Journalist
Suki Kim is a contributing editor to the New Republic and author of Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover among the Sons of North Korea's Elite.
PROFILE
Suki Kim
Guest
FROM Suki Kim
To the Point
Inside the Hermit Kingdom: Eyewitness views from North Korea It's the most isolated nation in the modern world, a closed society that the information age has barely penetrated, a place where teenagers have never heard of Beyonce and Facebook is just a mysterious word. North Korea is also a parallel universe, in which the United States is an evil empire bent on destruction, and patriotic North Koreans take it for granted that they would crush America in a nuclear war. Western options for defusing the situation have always been limited. As Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un escalate their war of words, guest host Todd Purdum speaks with journalists who've had rare firsthand access to Pyongyang. How worried should we really be?
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
How serious are people taking Trump's threat to North Korea? President Trump’s impromptu threat of hitting North Korea with fire and fury on Tuesday launched 48 hours of breaking news coverage: Montages of missiles detonating, graphics painting Trump and Kim Jong Un as mortal enemies. With mixed messages from Washington, many Americans are worried and confused. Should we be preparing for nuclear war or dismissing this as an empty threat?
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
How Journalist Suki Kim Became a Reluctant Memoirist The media in North Korea is tightly controlled by the government. The few foreign journalists let inside the country are strictly supervised, given access only to carefully orchestrated state-sanctioned events. They’re prevented from talking freely with anyone, so it’s nearly impossible for the rest of the world to learn what life really is like there. That’s why investigative journalist Suki Kim decided to go undercover as a teacher in the capital Pyongyang. Over a period of six months, she secretly wrote hundreds of pages of notes, and then smuggled them out of the country. The result of her undercover reporting was her book “Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.” When it was published in the fall of 2014, Suki Kim had prepared herself for a backlash from North Korea. But what she did not prepare for was an even greater backlash at home in the United States.
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