/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.

The Genocidal Mentality: Why Good People Do Horrible Things

Not everyone who participates in genocide is a through-and-through evil person. Yet there is something in us, which, given the right circumstances and psychological wounds, can erupt into murderousness on a vast social scale. Such was the case in Nazi Germany, for example, and such was certainly the case in Rwanda in 1994, when over […]

Grieving Vets Remember Their War

For many Americans, Veterans Day means merely a long weekend of relaxation or a parade of patriotic display and brouhaha. But for many of the veterans who fought and killed in war, the psychological wounds engendered by the carnage continues long after the guns have gone silent. I asked a group of everyday vets, many […]

The Status of Women in Israel

Due to religion, socialism, the Zionist ideal, the militarization of the society, Western feminism, Arab culture and many other factors, Israeli women have complex competing factors that inform their self-image and their social roles. This is a half hour documentary I did for National Public Radio back in the 1990s that is still relevant today.

Gary, West Virginia: A Coal Town Flickers Out

At its peak, the town of Gary was completely alive with the sound of coal mining, lunchtime whistles, and the ethnic music that its immigrant laborers made during their rare off hours. US Steel had built the town, and the workers were proud to be there, albeit under very difficult, even backbreaking and dangerous conditions. […]

Karme Choling Tibetan Buddhist Community in Vermont

Tibetan Buddhism has changed and blossomed in the American context. Nowhere has it taken deeper root than in the Karme Choling (Tail of the Tiger) center in Barnet Vermont, in the heart of the Green Mountains. This is not a monastery; men and women live together, cook together, make drama together and walk a path […]

The Doo Wop Revival

Oyez oyez ooh bop she-bop ooh bop she BAM! Doo wop was a great musical form that teens loved and parents often detested. In any case. its melodiousness has resurfaced big time on the revival circuit. This story here is one from one I attended at a cheesy (grand) venue in Atlantic City.