So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: Welsh journalist Jon Ronson has spent much of his career exploring controversial issues related to social behavior, science or politics. His 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed looks at the recent resurgence of public shaming through the internet — Twitter in particular. In fascinating interviews with Justine Sacco, Jonah Lehrer, and a host of other people who have received a tirade of online abuse not necessarily proportionate to their initial infraction, he humanizes the widely derided. He also looks at why we are so quick to jump on the shaming bandwagon — both as individuals governed by psychological impulses, and as members of a herd, driven by the-internet-as-sociological-phenomenon.

Ronson is a charming and very funny writer, who is by turns disarmingly sincere and compassionate towards his subjects and somewhat disingenuous, concealing his thoughts and motivations when it is expedient. As this excellent review puts it, “Comedy is his disguise and also his weapon. He is a moralist.” And while the reader may trust that she is being invited to turn a critical eye more on the shamers than the shamed, there is also a sense of being warned against the hubris we could all fall prey to, as anonymous observers. As Ronson writes, “The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places…The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us.” And you can never be completely sure you won’t one day end up on the wrong side of them.