So You've Been Publicly Shamed Read Online Free PDF

stopped in the middle of the hiking trail and looked intently at me. “I am a terrible story to put in your book,” he said.
    â€œWhy?” I said.
    â€œWhat’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 theater 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 before the story broke, Jonah wasn’t “icy” but wrecked.
    â€œI’m just drenched in shame and regret,” he had e-mailed 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 offered. He was foreseeing a lifetime of ruin. Imagine being thirty-one in a country that venerates redemption and second chances, and 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.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    S cience writing had been Jonah Lehrer’s ambition from the start. After he’d agreed to meet me, I found an old interview he gave 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.”
    â€”K RISTIN S TERLING ,
Columbia News
,D ECEMBER 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 32 young Americans are selected as Rhodes Scholars,” according to the Rhodes Scholarship 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 Lehrer 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 is that the great neuroscience breakthroughs of today had all been made one hundred years ago by artists like Cézanne 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