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Women's History Month starts on Thursday. All through March, Tell Me More will dig into inspiring, bold and sometimes disturbing stories of notable women — from Cleopatra to Coco Channel. To launch the biography series, host Michel Martin talks with two essayists about why it's important to tell women's stories, and how that storytelling has evolved.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. Coming up, if you have elementary school or even preschool types in your house, then you might have heard his voice as Tyrone on the Nickelodeon show "The Backyardigans." But now Jordan Coleman is a teenager, and as he became aware that some teens were experiencing violence in their dating lives, he decided to make a film about it, and he's going to tell us more about it in a few minutes.

Sixteen-year-old Jordan Coleman was a voice on the hit TV show The Backyardigans. Then he decided to write and direct his own films — the latest of which is Payin' the Price. He's showing it in multiple cities, and encouraging teens to "speak up and get out" if they are in abusive relationships. Coleman talks with host Michel Martin.

Many Google users are nervous about the tech giant's changes to its privacy policy, set to take effect on Thursday.

Google has already been collecting bits of personal information from its various services, but soon it will combine it all to produce more targeted ads.

So let's say you are signed into Gmail and you decide to watch a video on YouTube. And then you also check out your friend's vacation photos on Picasa. Well, Google will now combine all of that data to create a single, fuller portrait of you for advertisers.

Two students have become the first black editors-in-chief of their college newspapers in Oregon, which has a black population of less than 2 percent. Host Michel Martin talks with Brandon Southward of Oregon State University and Tyree Harris of the University of Oregon.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Today, we are going to bring you the last installment of our Black History Month series. All month long, we've been digging into some of the literature that has expanded our understanding of African-American lives through personal stories, the memoir.

We hope you enjoyed digging into our Black History Month memoirs as much as we did.

And if you are hungry for more good, true stories about people you may not know much about ... for Women's History Month, which starts on Thursday, we will be doing much the same thing.

We will be checking out recent biographies of famous and not so famous women whose life stories have been explored by talented writers.

Mitt Romney fended off Rick Santorum on Wednesday, winning the Arizona and Michigan primary races. The two have been vying for the top spot, but both candidates have been prone to gaffes. Host Michel Martin talks about the showdown with GOP strategist Ron Christie and Santorum supporter Bob Vander Plaats.

Banks recently made huge profits from overdraft fees. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asks how much of that was bad money management by customers, and how much was banks gaming the system. Host Michel Martin talks with Washington Post Financial Reporter Ylan Mui and regular financial contributor Alvin Hall.

The non-profit Child Trends reports that a growing number of children are born to single mothers. Journalist Bonnie Goldstein — who was a single mom — argues that single women should think twice before deciding to have children. Host Michel Martin talks with Goldstein, single mom Resa Barillas, and Dani Tucker, a regular parenting contributor.