Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist and author whose The Psychopath Test, Them, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed investigate the strange corners of contemporary life with humor, empathy, and deadpan absurdism.

Jon Ronson began his journalism career at The Guardian and established a distinctive method: embed himself in an unusual world, report what he observes with apparent guilelessness, and allow the comedy and pathos to emerge from what his subjects actually say and do rather than from editorial framing. Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), about a year spent with far-right and Islamist groups seeking a hidden elite that controls the world, established this approach. His subjects are both disturbing and often genuinely funny, and Ronson’s willingness to be confused and disarmed rather than superior gives the books their unexpected warmth.

The Psychopath Test (2011) is his most widely read book: a journey through the world of psychiatric diagnosis, specifically the checklist used to identify psychopathy (the Hare PCL-R), that expands into a broader investigation of how we categorize human behavior as normal or abnormal. Ronson is a nervous, self-deprecating narrator who alternately finds himself diagnosing everyone he meets and worrying about the implications of such diagnostic power. The book is genuinely illuminating about the history of psychiatric classification.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015) arrived at exactly the right moment: a study of Twitter and online shaming, based on interviews with people whose lives were destroyed by viral public outrage. The book is as empathetic with its subjects as his earlier work while being clear-eyed about what the dynamics of social media shaming actually are. Frank (2014), about the enigmatic musician whose band he briefly managed, is his most personal and most peculiar work.