Meet Jon Ronson, the Writer Behind the Haunting 'Okja'
Bong Joon-ho's upcoming film, starring Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano and Jake Gyllenhaal, is a bracing corporate satire with the excitement of an action movie.
It was February of 2012. The Welsh writer Jon Ronson had traveled to Long Beach, California, for the annual TED conference, where he was to deliver a talk about psychopaths. (Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test had been published the previous year.) While there, he was unexpectedly captivated by a presentation from Regina Dugan, then then-director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “She comes on in a polo-neck jumper looking like Steve Jobs and gives this TED Talk about weaponry,” Ronson recalls. While lecturing on the miraculous rise of flight, Dugan welcomed to the stage a hummingbird drone, which began zooming, eerily birdlike, above the crowd. Audience members gasped.
“I was gasping too,” Ronson says. Though
