Each year, a limited number of tourists are allowed to visit North Korea, the most isolated nation on earth. All tours are highly scripted and follow a similar pattern. Tourists are only allowed to visit a limited number of preapproved sites. Most days you are confined to the bus; government minders accompany tour groups everywhere and dictate everything, corralling you through tightly circumscribed itineraries. Our tour was coordinated by a travel agency in Beijing. Leading up to the trip, the agency sent our group, composed of fifteen students, informational PDFs that read like inverted Miranda rights. “Foreign visitors to North Korea may be arrested, detained, or expelled for activities that would not be considered criminal in any other country.” Prohibitions included straying from the group, practicing religion, and interaction with the local population. There are designated tourist hotels, where North Koreans are not permitted to stay—in Wonsan, the Songdowon Hotel is on a foggy, abandoned pier jutting out into the Sea of Japan. In Pyongyang, the Yanggakdo Hotel is marooned on an island in the middle of a river, with a checkpoint restricting North Korean citizens from entering. The hotel mostly serves Chinese tourists and businesspeople. When we were there, only a few of the forty-seven floors were in operation; if you pressed the other buttons on the elevator, the doors would open to pitch-black hallways, some with wires hanging from the ceiling, others with no carpet.

There is no Internet in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The government owns and controls The Pyongyang Times and all other newspapers, radio, and television. The vast majority of citizens do not have cell phones, though in recent years the government has begun offering limited cellular service through the Egyptian company Orascom. (Officials in Pyongyang were supposedly very impressed by the speed with which Orascom was able to shut down cell-phone access during Egypt’s revolution.) Time itself is owned by the government: North Korea invented its own calendar, which counts from Year Zero (Kim Il-sung’s birth in 1912; Juche 100 was celebrated a few weeks before our arrival). For many years, there were restrictions on wearing wristwatches. The country’s twenty-four million people live in a closed society so cut off and airtight that defectors—it is estimated that hundreds of thousands have managed to sneak across the hyper-patrolled borders with China and South Korea—feel, upon reaching their destinations, as though they are arriving on another planet. In Seoul, new arrivals from North Korea spend months in special schools learning how to live in the twenty-first century.

Ever since the Soviet Union caved in, the West has quietly and expectantly awaited North Korea’s implosion. But the Kim Dynasty and the Workers’ Party—a cabal of elites in Pyongyang who’ve micromanaged North Korea for nearly seven decades—have hung on, buoyed by a disproportionately oversized military and a Big Brother ethos of state surveillance and constant propaganda. The streets of Pyongyang are studded with towering bronze statues of Kim the Elder and Kim the Younger (the estimated countrywide statue total is 34,000). Along rural highways, every other hillside is plastered with giant red signs proclaiming the glory and eternal victory of Juche, North Korea’s national ideology of self-reliance and state patronage—a mash-up of Marx, Lenin, and Mao dreamt up by Kim Il-sung and articulated in his dozen or so books on the subject. A few days in North Korea teach you the basics of Juche: it is a philosophy of extreme nationalism capitalizing on resentment over historical injustices, especially toward the original Japanese colonization and the destruction wrought by the Korean War, for which North Korea ascribes blame exclusively to the U.S.

After Kim Jong-il’s death in December 2011, his youthful son Kim Jong-un succeeded him, and the world wondered if the new leader might open North Korea up to a new era of liberalization. Throughout 2012, Kim began to legalize previously forbidden behavior. Suddenly, North Korean women were allowed to wear pants and platform heels; bans were lifted on Western foods like pizza and hamburgers; in midsummer, Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh—classic icons of the DPRK’s cultural enemy—appeared as characters during a nationally televised event attended by Kim. Google executive Eric Schmidt visited in 2012, prompting the ruling party to relax restrictions on cell phones. Dennis Rodman made a meaningless “basketball diplomacy” visit months later. The overall effect was a burnished image for Kim and North Korea. The Supreme Leader was seen at Mangyongdae Amusement Park outside Pyongyang, pointing at roller coasters, ordering the managers to upgrade the video arcades, and eating french fries with schoolchildren.

But by early 2013, the U.S. and its allies were saddling North Korea with some of the toughest economic sanctions in history, and Kim Jong-un was threatening to revoke the armistice that ended the Korean War. In January, North Korea startled the world with its third nuclear test launch. By March, it was conducting mock drone tests and threatening to attack U.S. military bases in Japan and the Pacific Islands if provoked. In other words, the sea change in Pyongyang’s politics never came, and Kim Jong-un has assumed his inherited mantle as pariah leader and nuclear rocket rattler.

Visiting the country might be the best way to confirm these doubts about the prospect for change. North Koreans are perhaps the most repressed people on earth. Dissent is forbidden, and an enormous clandestine web of intelligence agents and neighborhood informers watches over society, ensuring that threats to the system are swiftly expunged. An estimated 200,000 North Koreans have been sent to Soviet-style gulags (or “reeducation camps”) in the mountainous north. The world knows little about these labor camps, save for a few harrowing memoirs from those who escaped and lived to tell the tale—but by all accounts, political prisoners are forced to work until they die. Or, as one of our guides put it, “People who do bad things are sent to work very hard, until people forget them.”

Everything in North Korea is tangled in misinformation. The government churns out constant fictions that citizens, lacking any reference point, are obliged to accept as reality. Visitors are left feeling slightly dizzy, wondering where the illusion ends. Every experience we had in North Korea felt somehow theatrical—as if the country put everything on hold during our visit and staged a simulated version of reality. We visited an adult-education classroom full of computers, with students who were apparently working on Word documents but never once touched the keyboards. I walked behind three students as they lazily moved their mouses over the screens—one was generating a document of complex math equations, another worked with architectural diagrams, and the third with dense paragraphs that looked like a technical manual. All of the Word docs were in English. Each student was wearing earbud headphones that didn’t appear to be connected to anything.

What the guides told us always felt vaguely deceptive, even when deception was totally unnecessary. We visited Kim Il-sung University, the best academic institution in the country, supposedly attended by 18,000 of the brightest North Korean minds. The stunning campus is full of Roman columns and marble staircases. When we showed up, the place was deserted. All of the classrooms were empty. Why? “It’s farming season,” a guide told me. “So the students are at the farms with their families.” But a few minutes later, I cross-checked this explanation with a different guide. “It’s Monday,” he said, “so the students are doing construction work off campus.” Five minutes later, a third guide made an announcement to our entire group. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the students are currently swimming at their swimming pool.” He said that the university had an Olympic-sized pool, located far from where we were touring, and that all the students had gone there after classes, “because after 1 p.m., they are free.”

It was impossible to know if the guides were aware of how dubious we were. If they were, they surely didn’t show it. All three guides were perfectly composed all week. After leaving Kim Il-sung University, we got back on the bus and the guide made another announcement. “I’m sorry we could not see the swimming pool and the students,” he said. “But if we did everything this time, you would never come back to Korea!”