Author
Johann Hari
The reporter who argues that your attention was not lost but taken, and went looking for who took it.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Johann Hari is a British writer, born in 1979 and educated at King's College, Cambridge. He was a columnist for The Independent from 2003 and won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2008.
In 2011 it emerged that he had presented quotations from interviewees' earlier published writing as if said to him, and had edited Wikipedia entries about critics under a pseudonym. He apologized, returned the Orwell Prize and left the paper. His later books were written with published source notes and, for Stolen Focus, audio of the interviews made available online, a direct response to that episode.
Those books each take a large question through reporting: Chasing the Scream (2015) on the war on drugs, Lost Connections (2018) on depression and anxiety, and Stolen Focus (2022), for which he spent three months without a smartphone and then interviewed the scientists who study attention and the designers who built the systems that capture it.
The signature
Hari's signature is the systemic frame: the claim that a personal failing is usually a condition acting on everyone, and that the honest response is both individual and collective. He reports rather than prescribes, builds an argument from interviews, and is willing to end a book on a political demand rather than a tip.