North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy...

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and...

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.

I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn’t hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren’t about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn’t ravenous just for a newspaper that had no...

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have...