The response to Rodman’s trip also seems connected to a larger, more troubling phenomenon, which is the persistent strain in the popular imagination that there is something simply funny about North Korea itself. The country’s secrecy, its technological backwardness, its ham-fisted and anachronistic public pageantry, and the Kim regime’s well-documented eccentricity all add up to a subject for which the Onion headlines write themselves. When the most you know about a country’s leader is that he was a fanatical devotee of Michael Jackson, and the most you know about his son is that he loves basketball, then it is easy to look for the next joke in the news that trickles across that country’s borders. So last week, there was a sense that North Korea and Rodman, two versions of strange and damaging excess, somehow deserved each other. There are, of course, twenty-five million or so North Korean citizens who may disagree. Leave it to Gawker, which illustrated a post on the trip with photographs of North Korean famine victims, to remind us of the moral questions posed by Rodman’s goofy escapade. The world has turned on its head: dystopia, indeed.

Ian Crouch on Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea as the guest of honor of Kim Jong-un: http://nyr.kr/Z2Msnf

Photograph by Jason Mojica/VICE/AP

(Source: newyorker.com)

A timeline of U.S.-North Korea diplomacy, from Bill Clinton to Dennis Rodman to Lennay Kekua: http://nyr.kr/15j79gE

PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, has issued the following letter to the citizens of the world:

Dear World People:

For decades, North Korea was threatened by hostile foes with nuclear weapons. With our safety constantly at risk from violent intruders, we asked: How can we possibly defend ourselves? In the immortal words of my Dad, the glorious Kim Jong-il: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.”

…today I am founding the Nuclear Retaliation Association to defend the sovereign right of every nation on the planet to engulf that planet in a hellish inferno.

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XM3mnz

And yet, the dominant sensation in seeing the spidery new detail on the land is that it reminds us just how much we still can not see. For now, it’s hard to envision how the map will have much impact inside North Korea, because almost nobody there has access to the Web. The delight we get in a digital glimpse of the North Koreans’ land only underscores the span between their reality and ours. The map allows us to indulge our curiosity, but we are just as in the dark as ever about the mysterious realm inside the heads of Kim Jong Un and his mercurial men. Politically, North Korea remains as black as a satellite map at night.

Evan Osnos looks beyond the new Google Map of North Korea: http://nyr.kr/14qwchk

PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—North Korean leader Kim Jong-un surprised Korea-watchers today by abruptly cancelling his nation’s controversial rocket test and launching a fragrance instead: http://nyr.kr/TJyt0Q

Shouts & Murmurs - In the wake of Kim Jong Un’s marriage announcement, Tim Long looks at other surprising personal announcements by world leaders: http://nyr.kr/QB2dhf