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Pianist Guy Livingston commissioned dozens of composers to write 60-second compositions for him. He talks with Weekend Edition Sunday's Lynn Neary about the resulting album, Dont Panic! 60 Seconds for Piano, and about why anyone would possibly take on such a project.

Her sister's hospitalization for depression sent Virginia Gonzales Torres on a mission to reform her country's mental health system. Some 25 years later, she's founded a series of group homes and set the standard for how developing countries can treat the mentally ill. NPR's Joanne Silberner reports.

Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000. Wilkinson is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and has been there since 1980. He's the author of several books including, Midnights, Moonshine, and Big Sugar. We'll listen to a rebroadcast of a 1995 interview with Maxwell (3/29/95), and to an interview with Alec Wilkinson shortly after Maxwell's death (8/4/2000).

Weekend Edition Sunday host Lynn Neary talks with rising opera star Juan Diego Florez, who some say will take over from Luciano Pavarotti as the world's top tenor. Sunday, May 12, 2002 .

Since the 1973 release of his first album, Closing Time, Tom Waits has won fans over with his original songwriting and distinctive, gravelly vocal style. He has two new CDs out this month: Alice and Blood Money.

In the fourth and final segment of his series for Weekend Edition Sunday on the street kids of Mumbai, India, Julian Crandall Hollick spends time with children who scrounge for food scraps and empty bottles aboard the trains at Bombay Central station.

Diane Arbus' mysterious photo of girl twins is one of modern photography's most recognizable images. On Morning Edition, as part of NPR's Present at the Creation series, Madeleine Brand has the story behind the famous 1967 photo of sisters who are identical but not the same.

In the small town of Lititz, Pa., the luxury timepiece company Rolex operates a school for watch repair in partnership with a Swiss watchmakers' organization. As Jack Speer reports for Morning Edition, the opening of the "Watch Technicum" is the latest signal of a rebirth for the high end of the watch industry.

David Newman is a political columnist for The Jerusalem Post. He is also chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and editor of The International Journal of Geopolitics. He'll discuss the history of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He's written about the settlements in The New York Times. Newman is also author of the book, Population, Settlement and Conflict: Israel and the West Bank (1991, Cambridge University Press). Read the Transcript

Robert Jay Lifton is professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center and director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York. He'll talk with us about the psychological impact of the threat of terrorism and the potential for nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Lifton specializes in the study of extremist religions and cults. He's written books on many topics, including the Japanese cult which released poison gas in the Tokyo subways, Nazi doctors, Hiroshima survivors and Vietnam veterans.