When President Clinton flew into North Korea to release current.tv reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee, it brought the communist country again back into the American news spotlight (not that the missiles haven’t attracted world-wide attention). Sara Wang joined a group of Chinese businessmen and crossed the border into North Korea for four days. Her account of the trip in Slate is a rare glimpse into this mesmerizing, yet saddening world.

The store was empty except for three 10-foot-tall heaps on the ground—one of cabbage, one of tomatoes, and one of turnips. There were no price tags and no customers. A middle-aged woman in a black uniform stood behind the counter, which held small piles of peanuts and pine seeds that looked as though they had been there for a long time.

Washington Post addresses the modern day quandary of how to say goodbye. In their research, most people sign off with ‘sincerely’ in their professional emails and ‘love’ when writing personal emails. Other sign-offs have their own connotations — ‘best’ can be denounced as frigid or overly warm, ‘cheers’ can seem too british, ‘xoxo’ brings you into Gossip Girls territory, and using acronyms like ‘arlyw’ and ‘s/f’ peg you as military.

For my own emails, I tend to use ‘thanks!’ or a variation thereof.

Batman weighed 188 pounds. His hair was black. His complexion was fair. Young Batman grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he spent an unhappy and decidedly disturbed childhood. His grandfather was well known in town as the man who had invented the machine that lays down lane stripes on highways all across America. Batman’s mother was an insomniac. She could sew pretty well. She loved a good pork chop. Batman’s father, by contrast, preferred seafood. The church Batman attended was made of limestone. His school was a brick structure. The family car was an Oldsmobile.

Reading this monotonous paragraph calls back the ghosts of multiple consumer segmentation descriptions I’ve come across over the years.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.