in order to be read…
The best Asian American restaurants Bay Area has to offer span one of the oldest and most layered food cultures in the United States. Chinese immigrants arrived with the Gold Rush. Japanese Americans farmed the Central Valley before internment upended those communities entirely. Filipino laborers built the Alaskan salmon canneries. Vietnamese refugees rebuilt their lives…