The Last Days of August
Jon Ronson
★★★★★A follow-up to Ronson's series on the adult film industry, this investigation examines the death of the performer August Ames in December 2017, days after a wave of online abuse over a comment she posted. Her husband initially pointed Ronson toward the pile-on as the cause; as Ronson interviews family, colleagues and friends over months, the account becomes far more complicated, and the tidy narrative of internet mob equals tragedy does not survive contact with the evidence. Ronson is unusually careful about his own role, repeatedly questioning whether the investigation is itself intrusive. Produced as an Audible original, it is as much about the appeal of simple explanations as about the events themselves.
Key takeaways
Ronson sets out to confirm a simple story about online pile-ons and finds the evidence will not support it.
Grieving people construct narratives that make loss legible, and journalists are strongly tempted to accept them.
The series is candid about the ethics of the reporting itself, including whether it should have continued.
Blame is easier to assign than to establish, and the difference between the two is the subject.
The material is genuinely heavy — it deals with a death by suicide and its aftermath throughout.