Jad Abumrad is the creator and former host of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast.

Abumrad also created More Perfect, a series about the Supreme Court, which the New York Times called “possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” Other projects include the Vanishing of Harry Pace, Unerased, and Dolly Parton’s America (along with osm Audio’s Shima Oliaee) a Peabody Award-winning 9-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one its greatest icons. His podcast Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, about the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, won the Peabody Award in the Arts category and was chosen the Best Podcast of 2025 by the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Guardian. His new podcast is The Obit Project hosted by Jad Abumrad and Jule Banville working with the Montana Media Lab and the University of Montana School of Journalism.

Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sounds into compelling
documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. He’s won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011 he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Abumrad is inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.”

In April 2022 Abumrad began a joint appointment at Vanderbilt University as a Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and of Communication of Science and Technology at the College of Arts and Science, and he will have an advisory role with Vanderbilt’s Communications and Marketing team. Both Radiolab and More Perfect are on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Best Podcasts of All Time.

His show Words Fail Me is a deeply personal meditation on what it feels like to live inside information overload — and what we can learn from the last few times humanity went through this. It opens with a memory: a shortwave radio pulling in a chaotic jumble of voices from across the globe, everything from Chinese talk radio to garbled Cold War transmissions. That sensation of being "pulled apart" by simultaneous signals becomes the doorway into a bigger question: what happens to our minds when we're bombarded by thousands of channels, frequencies, and timelines at once?

From there, I dive into Virginia Woolf's writing on time and consciousness (Mrs. Dalloway, written as the telegraph and radio first scrambled people's sense of "now"), Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, Delia Derbyshire's electronic music, and Chopin — building toward a meditation on how earlier technological shocks (the telegraph, the radio) reshaped human perception, and what that history might tell us as AI does the same thing again, faster. It's part personal essay, part sound-and-music performance, part philosophical detective story — built for an audience that wants to feel something about the chaos of modern attention, not just think about it.