This author holds an air of bias about him. Even in the title "...more despicable than you thought" suggests this is more of a tabloid than anything factual.
I'm interested in knowing what's going on in North Korea, and he does have some facts in here, but on the whole I'd prefer something a little more informative.
Alright, here's some factual discussion for you. I'm about to make claims which you may not think I mean literally. I mean them literally.
1) North Korea runs concentration camps, in which inmates are worked to death in mines and factories to increase industrial production.
2) North Korea is a military dictatorship which has used democide via famine against its own people to make it impossible to resist its dictatorship. If you're on the winning side with the army, your family gets to eat better than grass. In the late 90s a famine killed about 3 million people. That's the regime's estimate, incidentally. (Communists tend to have rosy accounting about such things.) The population of North Korea is about 23 million.
3) North Koreans are some of the most desperately poor people on earth. They don't have much, and what they do have gets forcibly expropriated to maintain one of the largest standing armies in the world. Its number one enemy is its own people, though if you believe the propaganda it has crushed the imperialist Yankee under its boot and exacts tribute from him, which explains all the bags of rice bearing American flags without which the population would again starve.
4) The regime is supported by a personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and his father, Kim Il-sung, who has been essentially deified. That is not an exaggeration -- North Korean propaganda has attributed the creation of the world to him.
Any educated person should know the above four facts already. If you know them, "Wait, hold on a second, let's not rush to judgement or use overly emotional language when discussing this country" sounds like you're so open-minded your brain has fallen out.
Slate is a politics and culture magazine, not a newspaper, that features essays and columns often expressing the opinions of mostly well-known regular writers. Hitchens is one of Slate's better-known writers and is most famous for his work in Vanity Fair magazine.
Usually when someone reads a Hitchens article, they know what to expect. He definitely has a bias. He is a hawk, a bit of a neo-con, and an infamous hater of the Clintons. He is also known for his zealous atheism (heh) and enormous ego. I don't often agree with Hitchens, but I generally enjoy his work and appreciate his surly intellectualism and penchant for turning over rocks to reveal the dirt. His pieces are usually opinionated but factual.
I'm interested in knowing what's going on in North Korea, and he does have some facts in here, but on the whole I'd prefer something a little more informative.