Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson
Jon Ronsonis a Welsh journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and radio presenter whose works include the best-selling The Men Who Stare at Goatsand The Psychopath Test. He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming something of a faux-naïf character himself in his stories...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth10 May 1967
confirmation bias seeing
Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere.
way kind sept-11
I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked.
people way ridiculous
The way I portrayed the people is accurate. Because they're human beings and we have a kind of wonderful capacity to be absurd and ridiculous.
land empathy understanding
In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble.
opposites shooting faces
I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you’ve got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.
sweet alcohol fruitcake
Friends are the fruitcake of life - some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet.
interesting personality anxiety
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
human paint relate
I was always out to paint them with human characteristics we could relate to. They really are, by and large, personable in the flesh.
hate writing ambition
As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
believe certainly crazy mountain threat top utterly
I certainly believe the Weavers were utterly innocent, were a threat to nobody, and if you can't believe crazy things on top of a mountain in Idaho, where can you believe crazy things?
people eccentric firsts
At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that.