Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal reports on newly released book titles and the world of publishing in The Book Reader.

Two hundred years ago, when someone committed a crime, they might be paraded out into the middle of the public square and fastened into the stocks. There, trapped and exposed, they might endure a whipping. Neighbors would watch, hurling insults, rotting food or worse.

Such public punishment was outlawed in 1839 in this country, but that doesn't mean we no longer shame our neighbors. We've just replaced pillories with Twitter.

In his provocative new book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," Jon Ronson investigates our high-tech version of 18th-century punishment. He makes the argument that we're “at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming” and reading this book, it's hard to disagree.

Consider the case of Justine Sacco. Chances are you don't remember her name, but you probably remember her tweet. In 2013, the PR rep made a bad AIDS joke on Twitter: "Going to Africa," she wrote. "Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" She hit send and then stepped onto a plane ride to South Africa. By the time she landed in Cape Town she was the top-trending subject on Twitter world-wide. She lost her job almost immediately. She can't find anyone to date because of her Google search results.

“A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop,” Mr. Ronson writes. “But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.”

Just this past week new villains entered the long roster in the East Village. Did the women who took smiling selfies in front of the building explosion deserve to be tarred and feathered? Mr. Ronson would probably say not. Once a gleeful public shamer himself, by the end of the book he admits he no longer joins in unless someone’s committed a transgression that has an actual villain. “I miss the fun a little,” he writes, “But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak…but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse.”