Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011). He has been described as a gonzo journalist, becoming a faux-naïf character in his stories. He produces informal but skeptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science.

He has published nine books, and his work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, City Life, and Time Out. He has made several BBC Television documentary films and two documentary series for Channel 4. Ronson was born in Cardiff on 10 May 1967. He attended Cardiff High School and later worked for CBC Radio in Cardiff before moving to London to study for a media degree at the Polytechnic of Central London.

Ronson's first book, Clubbed Class (1994), is a travelogue in which he bluffs his way into a jet-set lifestyle in search of the world's finest holiday. His second book, Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), chronicles his experiences with people labeled as extremists. Subjects in the book include David Icke, Randy Weaver, Omar Bakri Muhammad, Ian Paisley, Alex Jones, and Thomas Robb. Ronson also follows independent investigators of secretive groups such as the Bilderberg Group.

The narrative tells of Ronson's attempts to infiltrate the "shadowy cabal" fabled by these conspiracy theorists to rule the world. Louis Theroux described the book as a "funny and compulsively readable picaresque adventure through a paranoid shadow world." Variety magazine announced in September 2005 that Universal Pictures purchased them for a feature film. Ronson contributed the memoir A Fantastic Life to the Picador anthology Truth or Dared in 2004.

Ronson's third book, The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), deals with the secret New Age unit within the United States Army, the First Earth Battalion. Ronson investigates people such as Major General Albert Stubblebine III, former head of intelligence, who believe that people can walk through walls with the right mental preparation and that goats can be killed simply by staring at them. Much was based on the ideas of Lt. Col. Jim Channon, ret., who wrote the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual in 1979, inspired by California's emerging Human Potential Movement.

The book suggests that these New Age military ideas mutated over the decades to influence interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. An eponymous film of the book was released in 2009, in which Ronson's investigations were fictionalized and structured around a journey to Iraq. Ronson is played by the actor Ewan McGregor in the film.

Ronson's fourth book, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness (2006; Picador and Guardian Books), is a collection of his Guardian articles, mostly those concerning his domestic life. A companion volume was What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness (2007).

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (2011) is Ronson's fifth book. In it, he explores the nature of psychopathic behavior, learning how to apply the Hare Psychopathy Checklist and investigating its reliability. He interviews people in facilities for the criminally insane and potential psychopaths in corporate boardrooms. The book's findings have been rejected by The Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy and by Robert D. Hare, creator of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Hare described the book as "frivolous, shallow, and professionally disconcerting."

Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries (2012) is Ronson's sixth book and is a collection of previously published articles by him. Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) concerns the effects of public humiliation in the internet age.