S2 Ep20: Jon Ronson, storyteller

My final guest of the second series is Jon Ronson: journalist, documentary-maker, screenwriter, and author of wonderful narrative longform non-fiction. Jon’s books include The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and he tells me about the complicated legacy of the latter. In his work he’s delved into some murky worlds, including the Ku Klux Klan, the pornography industry and the Church of Scientology, and found the humour and pathos in subjects that most of us would overlook. In this conversation he explains why he appears as a character in his own work, the years of research that go into each story, and why empathy is the key to it all.