Johann Hari

The son of a Swiss bus driver and a Scottish nurse, Johann Hari was born in Glasgow and raised in London, where he still lives today. After attending a series of prestigious private schools, Hari went on to study Social and Political Science at Cambridge University, where he also won national awards for his writings in a student newspaper. After graduation, he began working for the magazine New Statesman and writing a column for the newspaper The Independent, where he stayed for more than a decade. During this time, he also published work in a variety of leading global newspapers, and he won significant awards including the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing and the 2010 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. However, in 2011, bloggers discovered that Hari had plagiarized parts of many interviews: he inserted real quotes from his subjects’ other writing or media appearances into his articles, in order to falsely imply that these quotes came from interviews that he conducted. The public also learned that Hari had assumed a false identity in order to make biased edits to his own and many of his rival journalists’ Wikipedia pages. Hari publicly apologized for his behavior, returned his Orwell Award, and lost his position at The Independent. For the next three years, he fell out of the public spotlight while traveling around the world and interviewing people to write Chasing the Scream, which he published in 2015. Then, he repeated this research process to study depression and anxiety for his 2018 book Lost Connections and focus and attention for his 2022 book Stolen Focus. While Hari’s journalistic comeback has been controversial, he now meticulously cites all the sources and quotes in his work, including by publishing audio recordings of his interviews online. Today, Hari is probably best known for his extremely popular TED Talks about addiction and depression.