Whistling in the Dark

I meet up with journalist, humorist, author and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson. We dig in to our opposing personality styles; he = introvert, me = extrovert… and find common ground in shared loves for everything from Malcolm Gladwell, cult female-band The Shaggs and Marc Maron’s podcast to our respective Ted Talk experiences. He tells me how he single-handedly tried to tackle the long unsolved Ted Kennedy/Chappaquiddick murder mystery, and that his brush with a particularly terrifying psychopath had near consequences for his son. We chat at length about social media, the way in which it’s being used to facilitate western civilization’s obsession with public shaming and how it’s informed his soon-to-be-released new book. No conversation with Ronson is complete until a deep dive in to modern psychiatry is explored, which we do, followed by a hack attempt at unpacking my father’s questionable pathology and the Robin Williams suicide.  We his high brow Marrakech experience with the Richard Branson clan, his wri