Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Aure Ugunbi. Every weekday

we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The origins of hip-hop can be traced back to a block party in New York, 50 years ago this

month. The genre has evolved immensely in the decade since, both in terms of the sound

and the techniques that define it.

Now it's going global, influencing and being influenced by the sounds of K-pop, Afrobeats

and even Latin rap too. But has this come at the expense of its popularity at home?

For much of the 20th century across East Asia, families tended to consist of mono-ethnic

married couples with children, where men worked and women kept the home.

Notice Nida is our Tokyo bureau chief. It was an arrangement with underpinnings and widely

shared confusion values and that really fit with the urbanizing 20th century lifestyle

of the time. But more recently, the traditional nuclear family is losing its hold on East Asia.

So a team of our correspondents in Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan went out to meet

families who are doing things a bit differently. One of the most unusual examples came from

South Korea, where my colleague Hye-yeon Shin met Lee Min-gyong. She went to her flat

in Hongdae, a trendy area and soul and heard the story of Ms. Lee's modern family.

Ms. Lee told Hye-yeon about how she came out as a lesbian in 2020 and how she wanted to

build a different kind of family, despite South Korea's conservative, deeply patriarchal

culture. Gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, so to kind of legitimize her family,

she created a company, which she called Gorilla. And its members live and work together.

She described the enterprise to us, and explained that it consists of a school that teaches

women language, writing and finances, a property business that rents out spaces for women,

...