Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson
Adam Johnsonis an English professional footballer who plays as a winger. A product of the Middlesbrough youth academy, he came to prominence after making his debut aged 17 in a UEFA Cup game. He played 120 games for Middlesbrough, also spending time on loan at Leeds United and Watford...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSoccer Player
Date of Birth14 July 1987
CountryUnited States of America
country eye korea
The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
book thinking light
I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.
jobs motivation character
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
book character years
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
jobs character korea
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
character thinking self
For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.
enemy taught needs
All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
captives
What good's a captive without her captor?
people done
But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.
stars dark night
The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.
wise men piano
Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.
dog socialism communism
[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
stories inevitable familiar
A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
alternate ate bark bombarded elite existence feels masses mix mount north people propaganda reader sadism starving whose
The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.