So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Forget gets me off the hook too easily,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?’

The self-plagiarism should have been a warning sign,’ Jonah said. ‘It should have been a sign that I was stretched then. If I needed to recycle my own material, why was I bothering to write this blog post in the first place?

Academics shouldn’t diagnose people from afar as sociopaths. It was a stupid thing for Jerry Coyne to have done. I think Jonah wanted us to bitch about his stupidity for a moment. It would be a way for him to recover some self-esteem - to do a bit of shaming of someone else

because it didn’t seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether whichever person we had just shamed was OK or in ruins.

Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses

They were stopped because they were far too brutal.

Michael had noticed that people were starting to feel scared of him.

the Knight Foundation had decided to erect a giant-screen live Twitter feed behind his head. Anyone watching from home could tweet their ongoing opinion of Jonah’s request for forgiveness using the hashtag #infoneeds and their comment would automatically appear, in real time and in gigantic letters, right next to Jonah’s face. A second screen was positioned within his eyeline.

It was unconsciously filtering out evidence that pointed to his innocence

victims of their hidden brain, undone by flaws so deep-seated they don’t even notice their existence.