Summary: William Dobson is the foreign affairs editor of Slate; before that he was an editor for Foreign Affairs. He has traveled around the world, logging some 93,000 miles to report on the changing ways dictators do their thing. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is not one of them -- the young leader of an old-school, frozen-in-time regime that stands in stark contrast to the many other dictatorships that survive and even thrive by adapting to life in the digital age. William Dobson talks about North Korea, and from there we move along what he calls the dictator’s learning curve, somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism, and a front line in the battle for global democracy.
