Demise of Dear Leader

"Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo—a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite. But he rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China."

In The New York Times, David E. Sanger reports the death of Kim Jong-il.