4 (de)Vices of Radiolab

Published in

Storytelling in Sound

5 min readJul 7, 2021

Radiolab is one of WNYC’s most successful exports. It has a listener base around the world, several offshoot shows and has elevated its main contributors to star status.

It also tells really solid stories in a very distinctive style.

Despite the name, and original stated intention of providing a platform for stories on “science, philosophy and ethics”, it has expanded beyond this to becoming one of the most-loved long-form journalism shows out there — but it’s built that off the back of bringing a scientific curiosity to non-science content.

There are loads of great sound design and story-structure devices they use to make the show compelling, but also a few crutches they fall back on. Some of these are a product of being, at heart, a radio show, where timing and audience retention is a slightly different game to the world of podcasting.

In this article, I’ll give you a few of my observations about what has made their storytelling so great, and a few notes on ways I think they could make it even better.

Detail

One of the things that is immediately apparent in a Radiolab story is the amount of detail that goes into them. There is a huge amount of information conveyed, and it’s always done logically. Thoughts lead into each other in the same order as the questions that are forming in your head.

This is one of the things that makes it so satisfying to listen to — just as you’re forming the “Yeah, but what if…” thought, up pops someone who will answer it. This level of audience understanding and anticipation is one of the things that Radiolab does better than virtually anyone else.

Wonder Without the Ethereal

I’m a big fan of shows that play on the ethereal nature of stories. Short Cuts and Love and Radio are my favourites in this category, and their work has a drifting and sometimes directionless quality that can be reassuring. There’s not always the need to fulfil every detail, or answer every question, sometimes it’s liberating to be left to wonder.

Radiolab doesn’t do this, and for good reason. Radiolab isn’t stories about the ethereal, it’s stories about reality, even when that reality is a multifaceted, complex and not-entirely-square-with-the-truth entity.

Radiolab plays the Wonder card is very specific ways.

There’s the drifting sensation of a story building. This seeds the questions in your mind. The sound design brings a sense of a building truth, a bubble that will be burst. We’re left to ponder as the mystery builds with a sense of anxiety, and then… POP!

This is the point of wonder in a Radiolab story, but you won’t be left to hang. Radiolab uses these beats to give you the sense that something profound is about to occur — and then it feeds you the answers that round off the story.

It’s a device they use in virtually every episode.

Anxiety

In order to build the Wonder device, Radiolab first needs to create the sense of anxiety. This isn’t a sense of insecurity in the world, it’s the sense that there is an urgent question to be answered. They do this in a really consistent manner that definitely achieves the required result, but at the expense of more satisfying storytelling at times.

This device is difficult to achieve, it involves really tight writing and, no doubt, several writers and researchers in order to bring the information together in such a consistent manner. At its heart, though, it’s very simple: Radiolab doesn’t let contributors speak for themselves if it slows the story down. Pace is everything.

You can hear it in every episode. The host starts telling the story, they draw on quotes from interviews, sometimes multiple interviews, to illustrate the point. Rather than simply stop there they often interject, and you get this back and forth of interview and paraphrase which keeps the pace high. At times, I think this goes too far, and I’d prefer to see more breathing space, respecting the interviewees’ authority a little more, but it’s always done with purpose.

Some of this might be a throwback to being a radio show and needing to conform to certain time constraints, but a lot of it is down to telling very complex stories. Allowing guests to talk at tangents or stumble too frequently means not being able to convey the information. Interjecting to paraphrase sections, often in line with passages from guests, is an unusual feature, but one that works well to keep the pace high.

Radiolab is usually about ideas, not the people who bring them. While some contributors are allowed more space, they are usually writers themselves; experts on the story, rather than experts in the field.

Playing the Fool

In the earlier days, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich established a very easily defined relationship — Robert was the fool. Only Robert actually asked insightful and heavily scripted questions. The whole thing is a very effective act, used in many other shows. It helps to draw the audience in with an ally who can ask the kind of questions you’d be slightly hesitant to ask, even though they were on your mind.

This has the liberating effect of creating a very low-threat environment for learning. It’s every teacher’s dream to create this kind of environment. It sets up listeners as powerful sceptics, uninhibited by their own lack of expertise in the story they’re being told. They can buy in to the clear friendship and respect of the presenters, while also being handed a licence for controlled wonder.

Most importantly, it pays deep respect to the ability to change one’s mind, and that’s the whole essence of what Radiolab is about — complex information about the world, delivered in a way that helps you to process it and, just maybe, emerge with a slightly different version of what the world is or should be.

With Robert Krulwich retiring this technique has taken a different slant, where Jad more often plays his own version of the fool, elevating Latif Nasser, Lulu Miller and Molly Webster to a higher status as storytellers.