No comfort in North Korea stor y

Even North Korean experts stand to benefit from The New

Yorker’s 20- page examination of US relations with the Hermit Kingdom.

The cover story’s theme is in the subtitle: “Could Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump goad each other into nuclear war?”

Author Evan Osnos, who visited North Korea three days after President Trump’s “locked and loaded” tweet, calls relations reminiscent of the Cold War — but with a difference.

“The two men making the existential strategic decisions were not John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev but a senescent real estate mogul and reality-television star and a young third-generation dictator who has never met another head of state.”

Their collective political experience — less than seven years of leadership — offers even less comfort in light of their shared personal experience, Osnos writes, hyper-ventilating with every keystroke.

Addressing Trump’s entitled upbringing, a former diplomat tells the author: “We don’t know where his brakes are, and I suspect he doesn’t know where he can stop.”

There’s a lot going on in the world but you’d never know it from Time’s bizarrely timed cover story, “Firsts: Women who are Changing in the World.” The story was more than a year in the making — and it shows.

The weekly interviews 46 women who are pioneers in their field and, for another first, splashes 12 of them on a dozen different covers.

Time put the whining Hillary Clinton on the cover. If there is a bigger waste of your time this week, we can’t think of it. Hill is the No. 1 woman changing the world? This week?

What was Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs thinking?