Like most visitors of North Korea, Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, thought the country “weird.” It’s her that everyone is quoting today, specifically this write-up on Google Sites: It’s impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like. Our trip... Read more »
Andrei Lankov, professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University and one of the world’s foremost North Korea experts (he blogs in Russian), has some chilling words about what the new year might bring for Korean relations. As quoted in The Globe and Mail: “The North Koreans will want to test [Ms. Park], maybe an overland intrusion, an artillery... Read more »
Please consider this the fitting and necessary follow-up to our previous post on Pyongyang Racing, the first computer game to come out of North Korea. Any explanation of it will probably ruin the experience. All you need to know is it’s been viewed 14,724 times, mostly in France, where surely the jokes are uproariously funny.... Read more »
Here we go again. From the news agency that brought you “Lair of King Tongmyong’s Unicorn Reconfirmed in DPRK,” we now have this: “U.S. Magazine Selects Kim Jong Un as Man of 2012.” Well… yes and no. The Korean Central News Agency may want to look again. Kim Jong-un indeed won recognition from Time Magazine, but... Read more »
Our friends at Koryo Tours have posted an online game called Pyongyang Racer, which they’re advertising as the “first computer game out of North Korea” (is there any reason to disbelieve it?). Players race around the “city of willows” collecting barrels of fuel and avoiding obstacles such as cars. (True to the Pyongyang I visited last... Read more »
Earlier today, North Korea successfully launched a three-stage rocket into space, its first ever. Two parts fell into the Yellow and Philippine Sea, respectively, while the other part deployed into orbit. The country — inasmuch as it’s a conglomerate and does not, say, comprise individual parts which are the actual human beings living the best... Read more »
By Xiao Yi “At my residence in Beijing, with Coke toast first to the supreme leaders!” And with that first message on June 29, Sina Weibo user @作家崔成浩 – literally, “Writer Choi Seongho” – launched himself into Chinese social media fame. From the very beginning, as a self-proclaimed North Korean patriot, he has written solely to glorify the Democratic People’s... Read more »
Ha ha! Western media, you got GOT. Unicorns! Ha ha, you totally fell for the Korean Central News Agency’s satire. Yeah, you did. You totally did. Look: Pyongyang, November 29 (KCNA) — Archaeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences have recently reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King... Read more »
The flagship CPC newspaper People’s Daily is, well, it’s a bit, you know. It’s rubbish. The design is terrible, the editorials are as pleasant as a shirt of broken glass and Captain Crunch, they have military equipment on their flash home page every day and their non-CPC related stories have the detached insouciance of a disabled child petting a kitten too hard.
Earlier this year, I gave a lecture to high school journalism students in China about the importance of citation, spending a good 10 minutes on the how and why of it. This may or may not surprise you, depending on whether you read Chinese publications and/or crappy blogs, but sourcing is often optional here; what’s... Read more »
