Sarai Walker received her MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. As a magazine writer, her articles have appeared in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves, before moving to London and Paris to complete a PhD. Her first novel, Dietland, was published this year, and takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality and our weight loss obsession. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marc Lewis, a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is a cognitive neuroscientist known for his research on the development of emotions and personality in childhood and adolescence. His current work, based on an integrative review of the neuroscience of addiction, shows that addiction is not a pathological state but rather an unfortunate result of a brain doing what it's supposed to do -- in fact overdoing it: pursuing pleasure and avoiding risk. Accordingly, he argues that to understand addiction we need to stop thinking of it as a disease. Lewis's 2012 book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, is an account of his addiction to drugs as a young man, with accompanying explanations of the neurobiological processes underlying various drug experiences as well as the process of addiction itself. His new book is called The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Broinowski is a filmmaker and writer. She is known for films including Forbidden Lie$ (about hoax-author Norma Khouri) and Helen’s War (about anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott). Her film Aim High In Creation! pays tribute to the cinematic genius of North Korea’s late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. Determined to stop a new gas mine near her Sydney home, she traveled to North Korea to learn about propaganda from the masters. She has written about her experiences in her 2015 book, The Director Is the Commander. � � �   Suki Kim is the author of a New York Times bestselling memoir, Without You, There Is No Us, My Time with the Sons of North Korean Elite, which chronicles her undercover investigation during the last six months of Kim Jong Il's reign. Her first novel, The Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize. Since 2002, she has travelled to North Korea as a writer, witnessing both Kim Jong-il’s 60th Birthday celebrations as well as his death at age 69.� Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, and an Open Society fellowship. Born and raised in Seoul, she lives in New York.Michael Kirby was Australia’s longest-serving judge when he retired in 2009. Following a distinguished legal career, he served on the High Court of Australia from 1996 to 2009. Among his many contributions to public life in Australia and internationally, he was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to lead an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea, which issued its report in 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tariq Ali is a British-Pakistani political commentator and a prolific writer, journalist and filmmaker. He has been a leading figure of the international left since the 1960s. His books include The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, The Obama Sydrome and The Extreme Centre: A Warning.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Joyce became international editor of The Economist in January 2014 having previously served as International Education Editor and Sao Paulo bureau chief. Before joining The Economist she worked as editor of Plus, an online magazine about maths published by the University of Cambridge, and was founding editor for The Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine, Significance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Wesley is a Professor of National Security at the Australian National University. He is currently the Director of the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. He also consults extensively for the Australian government. He has a new book being released this year called Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia's New Geopolitics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Ford is the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm and the author of two books:  The New York Times bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. He has more than 25 years’ experience in the fields of computer design and software development.Marc Lewis, a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is a cognitive neuroscientist known for his research on the development of emotions and personality in childhood and adolescence. His current work, based on an integrative review of the neuroscience of addiction, shows that addiction is not a pathological state but rather an unfortunate result of a brain doing what it's supposed to do -- in fact overdoing it: pursuing pleasure and avoiding risk. Accordingly, he argues that to understand addiction we need to stop thinking of it as a disease. Lewis's 2012 book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, is an account of his addiction to drugs as a young man, with accompanying explanations of the neurobiological processes underlying various drug experiences as well as the process of addiction itself. His new book is called The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Ilic is one of Australia’s most prolific comedic voices. Dan has been making television in Australia for ten years. His credits include: Australia’s Funniest Home Videos (Nine), Hungry Beast (ABC), Hamster Wheel (ABC), Can of Worms (Ten) and The Feed (SBS2) as well as being a regular on comedy panel shows and news magazine programs. In 2014 Dan raised more than $50,000 through crowd-funding to make A Rational Fear into a web series. Most recently Dan was Senior producer of Satire for AJ+ English, Al Jazeera’s digital platform for millennials.James Colley is a Young Walkley nominated satirist and creator of The Backburner on SBS Comedy. He works on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering and Gruen and has previously written for A Rational Fear andJunkee. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt describes James as "utterly unfunny" with humour "of the kind that would make only Lenin laugh”. James Colley notes that Lenin was famously difficult to amuse.Kate McCartney is a writer/director, illustrator, animator and performer. Her work as a comedy performer and writer has featured in Big Bite, Hamish and Andy and The Time Of Our Lives and she also appeared inKath and Kim and Outland. Kate was also a senior writer for Sam Simmons’ Problems, and her other credits include Adam Hills Tonight, Dirty Laundry Live, Spicks and Specks and ABC3’s Little Lunch andYou’re Skitting Me. In February 2015, McCartney and writing partner Kate McLennan’s original concept The Katering Show was released on YouTube. To date, it has attracted more than 4 million views and 60 000 subscribers.James Jericho founded satire news website The Shovel in 2012 after realising no-one else was going to publish his exclusive exposé about the real use for George Brandis’s bookshelf or Tony Abbott’s target to cut Australia’s reputation by 30% by 2020. Now read by hundreds of thousands of Australians every month, and featured weekly on The Sydney Morning Herald, The Shovel has become the must-read masthead in Parliament House. James is The Shovel’s head writer and editor, and is a regular commentator on satire’s place in contemporary Australia. In June 2015 he kick-started a national campaign to find Bill Shorten.Jordan Shanks started Friendlyjordies with a focus on political and social satire. in 2013 and since then it has grown to an audience of more than 100,000 people on Facebook and YouTube. He writes articles for SBS Comedy and a weekly Friendly Jordies podcast that occasionally makes it to the Top Ten Australian podcasts.Rebecca Shaw (aka Brocklesnitch) is a freelance writer, podcaster and creator of the parody Twitter account @notofeminism. She is a columnist for the Kill Your Darlings Journal, one of the team at The Backburner, and has written for SBS, Junkee, and The Guardian. She is in constant competition with Ruby Rose to become Australia's favourite lesbian.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Johann Hari is a British writer and journalist who has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers, including The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Guardian. He was a lead op-ed columnist for The Independent for nine years, and left the newspaper after it was revealed that in some of his interviews, he had used passages that his interviewees had written or said elsewhere, and presented them as if they had been said directly to him. Since then he has written The New York Times best-selling book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Day of the War on Drugs, which has been praised for its insights and for its thorough referencing by everyone from Glenn Greenwald to Elton John to Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist, author and documentary filmmaker whose works include best-seller The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test. He has been described as a gonzo journalist, known for his informal but sceptical, investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. His new book So You've Been Publicly Shamed explores public humiliation in the internet age. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.