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via NPR - In A North Vietnamese Prison, Sharing Poems With ‘Taps On The Walls’

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The United States was fresh off signing the peace accords to end the long and bloody war in Vietnam when, on Feb. 12, 1973, more than 140 American prisoners of war were set free.

Among the men to start a long journey back home that day was John Borling.

An Air Force fighter pilot, Borling was shot down on his 97th mission over Vietnam on the night of June 1, 1966. He spent the next six years and eight months in a notorious North Vietnamese prison.

Sarcastically called the “Hanoi Hilton” by American POWs, it was a place of torture, deprivation and often solitary confinement.

Filed in: npr taps on the wall prision john borling




Filed in: tomeu coll vorkuta russia arctic circle Picture Show NPR

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via NPR’s Picture Show - 100 Words: In A Russian Arctic City

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by TOMEU COLL

It’s a 40-hour train ride from Moscow to Vorkuta. The city, north of Russia’s Arctic Circle, was constructed in the 1930s in large part by prisoners who were part of the Soviet gulag system of forced labor. Many workers died and were buried next to the railroad they were building to connect the city to the outside world.

The long ride offers plenty of time to contemplate this painful history. Vorkuta and other Soviet cities in the Arctic were built upon mining. But many are now shrinking or being abandoned altogether.

I became interested in Russia’s far north because I was drawn to both the history and the modern, day-to-day realities. This relationship between big cities and abandoned places is what interests me.

via NPR - Raising A Glass To The Charms Of The Bar In ‘Drinking With Men’

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Rosie Schaap is a part-time bartender, and the author the “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. But she doesn’t hang out in bars just to make a living — or even just to make a drink.

“Bar car commuters, as I’m sure you know, are different from other commuters,” Schaap adds. They’re louder, drunker and smokier, “and that’s what really drew me to the bar car,” she says. “They just seemed to be having such a good time, and they really seemed like a community.”

••• reminds me of riding Amtrak across the country when I was younger..

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via NPR - The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears

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In 2008, reports of polar bears’ inevitable march toward extinction gripped headlines. Stories of thinning Arctic ice and even polar bear cannibalism combined to make these predators into a powerful symbol in the debate about climate change.

The headlines caught Zac Unger’s attention, and he decided to write a book about the bears.

Unger made a plan to move to Churchill, Manitoba, a flat, gray place on the Hudson Bay in northern Canada accessible only by train or plane. For a few months out of the year, as the bay starts to freeze, tiny Churchill boasts as many polar bears as it does people.

Filed in: polar bears npr arctic zac unger

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Filed in: John Lusk Hathaway christmas tree NPR Picture Show

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via NPR”s Picture Show - The Life Of Christmas Trees, Before The Merriment

McKinney Hollow, Carter County, Tenn., 2011

While many are putting the final touches on their decorated Christmas trees across the country this week, photographer John Lusk Hathaway is more concerned about the trees before they were chopped down.

Hathaway, who has a background in science, always thought it was strange to see trees growing in such rigid patterns, as opposed to the natural way they grow in forests.

via Shots, NPR’s Health Blog - Medical Electronics Built To Last Only A Little While

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Most engineers build things to last.

But a group of mechanical and electrical engineers are working on electronics that will break down in as little as a couple of days. On purpose!

The electronic circuits they’re developing don’t crash. It’s more dramatic than that. They dissolve in liquid.

Sounds a little bit crazy, but circuits that work for a while then disappear could be pretty useful in medical devices implanted in the human body.

Filed in: health npr medical equipment electronics

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via Shots, NPR’s Health Blog - Medical Electronics Built To Last Only A Little While ↑ click for link ↑ Most engineers build things to last. But a group of mechanical and electrical engineers are working on electronics that will break down in as little as a couple of days. On purpose! The electronic circuits they’re developing don’t crash. It’s more dramatic than that. They dissolve in liquid. Sounds a little bit crazy, but circuits that work for a while then disappear could be pretty useful in medical devices implanted in the human body.

Filed in: npr the picture show picture show springfield speed graphic

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via NPR’s Picture Show - Bringing Springfield’s Photos Back To Life

The first photography staff at the Illinois State Journal carried heavy, clumsy and slow Speed Graphic cameras. They shot on glass plates, and only had a few precious exposures to use throughout their day.

After their images were published in the 1920s and ’30s, the glass plates were boxed up and effectively lost in the newspaper archives. Stories vary about how they were saved from a wrecking ball, but the plates eventually wound up at the local Springfield library, which is where Rich Saal found them and began the monumental task of bringing them back to life.

via NPR’s Morning Edition - Roosevelt’s Badlands Ranch Faces Potential Threat

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Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota is often called the Walden Pond of the West. But Roosevelt’s ranch is now feeling the pressure of an oil boom that is industrializing the local landscape. Critics say a proposed gravel pit and a bridge could destroy the very thing that made such a lasting impression on Roosevelt: the restorative power of wilderness.
“That is, a landscape without any development, and all natural sounds: birds, wind in the cottonwood trees.” 

Filed in: NPR theodore roosevelt elkhorn ranch north dakota

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via NPR The Picture Show - This Image Is Not Photoshopped

This photo looks like two images stitched together; above is a normal forest, and below, a strange, Martian one. But it’s a single image from a single place and time — the hills of western Hungary, six months after a devastating industrial accident.

In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people.

Filed in: npr the picture show industrial accident aluminum oxide

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via NPR The Picture Show - This Image Is Not Photoshopped This photo looks like two images stitched together; above is a normal forest, and below, a strange, Martian one. But it’s a single image from a single place and time — the hills of western Hungary, six months after a devastating industrial accident. In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people.

via NPR Music - Fiona Apple: ‘I Don’t Really Have A Plan’

photo by Dan Monick

It’s been seven years since Fiona Apple has released a new album. The singer-songwriter, who broke out in 1996 with Tidal, says the delay is a quirk of her creative process.

“The only reason that it takes me seven years to do stuff is because I just don’t really have a plan,” Apple tells NPR’s Guy Raz. “I got a lot of problems, but I’m really good at intuiting what I need to do to be happy with whatever I create. I know when to stop myself, I know when to start, I know when to leave something alone. I guess I just kind of indulge that completely, and so I just take my time.”

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via NPR Weekend Edition Sunday - It’s Law: New Mexico Green Chilies Are Special

by Audie Cornish

The heart of chili pepper country in southern New Mexico is the tiny village of Hatch, which bills itself the “Chile Capital of the World.” A new state law aims to protect this food heritage by preventing foreign peppers from being labeled as New Mexico-grown.

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Filed in: NPR the picture show monterrey alejandro cartegena carpool

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via NPR The Picture Show - Car Pool: Aerial Views Of How Mexico Moves by Alejandro Cartagena

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“I’ve figured out that there are more of them when it’s a payday,” photographer Alejandro Cartagena writes to me from Monterrey, Mexico, where he is based. 

by CLAIRE O’NEILL

More carpoolers, that is — the subject of his latest project, which started somewhat accidentally. Cartagena was commissioned by a group of researchers about usage of a Monterrey street… For the people in these photos, Cartagena contends, carpooling is a necessity.

“If these guys would do the bus route,” he writes, “it would be too expensive for them, since there are no proper mass low-cost transportation systems in place.”

via NPR All Things Considered - The Passionate, Turbulent Life Of James Brown

James Brown used to tell people that even being stillborn as a child couldn’t stop him. He rose to the highest heights in the music industry and stayed there longer than most. But in the end he succumbed to atrocious financial planning, a drug habit and a violent temper.

RJ Smith, author of the new biography The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, tells NPR’s Guy Raz that Brown believed he was indestructible.

“Having been through as much in his life as he went through — criminal experiences, been up and down with the music industry, made millions, lost millions — I think on some level he felt whatever happened happened, and he couldn’t die.”

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Filed in: npr the picture show cuba kitchen food ellen silverman

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via NPR The Picture Show - What Our Kitchens Might Say About Us

Imagine your kitchen, if you have one. What’s in it? Appliances? Food on the counters? Is it messy or sparse? Fully stocked or running on empty?

These are questions that fascinate commercial photographer Ellen Silverman… It’s what inspired her personal series, Spare Beauty: The Cuban Kitchen, which she shot while on a workshop trip in Havana — now on display at the Umbrella Arts Gallery in New York City for a few more days.

“People are still rationed. They get a ration card and you get a certain amount of food a month,” she explains. “There are supermarkets, but there are very few … people buying food on a daily basis. Not everybody has refrigerators.”

Silverman says Cubans tend to keep appliances for a long time. “They’re adapting, they’re improvising, and they’re doing what they have to do.” Isn’t that, after all, what all the great chefs do?

via NPR Picture Show - Photography In Mexico (Or, At Least Some Of It)

There’s a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which, assistant curator of photography Jessica McDonald emphasizes, barely scratches the surface of photography in Mexico. It’s still called “Photography in Mexico” — and it’s not a bad teaser for all our southern neighbor has to offer.

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Boda en Coyoacan (Wedding in Coyoacan), 1983 (Pedro Meyer)

Filed in: mexico photography san francisco museum of art the picture show npr

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via NPR Picture Show - Photography In Mexico (Or, At Least Some Of It) There’s a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which, assistant curator of photography Jessica McDonald emphasizes, barely scratches the surface of photography in Mexico. It’s still called “Photography in Mexico” — and it’s not a bad teaser for all our southern neighbor has to offer. • • • Boda en Coyoacan (Wedding in Coyoacan), 1983 (Pedro Meyer)