When it comes to dark skies, we'll never be able to compete with North Korea

In announcing the death yesterday of Kim Jong-Il, Slate republished Christopher Hitchens's February 2010 column on the North Korean regime, in which he linked to a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. As Hitchens describes it, North Korea "is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city." Truly something to aspire to.