/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.

Affective Computing at the MIT Media Lab

Much silicon has been programmed and ink spilled about the human/machine interface and how to make computers truly interactive. No one has been more busy or more intelligent and playful about this than the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Here we talk with Justine Cassell (now at Carnegie) about what interactivity […]

Conversation with President Adamkus of Lithuania (1998-2003)

Valdus Adamkus was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in Lithuania during World War Two, and fled his native land for the US following the war, where he had a nice life, and rose high in the EPA bureaucracy in Chicago. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Lithuanian independence, there was a question about […]

A Day in the Life of a Good Humor Man

We all know what it’s like to jump at the sound of an ice cream truck, but what is it like for the mustachioed purveyor of those eclairs, sandwiches etc once he tootles away down to the corner and a new sale? This is a profile of one Good Humor Man as he makes his […]

The Wonders of the Hand (book)

A world famous surgeon who became famous for being able to reattach entire hands and restore their functions writes about this most amazing miracle-that-comes-in-twos.

“The Century in Sound: An American’s Perspective”

This is a 38-minute narration-free documentary of the 20th century using (other than my one minute spoken introduction) only archival sound, speeches and other audio artifacts of that talkative 100 years. The montage is of my own making and perspective as the American I happen to be, and hopefully, will take the listener of whatever […]

The Sacred Heart: An Atlas of the Body Seen Through Invasive Surgery (Book)

This is a extended, edited excerpt from my interview with (now Dr.) Max Aguilera-Hellweg, who saw and photographed the strange and difficult beauty of the body as it undergoes radical surgery. While this is a long form audio story, I hoped to give a sense of the ways the spirit, the “hotness” of fleshy life […]