Robert Krulwich
The son of a scientist and a doctor, Jad Abumrad did most of his growing up in Tennessee, before studying creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. Following graduation, Abumrad wrote music for films, and reported and produced documentaries for a variety of local and national public radio programs, including On The Media, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and WNYC's "24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero."
While working on staff at WNYC, Abumrad began tinkering with an idea for a new kind of radio program. That idea evolved into one of public radio’s most popular shows today – Radiolab. The program won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award and explores big questions in science, philosophy and mankind. Under Abumrad’s direction, the show uses a combination of deep-dive journalism, narrative storytelling, dialogue and music to craft compositions of exploration and discovery. Abumrad is also the Executive Producer and creator of Radiolab's More Perfect, a podcast that explores how cases deliberated inside the rarefied world of the Supreme Court affect our lives far away from the bench.
Abumrad was honored as a 2011 MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Abumrad is inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.”
Abumrad also produced and hosted The Ring & I, an insightful, funny, and lyrical look at the enduring power of Wagner's Ring Cycle. It aired nationally and internationally and earned ten awards, including the prestigious 2005 National Headliner Grand Award in Radio.
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Look up at the night sky and ask, "Anybody there?" Then consider this answer (from the 1830s): There are 22 trillion individuals in our solar system.
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Suppose two Chinese parents get on an Australian airplane and, while flying over U.S. territory, they have a baby on the plane. Can that baby be an American citizen?
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There are happy snails. There are lonely snails. And there are lost snails. This one is lost. Totally. But it sings.
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Thomas Doyle tells stories with teeny frozen people. They aren't cold. They are frozen in time, but he freezes them with exquisitely suspenseful, Sherlock Holmes-like care.
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Tether a balloon to the floor of a car, step on the gas, and watch the balloon do something it shouldn't. Ask why. Then discover the answer. Then feel smart.
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Nations need borders for security, for revenue, for defense, for identity. But for fun? Introducing borders that giggle.
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The M-Thing. It's patient. It's modest. It's relentless. It stays.
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Birds are everywhere, but the greatest concentration of different birds — the "bird mecca" of America — is not in our great parks, not in our forests, not where you'd suppose. Not at all.
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A Beverly Hills auction house has an unusual fossil for sale. It's not an ancient animal. It's something an ancient animal left behind — and it's very, very long.
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This may be the most heart-rending, most beautiful eclipse in our solar system. But you can't travel to see it. Not yet.