So You've Been Publicly Shamed Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€”L AUREN B EALE ,
Los Angeles Times
,D ECEMBER 4 , 2010
    The Shulman House. Photograph by Michael K. Wilkinson, reproduced with his permission.
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    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 theater 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 himself into. But not this time. As I related the details to him, the director shivered. And I found myself shivering too. When I finished the story, he said, “It’s about the terror, isn’t it?”
    â€œThe terror of what?” I said.
    â€œThe terror of being found out,” he said.
    He looked as if he felt he were 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 oversharing we keep this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbation before everyone suddenly got blasé about it online. With masturbation, nobody cares. Whereas our reputation—it’s everything.
    I had leaped into the middle of the Michael–Jonah story because I admired Michael and identified with him. 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 theater 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.

Three
    The Wilderness
    R unyon 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 were thinking higher thoughts and expressing them in a considered manner to his fellow hiker—me. But we weren’t having a considered conversation. For the last hour, Jonah had been repeatedly telling me, in a voice strained to its 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