Read Online So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson - Free Book Online Page A

counted as plagiarism, “or if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so.” Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: “In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore’s 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.”
    But even if it wasn’t plagiarism, Engber was “convinced that Lehrer hasn’t changed his ways at all. He’s set his course as clearly as can be. He’ll recycle and repeat, he’ll puke his gritty guts out.”
    No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn’t committed—it seemed to me—he couldn’t win. But his
Book About Love
is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so we’ll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.

Four
    God That Was Awesome
    D uring the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I’d meet them in restaurants and airport cafés—spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn’t even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.
    â€”
    It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days she’d been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York:
“Weird German Dude: You’re in first class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.—Inner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.”
Then the layover at Heathrow:
“Chili—cucumber sandwiches—bad teeth. Back in London!”
Then the final leg:
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
    She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.
    â€œI got nothing,” she told me. “No replies.”
    I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this—that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school:
“I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.”
    She looked at it, baffled.
    â€œAnd then my phone started to explode,” she said.
    â€”
    We were having this conversation three weeks later at—her choice of location—the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah’s destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at
The Daily Beast
as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine’s publisher, IAC—which also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.
    As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up:
“You need to call me immediately.”
It was from her best friend, Hannah.
“You’re the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right