So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  ‘I was picturing his house, a little house,’ Michael continued. ‘I was transferring my life onto his. His wife’s bustling around, his kid’s in the background, he’s in one of the two bedrooms at the back, sweating.’ Michael paused. ‘And then my friend from the Los Angeles Times sent me a story from 2009 about the purchase of the Julius Shulman house.’

  The Hollywood Hills residence and studio of the late iconic photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million. The Midcentury Modern steel-frame house, built in 1950 and designed by Raphael S. Soriano, is a Los Angeles historic landmark. The buyer is bestselling author and lecturer Jonah Lehrer. His book How We Decide has been translated into a dozen languages. The writer has an affinity for classic design.

  - Lauren Beale, Los Angeles Times, 4 December 2010

  The Shulman House, photographed by Michael K. Wilkinson and reproduced with his permission.

  ‘It’s unfair,’ Michael said. ‘It’s stupid of me. In some ways it’s unconscionable to begrudge him his success. But it made things a bit different.’

  *

  A few weeks after Michael told me his Jonah Lehrer story I was at a party in London, talking to a man I didn’t know. He was a theatre director. He asked me what I was writing about and I told him about Michael and Jonah. Sometimes when I recount for people the stories I’m working on, I feel a stupid grin on my face as I describe the absurdity of whatever crazy pickle this or that interviewee had got themselves into. But not this time. As I related the details to him he shivered. And I found myself shivering too. When I finished the story he said, ‘It’s about the terror, isn’t it?’

  ‘The terror of what?’ I said.

  ‘The terror of being found out,’ he said.

  He looked like he felt he was taking a risk even mentioning to me the existence of the terror. He meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out - some ‘I’m glad I’m not that’ at the end of an ‘I’m glad I’m not me’. I think he was right. Maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. Maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. But we can’t take that risk. So we keep it buried. Maybe it’s a work impropriety. Or maybe it’s just a feeling that at any moment we’ll blurt something out during some important meeting that’ll prove to everyone that we aren’t proper professional people or in fact functional human beings. I think that even in these days of significant over-sharing we keep this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbation before everyone suddenly got blase about it online. With masturbation, nobody cares. Whereas our reputation - it’s everything.

  I had leapt into the middle of the Michael/Jonah story because I admired and identified with Michael. He personified citizen justice, whereas Jonah represented literary fraud in the pop-science world. He made a fortune corrupting an already self-indulgent, bloated genre. I still admired Michael. But suddenly, when the theatre director said the words ‘the terror of being found out’, I felt like a door had briefly opened before me, revealing some infinite horror-land filled with millions of scared-stiff Jonahs. How many people had I banished to that land during my thirty years of journalism? How truly nightmarish it must have been to be Jonah Lehrer.

  3

  THE WILDERNESS

  Runyon Canyon, West Hollywood. If you were a passing hiker and you didn’t know that Jonah Lehrer had been totally destroyed you wouldn’t have guessed it. He looked like he did in his old author photographs - pleasing to the eye, a little aloof, as if he was thinking higher thoughts and expressing them in a considered manner to his fellow hiker - who was me. But we weren’t having a considered conversation. For the last hour Jonah had been repeatedly telling me, in a voice strained to breaking point, ‘I don’t belong in your book.’

  And I was repeatedly replying, ‘Yes, you do.’

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I was writing a book about public shaming. He had been publicly shamed. He was ideal.

  Now he suddenly stopped, mid hiking trail, and looked intently at me. ‘I am a terrible story to put in your book,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘What’s that William Dean Howells line?’ he said. ‘“Americans like a tragedy with a happy ending”?’

  The actual William Dean Howells line is ‘What the American public wants in the theatre is a tragedy with a happy ending.’ I think Jonah was close enough.

  I was here because Jonah’s shaming felt to me like a really important one - the shape of things to come. He was a dishonest number-one bestselling author who had been exposed by the sort of person who used to be powerless. And despite seeing Jonah’s face etched in panic and misery on the hiking trail I was sure the renaissance in public shaming was a good thing. Look at who was being laid low - bigoted Daily Mail columnists, monolithic gym chains with pitiless cancellation policies, and, most heinous of all, horrific academic spambot creators. Jonah had written some very good things during his short career. Some of his work had been wonderful. But he had repeatedly transgressed, he had done bad things and the uncovering of his lies was appropriate.

  Still, as we walked I felt for Jonah. Close up I could see he was suffering terribly. Michael had called his cover-up a ‘great deception that was very, very well plotted’. But I think it was just chaos and on that last day Jonah wasn’t ‘icy’ but wrecked.

  ‘I’m just drenched in shame and regret,’ he had emailed me before I flew to Los Angeles to meet him. ‘The shaming process is fucking brutal.’

  Jonah was offering the same dismal prediction about his future as Michael and Andrew Wylie had. He was foreseeing a lifetime of ruin. Imagine being thirty-one in a country that venerates redemption and second chances, and being convinced your tragedy has no happy ending. But I thought he was being too pessimistic. Surely after paying some penance, after spending some time in the wilderness, he could convince his readers and peers that he could change his ways. He could find a way back in. I mean: we weren’t monsters.

  *

  Science writing had been Jonah Lehrer’s ambition from the start. After he’d agreed to meet me I found an old interview he gave his student newspaper ten years ago, when he was twenty-one.

  [He] hopes to become a science writer. ‘Science is too often perceived as cold,’ he says. ‘I want to translate science and show how beautiful it can be.’

  - Kristin Sterling, Columbia News, December 2002.

  That interview was published on the occasion of the announcement that Jonah had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford as a graduate student for two years. ‘Each year thirty-two young Americans are selected as Rhodes Scholars,’ according to their website, ‘chosen not only for their outstanding scholarly achievements, but for their character, commitment to others and to the common good’.

  Bill Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar, as had the cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and the film director Terrence Malick. In 2002 only two Columbia students were awarded the accolade - Jonah and Cyrus Habib who is now, ten years on, one of the few fully blind American politicians and the highest-ranking Iranian-American in political office in the United States, serving in the Washington state legislature. Cyrus Habib sounds amazing.

  Jonah began writing his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, while he was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Its premise was that the great neuroscience breakthroughs of today had all been made a hundred years ago by artists like Cezanne and Proust. It was a lovely book. Jonah was smart and he wrote well - which isn’t the same as saying Mussolini made the trains run on time. Jonah wrote good things throughout his short career, essays untainted by transgression. After Proust came How We Decide and, lastly, Imagine. Along the way Jonah earned a fortune giving inspirational keynotes at - to name a few of the innumerable conferences he spoke at that I have never heard of - the 2011 International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in San Diego; FUSION, the Eighth Annual Desire2Learn Users’ Conference in De
nver; and the 2012 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations National Conference in Seattle.

  In this last one he told the story of a young athlete - a high-jumper who could never clear the bar however hard he tried. All the other jumpers mocked him. But then he thought counter-intuitively about it, invented a new jumping style called the Fosbury Flop, and won the 1968 Olympic gold medal. By now Jonah was commanding vast speaker fees - tens of thousands of dollars. I suppose he was being rewarded so richly because his messages were inspirational. My talks tend to be more disincentivizing, which I have noticed pays less.

  The adjective most often applied to Jonah was ‘Gladwellian’, Malcolm Gladwell being the New Yorker writer and author of the era’s most successful counter-intuitive pop-science book, The Tipping Point. Jonah’s book jackets looked like Malcolm Gladwell book jackets. Both looked like Apple computer packaging. Jonah was becoming a sensation. When he switched jobs it was a news story:

  Jonah Lehrer Jumps From Wired To The New Yorker

  Jonah Lehrer, the author of the popular science books Proust Was a Scientist [sic], How We Decide and 2012’s Imagine, has left his post as a contributing editor at Wired for the New Yorker, where he’ll be a staff writer.

  In many ways, Lehrer is a younger, brain-centered version of Gladwell, making him a natural New Yorker fit.

  - Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times, 7 June 2012

  Jonah resigned from the New Yorker after seven weeks in the job, the day Michael’s article appeared. On the Sunday night - the night before publication - he’d been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals International’s World Education conference in St Louis. The subject of his talk had been the importance of human interaction. During it - according to a tweet posted by an audience member, the journalist Sarah Braley - he revealed that since the invention of Skype, attendances at meetings had actually gone up by 30 per cent. After he left the stage she found him and asked where that implausible statistic had come from. ‘A conversation with a Harvard professor,’ he replied. But when she requested the professor’s name he mysteriously refused to divulge it. ‘I’d have to ask him if it’s all right to tell you,’ he explained. She gave Jonah her card but never heard from him again, which didn’t surprise her because the next morning he was disgraced and resigned his job.

  In the days that followed, Jonah’s publishers withdrew and pulped every copy of Imagine still in circulation, and offered refunds to anyone who had bought one. The Dylan quotes had been enough to bring Jonah down. His subsequent panic spiral was definitely enough - Michael wrote in his expose that Jonah had ‘stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied’ to him. Internet message boards were replete with comments like, ‘The twerp is such a huge overachiever that there’s something delightful about seeing him humbled’ (Guardian), and ‘Save the royalties from your book, blockhead, ‘cause you’re gonna need the money’ (New York Times), and ‘It must be strange to be so full of lies’ (Tablet magazine).

  Over in Brooklyn, Michael was agonizing over whether he’d been right to press Send. Although he’d essentially seen his takedown of Jonah as a righteous strike against the pop-science genre - ‘To make a tight little package where my mother would be like, “Ooh, I just read this thing, did you know that X leads to Y” you have to fucking cut corners’ - Andrew Wylie’s words were haunting him. Maybe it wasn’t enough to ruin a man’s life over.

  But there was worse to come. Wired magazine asked the journalism professor Charles Seife to study eighteen columns Jonah had written for them. All but one, he reported, revealed ‘evidence of some journalistic misdeed’. It was mainly Jonah reusing his own sentences in different stories, but that wasn’t all. Imagine if I had failed to put quotation marks around the sentences above that I lifted from the Rhodes Scholarship website. It was that kind of pervasive sloppiness / plagiarism. Probably the worst infraction was that Jonah had taken some paragraphs from a blog written by Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society and passed them off as his own.

  Michael was massively relieved - he told me - that ‘the rot spidered out to every book, every piece of journalism’.

  Jonah vanished, leaving a final, innocent pre-humiliation tweet like a plate of congealing food on the Mary Celeste:

  Fiona Apple’s new album is ‘astonishing’, rhapsodizes @sfj.

  @jonahlehrer 18 June 2012

  He ignored all interview requests. He resurfaced only once, to briefly tell Los Angeles Magazine‘s Amy Wallace that he wasn’t giving any interviews. So it was a great surprise when he responded to my email. He was ‘happy to be in touch’, he wrote to me, and ‘happy to chat on the phone or whatever’. In the end we arranged to go hiking in the Hollywood Hills. I flew to Los Angeles, even though his final email to me included an unexpected and unsettling sentence towards the end: ‘I’m not sure I’m ready to be a case study or talk on the record.’

  It seemed appropriate that we were hiking in a desert canyon, because his punishment felt quite biblical, a public shaming followed by a casting-out into the wilderness, although that analogy only went so far because biblical wildernesses tended not to be filled with extremely beautiful movie stars and models walking their dogs.

  We walked in silence for a while. Then Jonah listed two more reasons (alongside the ‘Americans want tragedies with happy endings’ one) why I shouldn’t write about him. First, if I was planning to be kind to him, he didn’t deserve it. And, second, a warning: ‘What I mostly feel is intensely radioactive. So even people who come to me with good intentions, I end up transferring my isotopes onto them.’

  Jonah was saying that spending time with him would ruin me in some unexpected way. ‘Well, that’s not going to happen to me!’ I laughed.

  ‘Then you’ll be the first,’ he said.

  As he said this, a bolt of panic shot into me. It was a frightening thing for someone to say. Still, I kept trying to convince him, on and on, but each line of reasoning seemed to make him more anguished, as if I were a siren trying to lure him to the rocks with my song of possible redemption. He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others.

  I gave up. Jonah drove me back to my hotel. In the car I stared at my lap, exhausted, like a cold caller after a long shift.

  Then, suddenly, Jonah said, ‘I’ve decided to make a public apology.’

  I looked up at him. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Next week,’ Jonah said. ‘In Miami. At a Knight lunch.’

  The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was created by the owners of the Chicago Daily News and the Miami Herald to fund young journalists with innovative ideas. There was to be a conference for the fund organizers, Jonah said, and he’d been asked to deliver the after-lunch keynote on the final day. Being advocates of digital media, their plan was to broadcast his speech live on their website.

  ‘I keep writing and scrapping and rewriting it,’ Jonah said. ‘Would you read it over? Maybe after that we can discuss whether I fit your narrative?’

  *

  I am the author of a book on creativity that is best known because it contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog. I lied, repeatedly, to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications …

  I sat on the plane reading Jonah’s apology speech. It was a stark opening - an unembellished declaration of guilt, followed by an account of his shame and regret:

  I think about all the readers I’ve disappointed, people who paid good money for my book and now don’t want it on their shelves …

  I was surprised by his candour. Jonah had insisted on our hike that if he did decide to give me an interview the one off-limit topic would be the shame. It was too private and personal, he said. But by the next sentence it became clear that the shame was something he intended to deal with as hurriedly as possible on the way to something else. This was, it quickl
y became clear, an apology speech like no other. He was going to explain his flaws within the context of neuroscience. It was a Jonah Lehrer keynote speech on the unique flaws of smart people like Jonah Lehrer. He began comparing himself to inadvertently imperfect scientists working at the FBI forensics lab. Innocent people had been convicted of terrorism because brilliant FBI scientists were:

  victims of their hidden brain, undone by flaws so deep-seated they don’t even notice their existence.

  He gave an example - an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was falsely accused by the FBI of committing the Madrid bombings of March 2004. A fingerprint had been lifted from a bag of detonators found at the scene. After the FBI fed it into their database Mayfield’s name came back as a match.

  The detectives soon discovered that Mayfield was a Muslim, married to an Egyptian immigrant, and had represented a convicted terrorist in a child custody dispute.

  The FBI held Mayfield for two weeks before acknowledging that the fingerprint match was, actually, ‘not even close’. In fact the agency had fallen victim to a bias known as ‘confirmation bias’. It was only taking seriously pieces of information that confirmed its pre-existing belief that Mayfield was the culprit. It was unconsciously filtering out evidence that pointed to his innocence. As a result of the scandal the FBI implemented rigorous new reforms to root out errors. It would be great - Jonah’s speech finished - if something like that could happen with him:

  If I’m lucky enough to write again, I won’t write a thing that isn’t fact-checked and fully footnoted. Because here is what I’ve learned: unless I’m willing to continually grapple with my failings - until I’m forced to fix my first draft, and deal with criticism of the second, and submit the final for a good, independent scrubbing - I won’t create anything worth keeping around.