"I try very hard not to be judgmental and offer these guys understanding," says Gordon. "They desperately need someone to listen to them."
Credit Briana Duggan
Millicent Gordon has been teaching music at Western Youth Institution for thirty years. "I've always felt that I came into this world to do something special," says Gordon. "but I never thought it would lead me to prison."
Credit Briana Duggan
Millicent Gordon directs members of Western Youth Instutition's Choir. The 84 year-old music teacher has been instructing youth offenders for thirty years.
Credit Briana Duggan
Locals call Western Youth Institution the "highrise". The 16-storey building houses around 430 of the state's felons and misdemenants.
North Carolina has sixty-six prisons, housing more than 37,000 inmates. Morganton’s Western Youth Institution is meant for the youngest of them; It houses about 430 inmates for sentences ranging from ninety days to life in prison.
It also has a flourishing music program, a rarity in the state’s prison system. It was started by Millicent Gordon thirty years ago. Now in her eighties, the Juilliard-trained pianist has found her meaning behind bars.
Only one person at Western Youth Institution has a reserved parking space, and it’s not the warden.
Part of the abandoned mining apparatus in the town of Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
A broken drum, one of the artifacts left behind by Piramida's residents that was actually intended to be a musical instrument.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The mountain that looms above Piramida and which gave the town — as well as Efterklang's fourth album — its name.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Piramida, shot from above. The ghost town, once an active Russian mining settlement, is on the island of Spitsbergen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, which is controlled by Norway.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
"It almost sounds like a vibraphone." Mads Brauer (left) and Rasmus Stolberg record sounds atop one of the empty fuel tanks that Brauer would manipulate into the organlike sounds on the song "Sedna."
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Now drained, the swimming pool in Piramida was once warmed by residual heat from generating electricity. "It was fantastic," says Hein Bjerck, a former Spitsbergen resident.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Efterklang's Mads Brauer records "the world's northernmost grand piano," one of the reasons the band wanted to visit Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The abandoned gymnasium.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Efterklang's singer, Casper Clausen, records the sound of his footsteps on a long boardwalk running out of town. The sound can be heard in the opening of the song "Dreams Today."
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Empty buildings and rusty swing sets in the town of Piramida. The Russian mining colony that built and populated the settlement abandoned it in 1998.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The members of Efterklang in Piramida: Mads Brauer (left), Rasmus Stolberg (center) and Casper Clausen.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
An arctic-inspired mosaic on one of the walls of an abandoned building in Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The spike-covered fuel tank that the band taught itself to play. A recording of the tank opens Piramida's first song, "Hollow Mountain."
Author Jamaica Kincaid is out with a new novel, her first in 10 years.
Kincaid is perhaps best known for her books At the Bottom of the River and The Autobiography of My Mother. Her new book, See Now Then, tackles some difficult themes.
The novel opens with a scene of a seemingly idyllic home life in small-town New England. But it is soon clear the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet is anything but sweet.
Theweekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.
It feels so good to root for the golden-hearted guy. To imagine that in a crisis you'd be just like Harry Potter — noble, self-sacrificing, flaunting rules only in the service of Good. But most of us also harbor secret, selfish thoughts we're certain Mother Teresa never had. Those failings are what make the morally flawed heroes of these books ring uncomfortably true. And if we, the readers, refuse to empathize with these very human characters, does that make us nobler than they, or merely self-delusional?
On-air challenge: You will be given two words starting with the letter P. Name a third word starting with P that can follow the first one and precede the second one, in each case to complete a familiar two-word phrase. For example, given "peer" and "point," you would say "pressure," as in "peer pressure" and "pressure point."
"Hava Nagila" scores a raucous wedding hora in Roberta Grossman's Hava Nagila (The Movie). The film traces the evolution of the tune from folk song to party favorite.
Credit Robert Zuckerman / Katahdin Productions/More Horses Productions
Documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman traveled to Ukraine, Israel, Greenwich Village and Hollywood to explore the origins and legacy of a famous Jewish song in Hava Nagila (The Movie).
Harry Belafonte, whom Grossman dubs the "ambassador" of Hava Nagila, reflects on performing the song in postwar Germany. "And here were these young German kids, singing this ... Hebrew song of rejoicing. 'Let us have peace.' And I got very emotional."
Whether you love it or you hate it, you know it: "Hava Nagila." Maybe you grew up listening to Harry Belafonte's rendition, or found yourself in a chair being hoisted into the air by a singing crowd at your wedding or bat mitzvah. The kitschy Jewish standard lends itself particularly well to group singalongs and celebrity covers — but where did it come from?
Denise Kiernan was head writer for ABC's Who Wants to be Millionaire during its first season. She has worked as a journalist and written several nonfiction books.
Before the fight to win women equal footing in the workplace, there was the fight against Hitler and Hirohito. In the depths of World War II, everyone in America had to pitch in, men and women alike. And in 1943 the government offered war jobs, lots of them, in a town called Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Where is it on a map? What do they do there? What will I do there? The government didn't give any answers to those questions — and still the recruits, many of them young women, streamed in.
