North Korea is the most secretive country in the world today, with its main railway lined with walls so high that its foreign passengers can’t see the countryside. It is also, as Bradley Martin’s book makes clear, the most repressive and brutal country in the world, with entire families sometimes executed if one member gets drunk and slights the Dear Leader. It is at the same time by far the most totalitarian, with nearly every home equipped with a speaker that issues propaganda from morning to night.

– From a great book review by Nicholas Kristof.

Yipes.

Here’s a histogram of the best movies of 2004. (Note to self: refer to this list often.) [via]

Cheney Criticized for Attire at Auschwitz Ceremony

Other leaders at the event in Poland on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, wore dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots.

“The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower,” Robin Givhan, The Washington Post’s fashion writer, wrote in the newspaper’s Friday editions.

Between the somber, dark-coated leaders at the outdoor ceremony sat Cheney, resplendent in a green parka embroidered with his name and featuring a fur-trimmed hood, the laced brown boots and a knit ski cap reading “Staff 2001.”

I usually don’t read too much into fashion decisions, but… come on, Dick.

On the other hand, what does he care – he’s already been re-elected.