Quotes from Jon Ronson

Maybe – as my friend the documentary maker Adam Curtis emailed me – they're turning social media into 'a giant echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.' We express our opinion that Justine Sacco is a monster. We are instantly congratulated for this – for basically being Rosa Parks. We make the on-the-spot decision to carry on believing it.

In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene. Bob

Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

Glenn Beck did not fall into line. He told his listeners that Trump was a "dictator in the making.

I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the DSM-IV when you're not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

I suddenly feel with social media like I'm tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment,' he said. 'It's horrible.' He

According to Google's own research into our "eye movements," 53 percent of us don't go beyond the first two search results, and 89 percent don't look down past the first page.

It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together—Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. "I 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.

That's what I Am a Strange Loop is about," said Deborah. "It's about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop.

I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?

our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

Their puffed-out cheeks are beetroot-red, making them resemble sweaty, meat-smeared squirrels.

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: There's a pedophile! Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.' 'What had she done?' I ask. 'Shoplifting,' says Tam. There is silence.

I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I

Then I get worried that if anyone is really paying attention to Happy's predilections, they might become wary of his wholesale compassion and suspect him of being an imaginary character, created by a journalist, to trick businesses into inadvertently revealing their data-trafficking practices. So I untick tigers.

what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.

Why?" I asked, "What are you looking for?" There was a short silence. And Toto softly said, "I want to see if people like me.

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. "I

What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there's this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don't put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don't light up."     And

As a group they tend to be more charming than most people," she said. "They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us.