Things Fell Apart

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

In front of a live audience at the Hay Festival 2023 in Wales, Jon Ronson and journalist and author Dolly Alderton discuss Jon’s multifarious adventures in nonfiction, and all things Culture Wars, including an appearance from a mystery guest from series one of Things Fell Apart.

Producer: Sarah Shebbeare

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

An incident of racist bullying on Snapchat is currently tearing apart a small town on a lake in Michigan. As the ripples spread, practically every conflict we’ve encountered throughout our series rears its head.

Presented by Jon Ronson

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

Archive with credit to:

Videos discussing Isaac Kappy: Lisa Crapella.– Youtube , The Truth Blog Part 2 – Youtube , Miss M – Youtube , Truth Crossing - Youtube

This story is about how the unique experiences of a little girl growing up unconventionally in America in the 1970s seismically changed the face of feminism in the 90s and beyond. It's a story too about the invention of a word - one that's contributed to a ferocious schism in the British culture wars.

Written and presented by Jon Ronson

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

In the mid 1980s a new conspiracy theory proliferates across America - that cabals of Satanists are secretly preying on children and polluting the culture. This ‘Satanic panic’ is a madness with bizarre and dreadful consequences – as an unsuspecting young woman in New Jersey is about to discover…

Written and presented by Jon Ronson

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

Archive from the PTL network's 'Tammy's House Party' and the 'PTL Club'.

1974. A church minister's wife in West Virginia learns of a brand new curriculum being introduced into her children's school. So she decides to read all 325 new textbooks herself. What she discovers horrifies her so much she instigates a State-wide insurrection. But were some of her concerns based on a misunderstanding?

Written and presented by Jon Ronson

With thanks to Trey Kay for helping us tell this story.