RadioLab’s Jad Abumrad Answers Your Questions – Live on Big Think!
Jad Abumrad won a 2011 MacArthur Genius grant for his work as creator/producer of WNYC’s Radiolab. The Macarthur foundation describes his work thus:
As co-host and producer of the nationally syndicated program Radiolab, Abumrad employs his background as a composer to orchestrate dialogue, music, and sound effects into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the science of emergent phenomena within ant colonies and other complex systems.
As a result of his meticulous editing and conversational approach to interviews with experts, the structure of Radiolab episodes often mimics the scientific process itself, complete with moments of ambiguity, digressions, reversals, and surprising conclusions that evoke in audiences a sense of adventure and recreate the thrill of discovery. One humor- and insight-filled segment, entitled “A Very Lucky Wind,” tackles the subject of stochasticity, or the mathematics of randomness, by following the highly improbable route of a drifting balloon across the south of England.
