OK, this one is not about North Korea per se, much less its economy, but it is cool.  Check it out:  

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Many of you have expressed enjoyment in some of the links we have posted to Vice Media reports on North Korea, including the logging camp adventure and the trip to the film studio.  As part of its weekly “Lunch with the FT” series, the paper recently sat down with Vice founder Shane Smith (you may [...]

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Thanks to Eric Weingartner at Cankor we have advance notice of two new films on North Korea that showed at the Toronto film festival. We already commented on one:  Comrade Kim Goes Flying.  This film is of interest in part because it is a joint Belgium, UK & North Korea production, more evidence of the [...]

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We have generally been cautious-to-skeptical about whether the change in style at the top of the North Korean leadership has any substantive significance. Recently, my colleague Marcus Noland rightly poked fun at North Korea’s Camelot moment.  But a link to a DPRK television broadcast sent to us by Georgy Toloraya is giving us pause. (For [...]

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This one comes from Gordon Flake at the Mansfield Foundation. (Keep those cards and letters coming folks—you think we have time to make up all this stuff ourselves?)  He writes,  “I found this article fascinating and perhaps worthy of your analysis…..striking in that I think this is probably genuine…..the North Koreans simply cannot conceive of [...]

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For those living in Southern California, UC Irvine is staging an exhibition of South Korean political art that looks like it is worth a visit. Following the Kwangju massacre, an important group of Korean artists—most born in the immediate post-war period—turned against Korean modernism by developing a dynamic, political; Youngwoo Lee offers a good introduction [...]

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For anyone in New York, the Korea Society is hosting an exhibition of early realist South Korean photography entitled Traces of Life: Seen Through Korean Eyes 1945-1992. The photographs are on loan from one of the first public photography museums in Korea, Dong-Gang Museum of Photography, and from several of the photographers (or their estates) [...]

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Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder… A Loyal Reader sent me an Amazon.com link to “Pyongyang #*$%: Deep Inside North Korea” by Mhari Yi. (I can’t even write out the title—this is a family-oriented blog, after all.) I’m not sure which surprised me more: that Amazon was selling porn (my sheltered life) [...]

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For those of you who may have forgotten (or never knew), for the last few weeks we have been running a contest for best—and best avoided—songs for “Pyongyang’s “first ever DJ Party.” (If anyone actually attended let us know via the reply button. We’d love to see the documentary evidence.) According to DJ BO (what [...]

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We are decidedly consumers rather than producers of work on North Korean culture, so caveat emptor. But given the tremendous effort the regime devotes to propaganda, we find it useful to read what is being written on the ideational as well as political and economic aspects of the regime. Heonik Kwon (Cambridge) and Byung-ho Chung’s [...]

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