So You've Been Publicly Shamed (4 page)

I had leaped into the middle of the Michael–Jonah story because I admired Michael and identified with him. He personified citizen justice, whereas Jonah represented literary fraud in the pop-science world. He made a fortune corrupting an already self-indulgent, bloated genre. I still admired Michael. But suddenly, when the theater director said the words
the terror of being found out
, I felt like a door had briefly opened before me, revealing some infinite horror land filled with millions of scared-stiff Jonahs. How many people had I banished to that land during my thirty years of journalism? How truly nightmarish it must have been to be Jonah Lehrer.

The Wilderness

R
unyon Canyon, West Hollywood. If you were a passing hiker and you didn't know that Jonah Lehrer had been totally destroyed, you wouldn't have guessed it. He looked like he did in his old author photographs—pleasing to the eye, a little aloof, as if he were thinking higher thoughts and expressing them in a considered manner to his fellow hiker—me. But we weren't having a considered conversation. For the last hour, Jonah had been repeatedly telling me, in a voice strained to its breaking point, “I don't belong in your book.”

And I was repeatedly replying, “Yes, you do.”

I didn't understand what he was talking about. I was writing a book about public shaming. He had been publicly shamed. He was ideal.

Now he suddenly 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.

“Why?” I said.

“What'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.

“I'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.

•  •  •

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.”

—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 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.

—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 genre—“To make a tight little package where my mother would be like, ‘Ooh, I just read this thing, did you know that X leads to Y,' you have to fucking cut corners”—Andrew Wylie's words were haunting him. Maybe it wasn't enough to ruin a man's life over.

But there was worse to come.
Wired
magazine asked the journalism professor Charles Seife to study eighteen columns Jonah had written for them. All but one, he reported, revealed “evidence of some journalistic misdeed.” It was mainly Jonah reusing his own sentences in different stories, but that wasn't all. Imagine if I had failed to put quotation marks around the sentences I lifted earlier from the Rhodes Scholarship website. It was that kind of pervasive sloppiness/plagiarism. Probably the worst infraction was that Jonah had taken some paragraphs from a blog written by Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society and passed them off as his own.

Michael was massively relieved—he told me—that “the rot spidered out to every book, every piece of journalism.”

—

Jonah vanished, leaving a final, innocent prehumiliation tweet like a plate of congealing food on the
Mary Celeste
.

Fiona Apple's new album is “astonishing,” rhapsodizes @sfj.

—
@
J
ONAH
L
EHRER
,
J
UNE 18
,
2012

He ignored all interview requests. He resurfaced only once, to briefly tell
Los Angeles
magazine's Amy Wallace that he wasn't giving any interviews. So it was a great surprise when he responded to my e-mail. He was “happy to be in touch,” he wrote me, and “happy to chat on the phone or whatever.” In the end, we arranged to go hiking in the Hollywood Hills. I flew to Los Angeles even though his final e-mail to me included an unexpected and unsettling sentence toward the end: “I'm not sure I'm ready to be a case study or talk on the record.”

—

It seemed appropriate that we were hiking in a desert canyon, because his punishment felt quite biblical, a public shaming followed by a casting out into the wilderness, although that analogy only went so far because biblical wildernesses tend not to be filled with extremely beautiful movie stars and models walking their dogs.

We walked in silence for a while. Then Jonah listed two more reasons (alongside the “Americans want tragedies with happy endings” one) why I shouldn't write about him. First, if I was planning to be kind to him, he didn't deserve it. And, second, a warning: “What I mostly feel is intensely radioactive. So even people who come to me with good intentions, I end up transferring my isotopes onto them.”

Jonah was saying that spending time with him would ruin
me
in some unexpected way. “Well, that's not going to happen to me!” I laughed.

“Then you'll be the first,” he said.

As he said this, a bolt of panic shot into me. It was a frightening thing for someone to say. Still, I kept trying to convince him, on and on, but each line of reasoning seemed to make him more anguished, as if I were a siren trying to lure him to the rocks with my song of possible redemption. He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others.

I gave up. Jonah drove me back to my hotel. In the car I stared at my lap, exhausted, like a cold-caller after a long shift.

Then, suddenly, Jonah said, “I've decided to make a public apology.”

I looked up at him. “Have you?”

“Next week,” Jonah said. “In Miami. At a Knight lunch.”

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was created by the owners of the
Chicago Daily News
and
The Miami Herald
to fund young journalists with innovative ideas. There was to be a conference for the fund organizers, Jonah said, and he'd been asked to deliver the after-lunch keynote on the final day. As an advocate of digital media, the foundation planned to broadcast his speech live on its website.

“I keep writing and scrapping and rewriting it,” Jonah said. “Would you read it over? Maybe after that we can discuss whether I fit your narrative?”

•  •  •

I am the author of a book on creativity that is best known because it contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog. I lied, repeatedly, to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.

I sat on the plane reading Jonah's apology speech. It was a stark opening—an unembellished declaration of guilt, followed by an account of his shame and regret.

I think about all the readers I've disappointed, people who paid good money for my book and now don't want it on their shelves.

I was surprised by his candor. Jonah had insisted on our hike that if he did decide to give me an interview the one off-limit topic would be the shame. It was too private and personal, he said. But by the next sentence, it became clear that the shame was something he intended to deal with as hurriedly as possible on the way to something else. This was, it quickly became clear, an apology speech like no other. He was going to explain his flaws within the context of neuroscience. It was a Jonah Lehrer keynote speech on the unique flaws of smart people like Jonah Lehrer. He began comparing himself to inadvertently imperfect scientists working at the FBI forensics lab. Innocent people had been convicted of terrorism because brilliant FBI scientists were “victims of their hidden brain, undone by flaws so deep-seated they don't even notice their existence.”