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3 weeks ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
I learned some terrible news back on January 10th. It was about Carol Howe, the subject of my 2023 Audible show The Debutante. Before I tell you the news, here’s a little about her:She led many lives. She was a high society Tulsa debutante, then she joined an especially violent and unhinged white supremacist group, becoming their enthusiastic spokeswoman, then she turned undercover informant for the ATF. During her CI days she spied on some extremely dangerous people for the government.
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3 weeks ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
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2 months ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! I wanted to let you know about some upcoming live events. First, I’ll be in conversation with Amanda Knox in Dumbo, Brooklyn, on March 26. Amanda is soon to publish a new book called Free about her reintegration into normal life after prison. There’s a story in there about a man called ‘Mike’ that’s so stunning, so tense and unexpected, my mouth literally hung open while I was listening. I’m going to ask her about that story A LOT. She wrote it very well.
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2 months ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! During the past few weeks I’ve started to think of this Substack as a bit of a burden - mostly because of the people who very kindly pay. I very much want people to feel they’re getting their money’s worth with my work. So I’m going to KEEP POSTING - especially because I’ve got some stuff coming out soon that I’ll be very excited to tell you abou…
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2 months ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! I want to introduce you to a very interesting and little known mental disorder called Scrupulosity. It’s a kind of OCD, where the sufferer has an obsessive concern with religious or moral matters. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, apparently had it. One time he accidentally stood on two bits of straw in the shape of a cross and it tormented him for ages. Martin Luther apparently had it too.
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2 months ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had a few months ago with my friend, the documentary maker Adam Curtis. I’d had a worry about how to portray a particular character in my next book and I wanted Adam’s advice about it. I’ll tell you more about my worry next week, because I want to skip straight to his advice. Which was: “Put it in there.”Share
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2 months ago | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! This weekly Substack is mostly about my fixation on how a piece of journalism can be made to feel as distinctive as a novel or a painting - how it can inhabit its own universe and, if it’s a book, be such a one-off bookstores won’t even know which section to put it in. (That, I confess, is the downside: If your book doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, bookstores may get bewildered and place you somewhere horrific like Wellness.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
Hello! I’ve so far managed to publish one newsletter each week since I started this five months ago. But it’s been eight days since my last one, and I wanted to apologize. I’ve been frantically working to deliver nine chapters of my new book - which I just did - plus there’s been a very big development in one of my old stories, so …
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Feb 6, 2025 | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson
This week I’ve been emailing potential interviewees for my book, and so I wanted to write about what I think are the best and worst ways of going about it. It’s the most stressful part of the process and incredibly important to get right. We can spend months scrabbling around down rabbit holes trying to find a story to fall in love with, but if we can’t get people to talk to us it’s still - after all that - dead in the water. That’s the horror of access-dependent nonfiction.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
jonronson.substack.com | Jon Ronson |Lila Shapiro
Last summer Rachel Johnson made a brilliant podcast for Tortoise Media, The Master, revealing for the first time the allegations against Neil Gaiman. It was nuanced and thoughtful while also being completely damning. Oddly, for such an important and well-made show about a topic with so much mainstream interest, the Master did not go viral. In fact almost no one talked about it. I recommended it, as did a few other people like David Aaronovitch – but the world was bizarrely quiet.