Jad Abumrad Says a Springy Travel Pillow Is His Most Indispensable Tool

Abumrad, who retired from Radiolab in 2022 and left the show to Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller, has since produced Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, composed for film, theater and dance, and served as a distinguished research professor at Vanderbilt University. In the questionnaire, he said he needs a flat, springy pillow and does not understand the hotel and Airbnb trend toward large, fluffy pillows that he said wreck your neck for a week. He also named Fantastical, a calendar app, as a digital tool he truly loves, saying it makes scheduling meetings with many busy people fun. For audio, he said he is addicted to plug-ins and owns too many, but returns most often to Granite, a 15-year-old granular synthesis app he described as musical and has used to score dozens of original Radiolab pieces.

He called indoor plumbing wildly underappreciated. The first app he installs on a new phone or computer is Alfred, which he described as a lightweight replacement for Apple's Spotlight, similar to Raycast but without features he finds annoying. He said he wishes he could eliminate all buzzes and dings from his phone, and would like a button that turns a smartphone into a very dumb phone because he needs it to be smart only a few minutes a day.

His pinned browser tabs are functional: The New York Times, Ground.News, a Vanderbilt Library resource page linking to Nexis and journals, and ESPN. He had 14 tabs open at the time, which he said followed a big research day. He uses Instagram sometimes. He said he was active on Twitter and had a decent following before Elon Musk's ownership, but was locked out after the login process changed and stopped wanting to get back in. His online happy places are Bandcamp and Andrew Huang's YouTube channel.

Abumrad's favorite gadget is a tie between a Motorola flip phone from 1997 and a butterfly knife he saved up for a decade earlier. He said snapping the phone open and shut satisfied a deep, restless urge, and the rotational flourish of the wrist involved in opening and closing the knife did the same. The most disappointing gadget he owned was a Muse brainwave headset.

He recalled saving quarters all week to play Donkey Kong at a local Kroger around the same time, saying he was never good but remembered the adrenaline of reaching a new level with barrels flying everywhere. Asked which tech trend he wished would go away, he cited people walking their dogs while looking at their phones. He said he wished he had created the soundtrack to Birth, praising Alexandre Desplat as a shape-shifting genius and calling the score haunting. He named his children as the creation he is most proud of, describing himself as a co-creator and saying his partner Karla might say he was more of a production assistant. He said he remains fond of much of his early music and stories, which were what he needed to make at the time.