So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Jon Ronson's captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Through social media, justice has been democratized and the silent majority are getting a voice. But are we using our voice for good?Instead we are mercilessly finding people’s faults and defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those who position themselves outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.In this prescient, unnerving yet often hilarious book, Jon Ronson meets the victims of modern public shamings and, in doing so, plunges us deep into the heart of a very modern terror: the terror of being found out. Full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws – and the very scary part we all play in it – this is Jon Ronson at his very best.A Sunday Times Book of the Year when first published, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

He is such an exceptional writer . . . A perfect sense of comic timing throughout, but he manages to deal with profound subjects . . . Such a great book. We're buying it!, A magnificent book, subtly argued, often painfully funny and yet deeply serious . . . I'm not sure I can recommend it highly enough., A work of original, inspired journalism, it considers the complex dynamics between those who shame and those who are shamed, both of whom can become the focus of social media's grotesque, disproportionate judgments., Certainly, no reader could finish it without feeling a need to be gentler online, to defer judgment, not to press the retweet button, to resist that primal impulse to stoke the fires of shame., Ronson is our current master of smarter-than-average pop nonfiction that combines social science, investigative journalism and no shortage of style.

Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of many bestselling books, including So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Lost at Sea, The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists. His acclaimed podcasts include two series of Things Fell Apart and The Butterfly Effect, and he co-wrote the screenplays for the movies Okja and Frank. He lives in New York.