Audio by Adam

The Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in New Hampshire s home to a complex set of delicate interlocking ecosystems that include this barrier beach, salt marsh and wetland, a large marine estuary and a pine and oak forest. The place is especially rich in migratory songbirds. I went there on a blustery New Hampshire day to take my fill of the place and acquaint myself and listeners with its birds and other wonders.

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Mother’s Day in America is a special day set aside for honoring mothers, and celebrating all those qualities and actions that make mother “Mom.” But animals and even plants have also evolved their own dizzyingly diverse maternal styles over the millennia, all of which serve to make sure the next generation thrives. Adam interviewed a leading evolutionary biologist and a zoologist about some of those strategies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:23 — 4.9MB)

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Nanotechnology, which deals with matter in billionths of a meter, allows for the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale. As such, it may represent humanity’s most profound and far-reaching scientific frontier.  This documentary looks at how it works, and what is possible, and what to prepare for, willy-nilly.

The story won VOA’s Annual Award or “Best Original Script.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:43 — 16.2MB)

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In which Adam goes out with an intrepid group of artist-citizen-scientists as they explore Brooklyn’s  Gowanus Canal on canoes looking for seven species of crickets and kaydids. Also includes some Madison Square Park exploration.

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Professor Maxine Greene of Teachers College, Columbia University, 91, has spent her educating and inspiring educators, artists and children in humanistic “wide-awakedness” and the social imagination.  Now 91, Maxine  has also been Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education since 1975. She just received a Gold Medal from Barnarnd College.  Maxine grew up with my mother in Brooklyn, and was a frequent dinner guest at our home on East 70th Street.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)

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Pamelia Kursten is the 21st century’s greatest theremin virtuosa, who has turned an instrument most associate with creepy sci-fi “woo-woo” music into an art form. Hear what she has to say and how she does it in this sound-rich piece, originally produced for the Voice of America’s “Our World” science program.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:30 — 7.8MB)

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Americans with disabilities are, in one sense, just like everybody else: they come from varied backgrounds, and cope with the challenges life presents them in many different ways. But living a full, satisfying life with a physical or mental handicap is no ordinary struggle.  Adam spoke with several people living with disabilities in the San Francisco area, and learned a few of their remarkable stories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:21 — 4.9MB)

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The late Terence McKenna is one of the smartest and most inspiring guys I’ve ever interviewed. Ethnobotanist, psychedelic philosopher of DMT, shamanism and fundamental erotic connection between the “Deep Animal” and the “Deep Vegetative” Kingdoms. This is just a snippet from one of our many interviews. Over several years, I talked to him about space exploration, the rain forest, ecology, psychology, human evolution, ethno-botany, art, philosophy and the Eschaton. Many see him as the kind of serious man that Timothy Leary could have been if he hadn’t been so absorbed in his personal dramas with his family and the law and so addicted to playing to the media as brand.

I was allowed by VOA to make this tribute to him soon after he died of a brain tumor as a relatively young man. Very sad. Many of us really miss him.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:35 — 6.9MB)

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In which Adam explores the biological and the spiritual pull toward the great “Out There” through interviews with an astronaut, Terence McKenna, astophysicists, and many others.  Cameo appearance by his son Noah as an infant.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:35 — 16.1MB)

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This is a extended, edited excerpt from my intervierw 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 and medical skill come together in the operating room, and which were compassionately exalted in his remarkable 1997 book.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:27 — 16.9MB)

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