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

throughout his short career, essays untainted by transgression. After
Proust
came
How We Decide
and, last,
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 had never heard of—the 2011 International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in San Diego; FUSION, the Eighth Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference in Denver; and the 2012 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations National Conference in Seattle.
    At 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 counterintuitively about it, invented a new jumping style that would be 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 counterintuitive pop-science book,
The Tipping Point
. Jonah’s book jackets looked like Malcolm Gladwell’s book jackets. Their jackets 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.
    â€”C AROLYN K ELLOGG ,
Los Angeles Times
,J UNE 7 , 2012
    Jonah resigned from
The New Yorker
after seven weeks in the job, the day Michael’s article appeared. On the Sunday night before publication, Jonah had been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Congress in St. Louis. The subject of his talk was the importance of human interaction. During the talk—according to a tweet posted by an audience member, the journalist Sarah Braley—Jonah revealed that since the invention of Skype, attendance at meetings had actually gone
up
by 30 percent. After he left the stage, Sarah 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, which didn’t surprise her because the next morning he was disgraced and resigned his job.
    In the days that followed, Jonah’s publisher withdrew and pulped every copy of
Imagine
still in circulation, and offered refunds to all 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 exposé 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 over-achiever that there’s something delightful about seeing him humbled” (
The Guardian
) and “Save the royalties from your book, blockhead, ’cause you’re gonna need the money” (
The New York Times
) and “It must be strange to be so full of lies” (
Tablet
).
    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