Joseph Ferris, who took the most breathtaking and evocative pictures of North Korea I’ve seen — see them on Flickr (I recommend watching the whole slide show) — reviewed my book, Understanding North Korea: Demystifying the World’s Most Misunderstood Country, in his blog, An American in North Korea. He wrote I admit that I was quite skeptical to learn that on his return he wrote a book on North Korea,[…] Keep reading →

A Columbia student responded to the announcement of my talk: I would be interested in why a human rights club is putting on what appears to be a sympathetic presentation on one of the world’s most notorious human rights abusers. Shouldn’t you be focusing on the plight of north Koreans rather than the “misunderstood” nature of an autocratic regime? Questions like his come up a lot. North Korea is an[…] Keep reading →

Columbia Global Initiative for Human Rights Proudly Presents North Korea: Demystifying the Business Strategy of the World’s Most Misunderstood Country * * * * * Lecture Description: Kim Jong Il’s death this December has reignited popular intrigue about North Korea and justifiably so. Few understand this isolated and authoritarian country despite its paramount global importance. How can we understand this mysterious country, its leaders and its economy? Professors Bruce Greenwald[…] Keep reading →

Who would have believed a North Korean vegan food blog could exist? And written by someone in New York City, home to no North Korean restaurants. Maybe this means I will get to try some reasonably authentic naengmyeon. Check it out: juchevegan.com: “The world’s first English-language vegan food blog devoted to North Korean cuisine.”

A podcast from NPR called Planet Money did a twenty-minute podcast last summer on the North Korean economy. I thought they did a great job, covering its size, its challenge of getting hard currencies other countries will accept, and its solutions. Since the country can’t feed its people or fuel its army, the leaders have had to solve how to get themselves luxury goods. The solutions include leasing land rights,[…] Keep reading →

People, left to themselves, don’t seem to care about people on the other side of the planet. They seem to want to pursue happiness and enjoy themselves if they can. My observations in North Korea reinforced this sentiment. It raises the question why North Korea and the United States harbor so much animosity. History answers the question at a low level. My visit revealed to me deeper reasons. In all[…] Keep reading →

Like most American kids of my generation, I learned This Land Is Your Land as a children’s song, never thinking much of its meaning. A decade or two later, I heard Bruce Springsteen’s version of it on his Live 75-85 set. His introduction first got me thinking about its meaning, especially in contrast to God Bless America. I didn’t know Woodie Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land as an[…] Keep reading →

At the end of my first post on this topic I speculated on the motivations of counterfeiters. The Vanity Fair article I mentioned in part 2 reminded me of other motivations that make the behavior more understandable to me. The North Korean bureaucracy that implements the counterfeiting, drug smuggling, and so on, according to the article, has many levels. Someone high up — as high as Kim Jong Il, according[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post on the New York Times’s article on counterfeit hundred dollar bills and evidence pointing to the North Korean government having forged them, today let’s look at a Vanity Fair article on the same topic. Vanity Fair wonderfully describes the network and system within North Korea and the international police work that found out what it did. It builds to a crescendo that in 2007 the U.S.[…] Keep reading →