2022 Ethos of Exploration

Click here to buy your ticket!

Note: Hidden Compass Allies receive perks, including FREE access to this event and EXCLUSIVE access to the VIP session afterward. Learn more about Hidden Compass: The Alliance, and become an Ally.

We’re proud to present “Down the Rabbit Hole, an Evening with Radiolab Founder Jad Abumrad.” Abumrad will join Hidden Compass co-founders Sivani Babu and Sabine K. Bergmann for a thoughtful conversation about the intersection of journalism, storytelling, and exploration.

From Radiolab to Dolly Parton’s America, Abumrad has pioneered a “new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism — exploring (and explaining) the world through musical storytelling. On Tuesday December 6, join Abumrad and Hidden Compass’s co-founders for an insightful discussion during the 2022 Ethos of Exploration event, “Down the Rabbit Hole.”

Abumrad’s radio journalism is multifaceted. There’s an exploratory feel, as he allows listeners to make discoveries alongside the reporters and editors of each story. And then there’s the innovative sound design that whole-heartedly embraces the musicality of storytelling. Combining them — or, as Radiolab’s website puts it, “smashing information into music” — has launched a phenomenon so popular that Abumrad has become, according to The New York Times, “the closest thing public radio has to royalty.”

The smashing together of things, whether genres or topics or business models, is something we welcome at Hidden Compass. Abumrad’s conversation with our co-founders will build on their collective fondness for mixing, and meditate on how one particular convergence — that of storytelling, journalism, and exploration — helps us make sense of our world.

Following this conversation, the trio will announce the winners of the first annual Pathfinder Prize, a $15,000 award to fund a modern expedition into the unknown. In the weeks leading up to the Ethos of Exploration event, Allies — members of Hidden Compass: The Alliance — will watch Pathfinder finalists present, and vote for the winning expedition.

After the public event, Abumrad and the Hidden Compass co-founders will host a one-hour VIP Zoom session exclusively for Allies, who will have the opportunity to converse with the prolific broadcaster.

Learn more about Hidden Compass: The Alliance, and become an Ally to receive these benefits and many more — and become a defender of science, history, journalism, and hope.

Purchase an individual ticket for this event.

Bio

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 each month as a podcast. He currently hosts Everything. Together. Radio on Apple Music Hits, offering a kaleidoscopic mix of uptempo, electro, dance, funk, hip-hop, experimental noise, soul, and everything in between.

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 was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant).

He also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court. And in 2019, Abumrad created 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. In April 2022, he 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.