News Features

Photos: North Korea's surreal Mass Games

While everyone else watches the Olympics, Asia's weirdest sporting event transpires in the world's most secretive country

By MICHAEL GAO | September 8, 2008

080808_NK4
Photo by Michael Gao

With a total population of about 20 million, the DPRK is a highly regimented society that lives and dies by a "military first" policy. Its standing army is 1.1 million strong with reserve forces of six million. The merciless razing of the north’s cities by American bombers during the Korean War left deep scars on the local psyche. At one point in A State of Mind, gymnast Pak visits the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum and asks her grandfather whether a shot-down US aircraft on display once dropped bombs on Pyongyang. He replies, "No, but it dropped all kinds of insects containing the virus of various plagues."

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8 of 32 (results 32)

Review: Kimjongilia
There is very little new in N.C. Heikin's documentary attack on North Korea's endless dictatorship that hasn't been seen or heard before.
The death of the American city, revisited
Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.
Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops
Like other Call of Duty games, Black Ops is rated M for Mature, but that rating doesn't cut it anymore.
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Review: Kimjongilia
There is very little new in N.C. Heikin's documentary attack on North Korea's endless dictatorship that hasn't been seen or heard before.
The death of the American city, revisited
Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.
Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops
Like other Call of Duty games, Black Ops is rated M for Mature, but that rating doesn't cut it anymore.
Linc's greenskeeping
Sure, governor-elect Lincoln Chafee used to shoe racehorses up in Canada, but it appears he could also have been a good greenskeeper.
I was a teenage Sandinista
As a freshman philosophy major at the University of Colorado, Deb Olin Unferth fell in love with a junior named George. A pious Evangelical, George felt it was his duty to help his Communist brethren in Central America fight against their capitalist oppressors. So he did, and Unferth went with him.
John Birch Society alive and confused in Maine
The Maine arm of the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 to combat communist influence in government, visited the State House in Augusta last week, calling for legislators to, well, do nothing, as it turns out.
The road goes on forever
If the Maine Turnpike Authority were a country, it'd be North Korea.
What's behind the curtain?
Here's our third Gubernatorial Scorecard, in which we score Governor Paul LePage on political savvy, and on whether what he's trying to do is good policy. Note the running total.
This trickle-down stinks
True free-market capitalism has lasted 30 years — barely half as long as its arch-enemy, Soviet communism.
Review: My Perestroika
Socialism might be a dirty word in America, but for Russians during the Soviet era, it was the way things were.
Review: Generic Theater takes on Havel's tale of an intellectual amid revolution
In these days of ongoing revolution, many are drawn to look back to protest and uprisings of the past.
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