In this bonus episode, Jon Ronson's friend and fellow podcaster Adam Buxton chat about the latest season of Things Fell Apart. They discuss their favourite moments from the show and how to best navigate the culture wars, all while also chatting about lockdown, fatherhood, social anxiety and how a rough time at Cardiff High School made Jon Ronson a better journalist.

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 young man with a novel idea for affordable accommodation, and an Oxford man with a plan for bus lanes, and a Danish woman writing a thought experiment about car rentals, unwittingly became hate figures for conspiracy theorists.

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 schism between a mother and her teenage daughter during lockdown contributed to Governor Ron DeSantis enacting new and far-reaching laws in Florida.

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 an American media polarized over Antifa led to an innocent family on a Twilight-themed lockdown-escaping camping trip getting barricaded in the woods by armed, hostile townspeople.

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

How the mysterious deaths of 32 black sex workers in Miami in the 1980s led to a whole new (and spurious) mental health diagnosis, ending with another murder that occurred during the height of lockdown.

Written and presented by Jon Ronson Produced by Sarah Shebbeare Original music by Phil Channell

Archive credits: NBC News June 1984; Fox Television’s A Current Affair 1989.

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 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