Things Fell Apart

Jon Ronson’s second season of unexpected human stories from the culture wars focused on the divisions that erupted in the wake of the Covid lockdown. It was a number 1 hit podcast and received five star reviews. In a fun, free-flowing live discussion from the Hay Festival in Wales, Jon turns the tables on himself and asks his audience to ask him anything they like.Series Producer: Sarah Shebbeare

How a former actor and model, burned by Hollywood and devastated by the death of his brother, has become an important culture warrior, fueling the flames of every story we tell this season.Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

How a bestselling book about trauma - lockdown’s number one bestseller - helped the culture war over free speech burst out of colleges and into the workplace. A shift some people pejoratively call the Great Awokening. Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

How a disenfranchised young man, maddened by the strict lockdown laws in Michigan, joined a club of like-minded men and suddenly found himself under arrest for the most unlikely and horrific crime. Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

How a chance encounter in a yacht club in the early 2000s between a bartender and a very wealthy couple with a daughter sick with a mystery disease ended with the creation of the first great covid conspiracy theory.Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

Since Jon Ronson’s first series, new battle lines in the culture wars have been drawn. And many of them are linked by one extraordinary thing: they all snowballed within days of each other, in May 2020, six weeks into lockdown.Millions of us spent our days locked at home with only the internet for company. People lost their jobs. Politicians told us what to do. We lived in fear of an invisible enemy nobody understood. This bizarre experience changed people psychologically. People and institutions fell apart. The pandemic – and lockdown – were to become dangerously fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking, and for new frontlines in the culture wars.And so in Season Two of Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson again uncovers intriguing and wholly unexpected origin stories, but this time of the culture wars that ignited during lockdown, and now dominate society.Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

In this bonus episode of Things Fell Apart, Jon Ronson's friend and fellow documentary maker Louis Theroux asks him all about how he made the series. They take a deep dive into Culture Wars battles and explore Jon's storytelling methods, all while chatting about Jon's broken arm, putting old rivalries to bed, and how they deal with difficult interviewees when they both hate conflict. Produced by Sarah Shebbeare

It’s 2017. Late one night after a party a Hollywood actor plays a prank on a friend. But the prank backfires terribly and the ripples are seismic - taking us inside Donald Trump’s White House and the Capitol insurrection of January 2021.Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sam Peach Original music by Phil ChannellArchive with credit to:Videos discussing Isaac Kappy: Lisa Crapella.– Youtube , The Truth Blog Part 2 – Youtube , Miss M – Youtube , Truth Crossing - Youtube Clip from the movie THOR (2011) – Produced by Marvel Studios, distributed by Paramount Pictures and Directed by Kenneth Branagh Coverage of 2016 Democratic National Convention from ABC News Coverage of Pizzagate and Isaac Kappy interview from Infowars Coverage of Edgar Welch's arrest from ANV News Coverage of Nicholas Sandmann incident from MSNBC, CNN and Fox News Interview with Lin Wood from Fox News Clip of Lin Wood’s speech from Ronnie N – Youtube Coverage of 2021 US Capitol Attack from CNN

This is the story of the very first person to be publicly shamed because of something they did online. It’s 1988, the internet exists only in its most nascent form, and a software designer, Brad Templeton, uploads onto a message board a joke in poor taste. How the architects of the emerging internet respond to the joke will create a set of rules that the rest of us have lived under ever since…Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Assistant Producer Sam Peach Original music by Phil Channell

It’s the early 1980s and a hugely popular television evangelist is having a crisis of conscience. She wants Christian evangelism to be less bigoted. And so, to the horror of her peers, she invites a very unexpected guest onto her TV show…Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil ChannellArchive from the PTL network's 'Tammy's House Party' and the 'PTL Club'.

It's the early 1970s. Frank Schaeffer is an American kid living in the Swiss Alps – the son of an influential Christian art historian - who daydreams of one day making Hollywood films. But for that he needs a show-reel to prove himself. The ripples of Frank's creative ambitions will help trigger one of America's most violent culture wars around the legalization of abortion and Roe vs Wade.Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell