Michael Jackson

Keepers of Knut, the baby polar bear whose antics warmed the hearts of millions at the Berlin Zoo, admit he has become a publicity-addled psychopath.

One of J. M. Coetzee's characters says the history of zoos is an extension of the history of warfare. The first zoos erected fences less to protect man from beast than to protect beast from man. Zoo-goers viewed the animals as POWs in a long inter-species war, on display to be jeered and attacked as representatives of the enemy. This hostility survives today in the sick exhibition of Knut, the cute bear-orphan who has been the object of exploitation for the first fifteen months of what one hopes will be a short life. MORE

Charles Robert Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter, has teamed with Jim Frederick to write a memoir of his forty years in North Korea.

Sgt. Jenkins's punishment is in his face -- a withered, jug-eared mug that looks about two decades older than its sixty-odd years. In January 1965, Jenkins deserted his unit in the Korean DMZ and slinked into North Korean territory, where he intended to turn himself in and go home after a prisoner-swap. The scheme failed badly. Instead of going home, he ended up confined with a handful of other American deserters, beaten bloody by one, malnourished from the start, and forced every day to do nothing but read and memorize the works of Kim Il Sung. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the ensuing four decades that one low point was the ripping of a U.S. Army tattoo off his arm without anesthetic, and a high point was watching a bootleg video of Michael Jackson's (admittedly sublime) "Thriller," with the volume turned to nearly inaudible levels, lest someone hear it, turn him in, and possibly have him shot. MORE