Common Sense and Whiskey

Opaque Regime Watch

Two good reads today:

A Glimpse into a Mysterious African Dictatorship: Is Eritrea on the Verge? from Time

and

The secret lives of North Korea from The Independent

Eritrea is one of those countries most people can't quite put their finger on on the map (Clue: All you have to do is find Djibouti). The author and African correspondent Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It for You is one of the only books about contemporary Eritrea I'm aware of, other than an odd, very handsome 2007 coffee table book called Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City by Edward Denison. As for North Korea, a couple of things: See this I mentioned last week, and here's a DPRK visitor we talked with on CS&W back in 2009.

Another DPRK Travelogue

With North Korea acting evil again, here's another look inside Pyongyang from Sophie Schimdt, daughter of Google's Eric Schmidt, who was recently in the DPRK on another one of those Bill Richardson trips. She shares her photos of a government guest house, which is, as she puts it, "a bizarre mix of marble grandeur and what passed for chic in North Korea in the 1970s."

Meanwhile, this guy is into watching North Korea from above.