/Audio by Adam/

Radio and Audio Features and Documentaries

Author: Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has been a radio features journalist and audio documentarist and oral historian since 1986, both as public radio freelancer and, since 1993, as a career journalist at the Voice of America. Adam has won nearly twenty international, national and in-house awards for his work, which highlights the experiences and realities of everyday people with extraordinary stores to tell, and which makes extensive use of found sound and music to create a “theater of the mind.” Adam teaches Audio Documentary Making at the New School’s Graduate School of Media Studies, and Oral History at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. His combines his lifelong interests in mythology, theater and community building in his celebrancy practice, which uses ceremonies to mark life’s milestones and the processes of nature. Adam was ‘born, bred and buttered’ in New York City.

Migrant Farmworkers: How They Live and
What They Do

If California were a nation of its own, it would have the twelth largest economy in the world; agriculture would be a huge percentage of it. Much of the labor that produces is done by migrant farm workers who come to the US, sometimes illegally, and follow the crops, before returning home to Mexico and […]

Astrobiology: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Life

The search for life forms (or life-like) forms has intensified in recent years as our technical prowess has increased and our understanding of the forms and chemistry of what life could be has expanded and grown more refined. This piece examines the branch of science that deals with this, and looks at various ways we […]

Nanotechnology and Molecular Machinery

Nanotechnology, which deals with matter in billionths of a meter, allows for the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale. As such, it may represent humanity’s most profound and far-reaching scientific frontier. This documentary looks at how it works, and what is possible, and what to prepare for, willy-nilly. The story won VOA’s Annual Award […]

The Island at the Center of the World: Dutch New York

2009 marks the 400th anniversary of English sea captain Henry Hudson’s arrival in what’s now New York harbor. British colonists would play a major role in the development of Manhattan Island. But historian Russell Shorto says it was largely the 17th century Dutch and their pioneering settlement of New Amsterdam that influenced what Manhattan, New […]

Two Showgirls of Yesteryear

It may be hard or many of us to imagine the glitter and the sometimes risque fun associated with the old nightclubs, burlesques and vaudeville houses of the 1920s and 1930s, especially in New York, where such entertainment reached a certain height of glamor. But what was that life like for those on the other […]