Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is
Jon Ronson and the panelists on the Nightly Show will be
Kal Penn,
Lewis Black,
Amy Holmes, and
Kristen Anderson.
Jon Ronson is a journalist, author, documentary filmmaker, and radio presenter, whose works include the best-selling The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest book, available on March 31, 2015 is
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming—meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter—a radically empathetic book about public shaming, and about shaming as a form of social control. It has become such a big part of our lives it has begun to feel weird and empty when there isn’t anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. A transgression is revealed. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn’t cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What’s it doing to them? What’s it doing to us?
Ronson’s book is a powerful, funny, unique, and very humane dispatch from the frontline, in the escalating war on human nature and its flaws.
This terrifying book puts me off going online ever again —except maybe to Ocado — says India Knight Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed makes for grim but gripping reading
What a terrifying book this is. It makes you want to delete all social media and never go online again, except maybe to Ocado. Ronson tells the story of public shaming through the stories of individuals. Their transgressions are minuscule — at least I think they are: this book constantly makes you wonder if there is something wrong with your own moral compass.
So: an American writer called Jonah Lehrer, a Malcolm Gladwell type, inserts five words into a Bob Dylan quote he’s using in a book. The words are: ‘I’m glad I’m not that.’ Another writer, called Michael Moynihan, thinks this doesn’t ring true. He contacts Lehrer, who lies about the provenance of the five words. Fast forward a bit and Lehrer loses his job, his reputation, his whole sense of self. He is disgraced, humiliated, loathed, unemployable, to an extent it’s hard to overstate. He is undone. When he tries to apologise, during a speech to a charitable foundation, he does so standing next to a huge screen containing a live Twitter stream. Within moments, it is filled with abuse. When asked by someone how Lehrer is now, years after the event, Ronson says ‘broken’.
Everyone who has any kind of online presence — including anonymous below-the-line commenters — will find this book gripping. There are fascinating detours: a US judge who makes people wear shaming placards round their necks, the Stanford Prison Experiment, a Radical Honesty workshop, the shooting of a porn film about humiliation, the question of deindividuation, and an especially gripping chapter about prison reform (and one about Max Mosley, unshameable, who’s got it sorted).
Ronson remains one of our finest comic writers, though there’s very little to laugh about here: it’s really grim stuff. One can only conclude, Pollyanna-like, that the only remedy to it all is kindness.
This sounds like an interesting book, I hope it will be a very good interview.
Kal Penn
is an American actor, producer, and civil servant.
As an actor, he is known for his role portraying Dr. Lawrence Kutner on the television program House, as well as the character Kumar Patel in the Harold & Kumar film series. He is also recognized for his performance in the critically acclaimed film, The Namesake. Additionally, Penn has taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the Cinema Studies Program as a visiting lecturer.
On April 8, 2009, it was announced that Penn would join the Obama administration as an Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement. This necessitated that his character, Lawrence Kutner, be written out of the TV series House. Penn resigned his post as Barack Obama's Associate Director of Public Engagement on June 1, 2010, for a brief return to his acting career. He filmed the third installment of the Harold & Kumar series, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and subsequently returned to the White House Office of Public Engagement as an Associate Director. In July 2011, he again left the White House to accept a role in the hit television series How I Met Your Mother.
Lewis Black
is an American comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor. He is known for his angry face, comedy and style, which often includes simulating a mental breakdown, or an increasingly angry rant, ridiculing history, politics, religion, trends and cultural phenomena. He hosted the Comedy Central series Lewis Black's Root of All Evil, and makes regular appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart delivering his “Back in Black” commentary segment.
Amy Holmes
is a news anchor on TheBlaze TV and a former host of TheBlaze's news discussion program Real News. She appears on a regular basis as an independent political contributor for CNN and has previously appeared on Fox News. She has also appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher several times. Holmes received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in economics from Princeton University in 1994. She was also a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She is an independent conservative.
Kristen Anderson
is a Republican researcher and strategist and a columnist at The Daily Beast and partner and co-founder of Echelon Insights. She previously served as Vice President of The Winston Group, a Washington DC-based opinion research and political communications firm where she spent eight years studying emerging trends in politics and policy. In 2013, she was named one of TIME magazine’s “30 under 30 Changing the World,” National Journal magazine’s “25 Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” and one of Marie Claire magazine’s “New Guard” of the 50 most connected rising female leaders.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
We 3/25: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering
Th 3/26: John Hargrove
Next week will be repeats after being pre-empted Monday. New episodes begin again Mo 4/6.