Launching as a box set on BBC Sounds on Tuesday 9 January, the award-winning podcast Things Fell Apart returns, with acclaimed writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson revealing eight more wholly unexpected but all too human stories about the culture wars that divide us so toxically today.

In Season 1 Jon Ronson went back into history to unearth the origins of the culture wars through a series of astonishing, consequential stories.

Since then, new battle lines have been drawn. And many of them are linked by one extraordinary thing: they all snowballed within days of each other, in May 2020, six weeks into Covid lockdown.

Millions of us spent our days locked at home with only the internet for company. People lost their jobs. Politicians told us what to do. We lived in fear of an invisible enemy nobody understood. This bizarre experience changed people psychologically. People and institutions fell apart.

And so in Season 2, Jon Ronson uncovers eight more jaw-dropping, thought provoking, and sometimes darkly funny stories about many of the new battle lines in the culture wars which snowballed during lockdown and dominate society now: from covid conspiracies and Antifa hysteria, to racial and gender identity politics, free speech and protests against lockdown that spiralled out of control.

While each episode is a gripping listen, the series also illuminates one of the most turbulent and traumatic times in our recent history. Released at the start of a US election year and set against a political climate in the UK which can sometimes seem defined by culture wars issues, Things Fell Apart will be a vital primer on the new battlefronts of a phenomenon that we all need to understand.

Jon Ronson says: “A connection between these stories is untruths and their consequences. In every episode, someone says something that isn’t true and the ripples are extraordinary and devastating. Recent months have shown that we’re living in post truth times where all sorts of lies are allowed to flourish for all sorts of reasons, and many people are guilty of that from across the political spectrum. It feels impossible for anyone to believe anything when it’s been spun, memed and propagandised, and we’ve had to use our brains in totally different ways to try and figure out what’s true and what’s not true.

What the podcast is about in the end is that we have to hold on to truth like driftwood or else we’ll drown. The new season of Things Fell Apart is really an homage to factual truth because look what happens when we allow that to slip through our fingers.”

Daniel Clarke, BBC Radio 4 Factual Commissioning Editor says: “Whilst to start with it felt like the pandemic might bring us together, it was to become dangerously fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking, and for new frontlines in the culture wars. Each spellbinding story in this series takes us into a different aspect of how this bizarre period rewired our brains – and shows how any of us can be blown into extraordinary, unexpected situations by the winds that sweep through our lives. And whilst every episode is an utterly gripping story about a group of individuals, in Jon’s hands, there are always universal takeaways, and profound truths about human nature, as well as thought-provoking insights into how we live now.”

Stories in season two of Things Fell Apart include:

• The connection between the mysterious deaths of 32 black sex workers in Miami in the 1980s and a whole new (and spurious) mental health diagnosis, which led directly to an incredibly high profile killing that occurred during the height of lockdown.

• A chance encounter in a yacht club in the early 2000s between a bartender and a very wealthy couple with a daughter sick with a mystery disease that helped to result in the creation of the first great covid conspiracy theory.

• The devastating impact of an American media polarized over Antifa on an innocent family taking a Twilight-themed lockdown-escaping camping trip.

• How a disenfranchised young man, maddened by the strict lockdown laws, joined a club of like-minded men and suddenly found himself under arrest for the most unlikely and horrific crime.

• The consequences of an argument between a mother and her teenage daughter during lockdown that led to Governor Ron DeSantis enacting new and far-reaching laws in Florida.

• How a former actor and model, burned by Hollywood and devastated by the death of his brother, has become an important culture warrior, fuelling the flames of every story Jon Ronson tells this season.

Season two of Things Fell Apart is available as a box set on BBC Sounds from 9 January and broadcast weekly on BBC Radio 4 at 9am from 9 January.

Written and presented by Jon Ronson
Produced by Sarah Shebbeare
Original music by Phil Channell

The Editor was Philip Sellars and the Commissioning Editor was Daniel Clarke
Things Fell Apart is a BBC Audio production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds