Beyond the New Google Map of North Korea : The New Yorker: From space, the nighttime map of North Korea has a curious distinction: it is almost completely dark. Next door, South Korea glitters with great splotches of economic life, and, on the other side, China surges with energy. But North Korea has remained “an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England,” as Barbara Demick writes in “Nothing to Envy,” her profile of the country and its people. “It is baffling how a nation of twenty-three million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.”
We got one step closer to filling in that void on Tuesday, when Google unveiled its first detailed map of what had been the last country on Earth to go unmapped by the digital Livingstones in Mountain View. The new map has subway stops in Pyongyang, a dictatorship’s worth of monuments and mausoleums, as well as hotels, hospitals, stores—and what are known to be facilities associated with several of the giant gulags.