So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Read Free Book Online

failures is by doing completely different work. He is tainted as a writer forever.
    I have zero inclination to forgive or read his future work.
    Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist.
    Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled “Recognizing self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future.”
    Still, he was forced to continue. He had no choice. He had to reach the end. He flatly intoned that he hoped that one day, “when I tell my young daughter the same story I’ve just told you, I will be a better person because of it. More humble.”
    Wait, Jonah Lehrer is speaking at a journalism conference? Did they run out of people who aren’t frauds with interesting stuff to say?
    Jonah Lehrer putting on a great demonstration of the emptiness of pop behavior-psych: a moral defective tries to blame cognitive failure.
    He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.
    The speech ended with a polite round of applause from the people in the same room as he was.
    Amid the tidal wave of abuse, there had been some calls for humanity, a few tweeters noting the terrible strangeness of what was unfolding.
    Ugh, Jonah Lehrer is apologizing next to a live Twitter feed of people mocking him. It’s basically a 21st century town square flogging.
    Jonah Lehrer is a real person. Twitter is making me so uncomfortable right now.
    Jonah Lehrer’s crimes are significant, but apologizing in front of a giant-screen Twitter feed seems cruel and unusual punishment.
    But all that was wiped away when someone tweeted:
Did Lehrer get paid to be there today?
    Of course he didn’t,
I thought.
    And then Knight answered that question.
    Jonah Lehrer was paid $20K to speak about plagiarism at Knight lunch.
    Wish I could get paid $20,000 to say that I’m a lying dirtbag.
    And so on, until late that evening, when this tweet arrived.
    Journalism foundation apologizes for paying $20,000 to disgraced author Jonah Lehrer.
    Jonah e-mailed. “Today was really awful. I’m filled with all sorts of regret.”
    I sent him a sympathetic reply. I said I thought he should donate the $20,000 to charity.
    â€œNothing can turn this around,” he replied. “I’ve got to be realistic about that. I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation to speak, but now it’s too late.”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    F uck off, you can’t even do your apology without slotting it into some stupid Jonah framework,” Michael Moynihan said to me over lunch at Cookshop in New York City. Michael shook his head in wonder. “That wasn’t an apology. It was a string of Gladwellian bullshit. He was on autopilot. He was a robot: ‘Let me get this study from some academic.’ All the words he used to describe his dishonesty. It was like a thesaurus had landed on his head.” Michael paused. “Oh!” he said. “Someone sent me a text. I thought he was reading way too much into it. But he pointed out to me that Jonah said, ‘I lied to a journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.’ I love that. I said, ‘Yeah. I see what you’re saying.’ He didn’t lie to ‘journalist Michael Moynihan.’ That’s the great trick of the language. ‘A journalist
CALLED
Michael Moynihan.’ ‘Who’s this fucking schlub?’”
    Michael took a bite of his steak. The fact was, his was a great scoop. It was great journalism, and what did Michael get from it? Some congratulatory tweets, which probably give you a bit of a dopamine rush or something, but otherwise nothing: $2,200 plus a veiled insult from Jonah if Michael and his friend weren’t being paranoid about that part.
    Michael shook his head. “Nothing came out of this for me,” he said.
    â€”
    In fact, it was worse than nothing. Michael had noticed that people were starting to feel scared of him. Fellow journalists. A few days before our lunch, some panicked writer—someone