Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: God, Im glad Im not me, he said. I dreaded uploading the footage onto YouTube because Id been so screechy. He got in touch with somebody who got in touch with me to tell me to call him, Michael told me. On a whim he downloaded the latest number-one New York Times nonfiction bestseller from the young, handsome, and internationally renowned pop-psychology author Jonah Lehrer. I left it up for ten minutes. Bob Hare, the titular Psychopath Tests inventor, tells Ronson: Its dimensional. (A matter of degree.) After that, when the powerful transgressed, we were there. Excuse me, sir, one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. And so the community responded by degrading her femininity., I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. They didnt make them like Michael anymore. And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. Ships from and sold by Book Depository CA. Their public shaming had been like the button that restores factory settings. We think theres already a layer of artifice and its your online personalitythe brand Jon Ronsonyoure trying to protect. I had no idea who Jon Ronson was or what he'd written before so I came to this book with no preconceptions. At other times, Ronsons interviews are thrilling because he talks to unpleasant people as we would love to do so ourselves, not as a journalist condemned to dispassionate balance. The only question is how long he can keep this up the more success he has as a widely beloved bestselling author, documentarist and screenwriter. Thats bizarre, said Dan. And then one day it hit me. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. Photograph: Rachael Wright/Camera Press. I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. Smoking, smoking, smoking. Michael thought. One was fired from his job. What was it for: just some social media drama? There were no readers and there wasnt a lot of news. But still, it was a break. Theres no great message. This was an outstanding read and was wake-up call especially for people who don't understand the implications of Twitter. In his recent short memoir Frank, about his years playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom, which is published to coincide with the movie that he cowrote, Ronson shows that he has enjoyed witnessing nuttiness for a long time. It was May 1965 and Dylan was bored, weary from a grueling tour, skinny from insomnia and pills, sick of his music, thinking he had nothing left to say. Fast CompanyI was mesmerized. Some columns he had written for The New Yorker had, it turned out, been recycled from columns hed published months earlier in The Wall Street Journal. And that, Michael said, is when Jonah lost it. So Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. (I parked my car outside the Massachusetts archive ) But its usually worth it for the jokes: For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people called Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. There is in his books a characteristic rhythm of vivid storytelling followed by a single diagnostic thought: We were creating a world, he writes in So Youve Been Publicly Shamed, where the smartest way to survive is to be bland. (In his winsomely gonzo way, he has attended a course in how not to be ashamed, in which the participants tell each other their most humiliating secrets. Joanne sat with us. As he stresses, we are the ones wielding this incredible power over others' lives, often with no regard for the lasting consequences of our actions." The two of us were eating lunch at the Cookshop restaurant in Manhattans Chelsea district. Judd Apatow"Jon Ronson is unreal. No, not really, said Dan.