Homage to Radiolab

I reference Radiolab way too much on here (see other related posts here), but today is a must-post.

First, congratulations to Jad Abumrad, recently named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow!  Here's a description of the Fellows Program from the MacArthur Foundation website:

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

The announcement led me to this article by Ira Glass, host of the great--but not as great as Radiolab--radio show/podcast This American Life.  In the article, Glass breaks down every specific thing that is simply awe-inspiring about the show; it's tedious but extremely accurate. Here's a basic summary/outline:

Every Great Thing about Radiolab:

• The Aesthetics: "Simply put: it’s a show that’s out for fun. It’s no surprise that a much younger audience loves Radiolab. It’s no surprise that a huge part of its fan base is people who don’t consider themselves public radio listeners."
• The Banter: "Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks."
• The Music: "Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made. No other public radio show has this."
• The Editorial Sensibility: "Listening toRadiolab I have the unusual experience where nearly every story is something I’ve never heard of or thought about before, and the stories lead to ideas I’m utterly unfamiliar with. That’s a standard very few of us even aspire to, much less achieve."
• The Flow: "Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out."
• The Generational Gap: "Sometimes when I listen to the show, I feel like Jad has taken all the key elements of Robert’s 1980 sensibility – the humor, the insistence on entertaining, the surprising story choices, the amused intimate interviews and the chatty narration style – and retooled them for the digital age and a completely different generation. It’s Jad’s ear and astonishing production chops that define the sound of Radiolab, but the DNA of that sound comes from Robert."
• The Number of Episodes: "For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?"