It's A Long Story

S-Town's rich and thoughtful story telling captured the attention of audiences from around the world. Brian Reed, its host and co-creator, originally set out to find a new story for This American Life. Instead, he spent three years investigating the life and tribulations of small town Alabama resident John B. McLemore. The podcast captured audiences with the twists and turns of life in Bibb County, presenting an audio story akin to great literature. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Award-winning writer, journalist and public speaker, Thordis Elva was voted Woman of the Year in her native Iceland for her tireless campaigning for gender equality. She believes in ending the silence that still shrouds sexual violence, of which she is a survivor, and sees dialogue as a means of healing. She has long researched the effect of forgiveness in human relationships, an interest which took her across the globe and into the depths of her own heart, resulting in the book South of Forgiveness which she wrote with Tom Stranger. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lindy West’s vibrant humour, refreshing candour and unapologetically trenchant attacks on body shamers and trolls have earned her the admiration of Lena Dunham, Ira Glass, and Caitlin Moran. What can each of us take away from the courage of someone who confronts rape jokes, the fat police, and anti-abortionists - and laughs to tell the tale? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Mei Fong is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered China for the Wall Street Journal for many years. Her book, "One Child", the story of China's most radical experiment details the repercussions of the one-child policy. Originally implemented to kerb population growth, the one-child policy resulted in immense suffering and hundreds of thousands of infant deaths. By the time the government announced it was ending the policy in 2015, China had a surplus of 33 million men and population numbers that were dropping drastically. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Has contemporary feminism grown so tame, cowardly and irrelevant that it barely challenges the status quo? Have feminists traded liberation for acceptance? What will it take to wake the movement up? In a fearless call for revolution, Jessa Crispin demands more of feminism - nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As a war correspondent, Janine di Giovanni has spent the last 30 years covering stories in the most dangerous places on earth. She first reported from Palestine in the late 1980's and has covered almost every major conflict area since - most recently working in Syria. Her book, The Morning They Came For Us, tells a sequence of powerful and harrowing stories about the effect of the Syrian Civil War on ordinary people. Of her work Janine has said, 'I'm deluded if I think that what I do as a journalist can stop war, all I am is a witness, my role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless.' See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Microbiologist Giulia Enders is seriously into guts. So into guts in fact, that she's been the catalyst for a global movement to encourage people to understand their insides and to not be afraid of talking about them. Her book, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ has sold well over one million copies in her native Germany and been published in over 30 different languages. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When Geena Davis was three years old she announced to her parents that she was going to be in movies.  In fact, the quote in her high school year book was "Future plans: go to the big city and become a star." Fast forward some years and she's so much more. Fronting the Women's Sports Foundation and launching the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media - to name just a few accomplishments. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You will know Josh Thomas as the blonde-haired, 20-something from "Please Like Me." An Aussie comedy, which has stolen audience hearts the world over. The New Yorker describes the show as having a "tender, finicky quality, a different charisma." That could well be describing Josh Thomas himself. Raised in Brisbane, he once described himself as fat and unknowingly gay. There is a lot more to this man Josh Thomas.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Some words to describe the woman who sits before you; creative - you've seen her on TV and in theatre. Prolific - she's written more than 20 books. Overachieving maybe as well - she wrote many of them while raising two children, and controversial, but we might save that until a little bit later. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Christopher Eric Borrelli is a features and culture writer for the "Chicago Tribune." By his own admission, a bland title. But there's nothing bland about what he writes and how he writes it. I was a typical latchkey kid, he says. But it is still pop culture that shapes him. Today he writes about what for most of us is the mundane, the ordinary. The everyday. With a richness and curiosity that defies the genre. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

20 years ago Julie Snyder applied for a job at a little known radio show called, 'This American Life'. They'd only been on the air for a year and she said of her application, "I was incredibly unqualified." It was there she developed a passion for audio storytelling, and where she met Sarah Koenig. 15 years later the two would start working on a new podcast project in Sarah's basement. The project launched in 2014, it's called 'Serial'.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Through a unique combination of audio storytelling, music and soundscapes Jad Abumrad has been credited with creating a new aesthetic for broadcast journalism. Colleague, Ira Glass speaks of his podcast 'Radiolab' confessing "I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. I'm a hack in comparison. Everyone else is too."  Son of a doctor father and scientist mother and raised in Nashville, Jad has said of his childhood that "I was always in the weird in-between space...being the Arab kid in a place where there are no Arabs...and conversely going back to Lebanon and being American." In our season two opener we ask Jad, how did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set you onto the intuitive path of breakthrough audio journalism? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lionel Shriver is the author of 12 books. Perhaps most famously "We Need To Talk About Kevin", for which he won the Orange Prize. Born Margaret Ann in May 1957, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager, she announced to her family that she would change her name to Lionel. A year later, she announced she would no longer be attending church with them. It has been said she writes mostly about characters who are hard to love. A series of what-if scenarios play out on her pages, troubling, confronting, often uncomfortable. "It makes me happy", she has said, "if I'm being successfully frightening." Dividing her time between New York and London, she's fiercely anti-authoritarian, a self-described Libertarian, pro-Brexit, anti-death, and it seems she doesn't have much time for the watercress and wasabi set who now populate our fast gentrifying inner-city suburbs.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lev Grossman is the author of five books, perhaps most notably his series beginning with "The Magicians." Described by almost every critic out there perhaps unfairly as "Harry Potter for adults." Born in June of 1969 he was introduced early to the works of C.S. Lewis and went on to spend years as a teenager playing Dungeons and Dragons. He has a day job as the book critic for Time Magazine. But lives a life engrossed in fantasy -- a passion he now shares with a legion of fans. "I bristle whenever fantasy is characterised as escapism," he says, "I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Once described as an obscure Cambridge lecturer after a high-level academic spat on live British radio in truth Priyamvada Gopal is anything but. There are few public intellectuals who think and write on the subjects of India and colonialism with as much influence and insight. A reader with the University of Cambridge in Anglophone and related literature she has a Ph.D. from Cornell and specialises in colonial and post-colonial literature. Priya Gopal has said that "since dictators, war criminals and bankers also read Shakespeare we can't claim that literature will inevitably make society more humane and imaginative. But it does engage most people's ethical capacities."  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alok Jha is a self-described water obsessive, a scientist and communicator; he's made an art form of unpacking some of the most complex questions of our age. A fascination with water has taken him literally to the ends of the earth. A journey to Antarctica in 2013 came close to an unfortunate end. He joins a long list of remarkable science communicators, who try to make the incomprehensible sound simple. He and his wife recently had their first child, and somewhere in between all of this, he's penned the Water Book.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is an independent advocate on Inuit human rights. When she was growing up, she wanted to be a nurse and then a doctor, but that didn't pan out very well because she wasn't very good at chemistry, physics, or mathematics. Watt-Cloutier lives in Iqaluit on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. If the Arctic is the world's barometer, says Sheila, then the Inuit are the mercury, and she has campaigned tirelessly to get this message out, to explain to the world that climate change is not just an environmental concern, but very much a human one too. It is work that has made a mark globally and saw her nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From a very early age, Jesse Bering has been asking questions of himself. Growing up amid AIDS hysteria in Reagan's America, Bering knew that he was attracted to other boys but was terrified into a guilty silence. In high school he took up wrestling in a bid to fight back sexual desire but found only deeper consciousness of his homosexuality. As an adult he has continued asking questions with frankness and with humour, handling sensitive topics like sex, evolution, religion, and morality. His books Perv and Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? Have elevated him to cult hero status. "If I had to put a label on myself," hey says, "it would be a sexual libertarian." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There are people with interesting life stories, and then there are people whose lives read like a screenplay. From being conscripted as a child solider in Sudan to finding a new home in suburban Australia as a refugee where he taught himself to read and to write. Deng Thiak Adut is today a lawyer representing those who, just like him, struggle to find a voice. He's even been at the centre of one of those most modern phenomena, a viral video sensation. Like millions of children who grow up within the geography of conflict his childhood was taken away. "I didn't understand what freedoms I had lost", he says. "I didn't understand how fearful I should have been." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.