It's a Long Story

By Sydney Opera HouseNews Arts News Commentary

It's a Long Story episodes

July 10, 2017 Janine di Giovanni
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.'

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23 min
June 26, 2017 Giulia Enders
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.
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37 min
June 13, 2017 Geena Davis
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.

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25 min
May 29, 2017 Josh Thomas
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.

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35 min
May 15, 2017 Gretel Killeen
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.
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42 min
May 01, 2017 Chris Borelli
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.
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34 min
April 17, 2017 Julie Snyder (Serial)
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'.

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44 min
April 03, 2017 Jad Abumrad
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?

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39 min
March 20, 2017 Announcing: It's A Long Story Season 2
Why did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set Jad Abumrad onto the path of audio journalism? How did the sound of a toilet flushing almost ruin the pilot episode of Serial? What caused Josh Thomas to black out and rant to half a million people about Grindr?

Find the answer to these questions and more in season two of the Sydney Opera House podcast It's A Long Story. A podcast that explores the stories behind the big ideas of some of our most influential and acclaimed guests.
2 min
March 06, 2017 Lionel Shriver
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.
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46 min

About It's a Long Story

From the publisher's feed

Behind every big idea, there's a long story. Produced by Sydney Opera House as part of the Talks and Ideas program, Edwina Throsby interviews some of the world's most interesting thinkers and culture…