/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.

New (serious) Music for Toys

Avant-garde musical artists have always liked to stretch the limits of what traditional musical instruments can do. But some artists have gone even farther and explored the less orthodox music of familiar objects. This story explores the experimental music written especially for toys as performed in a concert in hipster Brooklyn. Features toy piano virtuouso […]

Profile: Dave Isay, Audio Documentarian and “Storycorps” Founder

Meet David Isay, a humane and immensely talented radio documentary maker and oral historian who has probably won every broadcasting award out there. Isay has dedicated his career to celebrating the lives of everyday Americans by recording their stories, and chronicling the experiences of underdogs and colorful characters, many of them living outside the American […]

Labor Day: Everyday Americans Reflect on the Meaning of Work

Labor Day in America is a day most Americans associate with a three day weekend and a farewell to summertime. However, this national holiday is also a time to honor workers and the central place their labor has in our lives. For this report, Adam asked a range of New Yorkers about what “work” means […]

Profile: Barney Rosset, Publisher and First Amendment Activist-Hero (VOA 2009)

This is a profile of the entrepreneurial publisher and First Amendment activist Barney Rosset. During the mid 20th century Rosset tirelessly fought America’s anti-obscenity laws in order to publish now-classic works by D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs and scores of other non-Establishment writers, several of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize. […]

Profile: Art Spiegelman “Maus” Creator & Comics and Graphics Novel Artist

Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice. In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY […]

What is a Father? Everyday Dads Reflect

Father’s Day in America is a day set aside to appreciate dad for all they offer their families, and society as a whole. Father’s Day can also be a time to reflect on what fatherhood actually means in today’s culture.  Adam asked a random sampling of Americans what the word “father” means to them.