In his BBC Radio series “Things Fell Apart,” the British-born journalist Jon Ronson introduces himself as “a writer living in America, the land where culture wars begin.” What are culture wars? Early in the show’s first season, which aired in 2021, Ronson defines them as “almost everything that people yell at each other about on social media”; in later episodes, he refines the definition to “the battle for dominance between conflicting values.” While reporting the second season, which was released last month, an interviewee told him, “America is a class-based society that pretends to be an identity-based society.” “It’s stuck with me ever since,” Ronson said. “I’ve been wondering if maybe a better definition of culture wars would be ‘anything we fight about that isn’t economics.’ ”
Season 1 ranges broadly, examining the contingent origins of rifts that now seem inevitable—the roots of the evangelical church’s fixation on abortion, for instance, or the first major case of Internet censorship. Season 2 has a tighter frame: eight conflicts that culminate within a few weeks of one another, in May and June of 2020. The first episode begins in the late nineteen-eighties, when several African American sex workers were killed in Miami. To explain the killings, the coroner invented a diagnosis called “excited delirium,” a condition that was said to cause spontaneous death in women and “superhuman strength” in men. Years after “excited delirium” was discredited as junk science, it was still used in some police trainings—including in Minneapolis, which is where the episode ends, with the murder of George Floyd. The second episode starts in 2006, in Ventura, California, where a frustrated scientist named Judy Mikovits is working as a bartender at a yacht club. By 2020, she has become the star of “Plandemic,” one of the most popular conspiracy-theory films of all time.
If chroniclers of social-media battles were military historians, Ronson might be Thucydides. In 2015, he published “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” one of the earliest books about cancel culture (so early that the term hadn’t yet been coined). In “Them: Adventures with Extremists,” which came out in 2001, he hatches a plan to sneak into Bohemian Grove, the top-secret, ultra-élite campground in Northern California; he even enlists Alex Jones, then an up-and-coming conspiracist with a small fan base, to join him. Incredibly, they succeed. “It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments, as a reporter,” he told me. “For better or worse, I guess Alex and I are connected for life because of that.”
Ronson, who now has both British and American citizenship, divides his time between a house in the Catskills and an apartment in Greenwich Village, where we spoke. (Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) “We’ve got a Juliet balcony, for when men on the street start professing their love to you,” he told me, welcoming me in. His dog prefers the upstate house, he went on, “But he likes it here as well, because he can hear the activity down below, and he likes being around people without necessarily having to interact with them. Which reminds me of myself.”
What are you working on right now?
I’m three chapters into writing my next book, and it’s going well. I love the structural experimentation you can do with both books and podcasts, but I think you can do it a bit more with books. With podcast narration you sort of have to be the straight guy, the ringmaster, so you’re a little restricted in your funny phraseologies.
That was one of my questions: How do you know whether an idea is a podcast or a book?
Sometimes it’s neurosis on my part. Like, I only want to bring out a book if it’s the most brilliant thing I can possibly do. Sometimes I’ll reject book ideas and go, I’ll do it as a podcast. And then the podcast, like “Things Fell Apart,” turns out to be great, so why was I worrying?
I have a friend who makes podcasts, and over dinner I told her about an idea I had for a podcast. She said, “Why not do it as a book?” And without thinking I said something like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s book-worthy.” She took offense at that, understandably.
I think “Things Fell Apart” and “The Butterfly Effect,” which I did for Audible, are easily as good as my books. “The Butterfly Effect,” which was set in the porn industry—that could never have been a TV documentary, because everybody would have just fast-forwarded past all the nuances to get to the nudity. But I think it could have been a book. I liked the structure—you start with a tiny pebble thrown in a pond, which in that case was this kid in Belgium coming up with an idea to give the world free porn, and it ends with seismic changes to, arguably, human sexuality.
I was worried about the explicit parts, but ultimately it was such a sweet-natured show. Because of Pornhub, all of these professional porn people are underemployed, and as a result you can now commission them to make an entire porn movie just for you, if you have a desire to see one that’s so weird that nobody would ever think to make it. And we found all of these sweet people making films that were barely even sexual, like Stamps Man, who was commissioning porn stars to destroy his expensive stamp collection. It was very sweet. It was like a sort of therapy.
In these shows, and in your books, you have moments that are heartwarming, and then others that are chilling—grisly suicides, that sort of thing. Do you know going in what kind of tonal balance you hope to strike?
I’m just looking for the best stories. I go for these endless hikes upstate where I listen to really boring, niche audiobooks, just waiting for the gems—the little glints of gold—which is how I found the excited-delirium story. There was just a passing mention of excited delirium in “His Name Is George Floyd,” which isn’t a boring audiobook, it’s a very good audiobook. But I just heard the words “excited delirium” and I thought, These are interesting, dissonant words to think about. And I’ve done this enough to know that that’s enough to dive down a rabbit hole, and to stay down the rabbit hole as long as it takes.
How often do you examine a dissonance that then gets resolved in a not very narratively interesting way?
The worst version of that was when I spent ages trying to write a book about pseudoscience in the credit-card industry. I did write a piece, really a kind of extraordinary piece—sorry to call one of my own pieces extraordinary. Not because I’m hubristic but because—I don’t know, I think I’m quite good at knowing what works. So it was a really good piece. And then I tried for almost a year to make it into a book. And it would have come out right when the credit crunch happened. I’d have been Michael Lewis! But at the time—probably 2006—I don’t think I was quite good enough to take such boring people and make them interesting on the page. Now I think I could probably do it, but I just didn’t have the talent then. But one line came from that process. Out of frustration, I wrote, “If you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring.” Because journalists don’t want to write about boring people. We want to look good. And that line made it into my next book, “The Psychopath Test.” So maybe, with what we do, if it takes you a year to come up with one good sentence, that’s O.K.
When is it worth it to try to force something across the finish line, even if it won’t be the most colorful narrative, because the underlying material is important enough? Or, relatedly, how do you know when you may be unconsciously biased toward the more colorful narrative, rather than the truer one?
Well, everything we do goes through such insane fact checks. I wrote a book called “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” so I know the horror of getting it wrong. If I’m down the rabbit hole and it’s taking too long for me to find anything that I’m really interested in, I just abandon it.
In nonfiction, I think we sometimes have a temptation to have our cake and eat it, too. We want that thrill of, Can you believe I found this incredible detail—and it’s real? And yet we also want readers to feel that they’re getting the most parsimonious, truest, Occam’s razor explanation for a phenomenon. And sometimes the truest, most parsimonious explanation is just kind of boring.
I do unashamedly want to write page-turners. I can never understand why most nonfiction books have such limited creative ambitions. If you picked up a novel, and the first chapter was, “In this novel, I’m going to tell you this and this,” you would be outraged.
When I was writing “Them,” I started getting chased by the Bilderberg Group in Portugal—it’s horrific, you know, being chased by men in dark glasses who are employed by the shadowy cabal that secretly rules the world. I phoned up the British Embassy and everything. I was genuinely terrified. I’m not a thrill-seeker. I only do this stuff so that I can come back to the safety of my room and have something to write about.
But I went through a sort of life-changing experience. I was a skeptic, and then suddenly I’m being pursued by shadowy forces. I got really paranoid. And then, when I was back at home, I just thought, This is a gift. Because, if you’re reading a novel, you expect the protagonist to go through a life-changing situation. I mean, it’s storytelling, right?
You’ve had success in Hollywood—
Miraculously, I've co-written two films that got made [“Frank,” starring Michael Fassbender, and “Okja,” directed by Bong Joon-ho]. And a third film was made based on one of my books [“The Men Who Stare at Goats,” starring George Clooney]. But, to be totally honest, I see myself as an I.P. generator, and that’s about it.
If I’m on a nonfiction Zoom, talking about a book or a podcast or whatever, I am king of the Zoom. Like, I know what I’m talking about. I have very strong opinions about storytelling and what’s going to work. If I’m on a Hollywood Zoom, I’m the quiet person who doesn’t say much and hopes nobody asks me anything.
Even when you’re reporting on people with extreme views, or people who have done troubling things, people refer to your reporting as empathetic, which I think is true.
I like people thinking of me as being empathetic, but I think probably a better word is curious. If you fill your head with judgment, there’s no room for curiosity. And, also, I don’t like hierarchies. I don’t like hierarchical journalism, where we’re supposed to be representatives of righteous society. At the same time, I think it’s very important when you’re back at home, and you’ve gathered all the material, to keep your morality intact. So there has to be a moment when you become skeptical again.
And maybe a little judgmental.
Yes, you can’t let people get away with doing bad shit. The one time where people accused me of getting that balance wrong was sneaking into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones, because he was sort of an absurd, buffoonish figure in that story. My response was that it’s a little postmodern to accuse me of giving him an easy ride, because a lot of his more nefarious behavior happened later. But I have always had in my head the question of whether there’s a karmic problem there, that I’ve got this comparatively gentle story about Alex out in the world, and now he’s, you know, hounding the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook. So, in that instance, I did go back and do another story about him, for “This American Life,” about his teen-age years. I felt like I needed to redress that karmic balance.
Alex Jones in the nineties definitely was not the Alex Jones we know now. He was a fixture of Austin weirdness back then.
Fortunately—for me, not for the world—9/11 was what made Alex Jones a star. I used to joke—I don’t really make jokes about Alex anymore, because people get too upset, but I used to joke that sneaking into Bohemian Grove was Alex’s “Revolver” and 9/11 was his “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
Alex is just one example, but in the previous few years some of the transgressors have become like hospital superbugs. We’ve turned them into thick-skinned people, impervious to shaming.
It’s another hustle. If you want to go out and be the main character for a day, it’s just another way to get attention.
It’s terrible. And it’s partly our fault for overusing shaming as a weapon. Because of course—and I think people who didn’t read “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” misunderstood this—I think if somebody does something bad, they should feel ashamed. That’s how society operates. But the fact is—and this doesn’t excuse every kind of behavior, it’s just true—that when somebody is ejected from a community, especially if they are narcissistically minded, it’s a wound that won’t heal. And what is Twitter except a wounding machine? I think the second episode of the new season of “Things Fell Apart,” the Judy Mikovits story, sheds some light on this. Because it’s one of the great mysteries of our time. Why are people falling into rabbit holes that they just can’t seem to get out of?
How did you come to May of 2020 as your unifying theme?
Well, the first season of “Things Fell Apart” was my lockdown project. First time I’ve ever done any journalism where I didn’t travel—I just did all the interviews remotely from my laundry room upstate. It was fantastic. It was also a bit of an experiment. Like, I’m not as young as I was. Can I still do journalism without taking a hundred flights?
One of my favorite little moments from your audiobook about Alex Jones and the pro-Trump right [“The Elephant in the Room”] is when you’re at the R.N.C., it’s summertime, it’s hot, and you follow him into his air-conditioned Winnebago, and you both let out these middle-aged sighs as you sit down. That’s a very human moment.
[Laughs.] They wanted Season 2 of “Things Fell Apart,” and I wanted parameters. My first thought was that lockdown might be interesting. And then what I discovered through research was that pretty much every culture-war story in recent memory blew up within twenty days of each other. Which makes sense, of course. But I’m not sure if anybody had really noticed that.
You’re both an expert in cancellation and a person with a long-standing interest in third rails. Do you have a generalized theory for why you’ve spent your life touching third rails and not getting cancelled?
I’m delighted that that’s the case. Sometimes I’m a little mystified.
There’s an Australian journalist, John Safran. He’s very good. He’s in the same sort of mold as me and Louis Theroux and so on. And he brought this up to me. I was having lunch with him in Central Park, and he said, “Have you noticed that we never get in trouble?” His theory was that we’ve been grandfathered in.
But I think the main reason, hopefully, is that I’m not an ideological person. And often, if my stories are critical of anyone, they’re critical of, you know, both sides.
This gets us back to that question of: When do you actually have to be a little more judgmental than you might be inclined to be? In theory, it sounds great not to render judgment, and yet—
I don’t think I let people off too easy. I just don’t do it in a way that is performative or hierarchical or, you know, gotcha-y.
I remember when Trump said, “There’s very fine people on both sides.” I just put my head in my hands, because I’m, like, You've just ruined it for all of us both-siders.
A few years ago, when people used to say “The Internet is mad about this” or “Here’s what people are talking about today,” what they tended to mean was Twitter. Even though it was, by definition, never close to a majority of people.
And yet Twitter did have outsized influence.
And now, with this more desiccated version of—I find it hard to call it X . . .
It’s a bit like ordering a venti latte at Starbucks.
Or referring to Snoop Dogg as Snoop Lion, or whatever. Anyway, I try to stay off of it, for all the familiar reasons, but the other week, when the Chabad guys were in the tunnel, I did go to Twitter, because I thought, O.K., social media, this is your time to shine. And there was some funny stuff on there, but for one thing it felt instantly oversaturated—like, the same dozen memes, making the rounds again and again. And then the other problem, of course, was that, as a Jew on Elon Musk’s Twitter, I couldn’t tell whether I was being laughed with or laughed at.
Yeah. The last time I went on Twitter was with Jeffrey Epstein papers, and the first thing I saw was a forgery about Jimmy Kimmel. So I just threw up my hands and scuttled back to the legacy media. My friend Adam Curtis, in the very early days of Twitter, said, “You know, the time is gonna come when Twitter is going to become one of those John Carpenter movies, like ‘Escape from New York.’ ”
That analogy gets at some of the pros and the cons. In a bombed-out, apocalyptic New York, within all the wreckage and the off-putting graffiti, you’ll find some really great art. And one of the people wandering around on the subway and muttering might tell you something about Jeffrey Epstein—
Something that turns out to be true. Absolutely. That’s why it’s such a shame. I loved that Twitter in the early days felt like a Robert Altman movie. Now I use social media only to promote my work or other people’s work. No more opinions.
Instagram is where you look at videos of unlikely friendships between different species of animals. And Twitter, especially these days, is like when you’re out for a country walk, and you come across a fence, and you can’t decide whether or not to touch it to see if it’s electrified.
“Things Fell Apart” comes from the Yeats poem—“the center cannot hold.” Do you have a desire to return to some center? Some middle, or some resting place, where we’re no longer spinning out of control? You’ve said that you don’t want your subjects to worry that you’re going to impose a left-wing bias on them, and yet there is something inherently conservative—small-“C” conservative—about wanting the center to hold. I mean, Yeats was a conservative. Didion was, too, arguably. I don’t know about Chinua Achebe.
There are parts of that poem that I don’t love. I don’t love that line “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” That’s pretty pejorative.
A number of centrists are moving to the right in a way that I personally find disappointing. It really startled me that while Trump was doing all the stuff that he was doing, there was this obsession about quote-unquote “wokeness.” I felt like, Come on—is this our highest priority right now? So I definitely have problems with centrists. They can be a little despotic.
There’s a term, “radical centrism.”
I absolutely don’t see myself as part of that. For me, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold”—it’s a sort of human center of being curious and trying to understand people’s perspective and look for the nuances. It’s not the center that, to be honest, the centrists talk about. ♦
