Johann Hari used to be a star columnist at The Independent, and popped up in numerous other publications. After his various misdeeds came to light in 2011, he briefly disappeared, then reinvented himself as a non-fiction author and highly successful TED Talk speaker.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this transformation. He did, after all, apologise — after a fashion — for the plagiarism and the malicious editing. Perhaps he’s now a reformed character, worthy of rehabilitation. But as Jeremy Duns has pointed out, Hari has never provided a full account of everything he did wrong. His articles are still online without any flags from the newspapers that published them — and some of them make quite, well, surprising assertions.

But what if his books really are that good? They must have done something to earn such laudatory quotations and blurbs from varied luminaries including Hillary Clinton, Elton John, Russell Brand, George Monbiot, Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. On the back of all this support, and some heavy marketing, his books have been best-sellers.

Unfortunately, the books are not, in fact, that good. In his first, Chasing the Scream — in which he announced that “everything you know about addiction is wrong” — Hari hadn’t quite changed his ways. Even though he posted audio clips of his interviews online (a concession born of the ethical lapses he’d previously committed), actually listening to the clips revealed that, in very many cases, he seemed to be misconstruing what his interviewees said.

The neuroscientist Dean Burnett wrote an exasperated critique of an extract from Hari’s second book, Lost Connections, which asked “is everything you know about depression wrong?” Hari’s condemnatory attitude to anti-depressant drugs, for example, wasn’t exactly nuanced, and he made some truly bizarre (and bizarrely untrue) points — for example that, “if your baby dies at 10am, your doctor can diagnose you with a mental illness at 10.01am and start drugging you straight away”.

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Hari’s third book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, published yesterday, is not much better. Which is frustrating, because the phenomenon Hari addresses — the feeling that, with so many distractions around in the modern, online-centric world, it’s harder than ever to focus — is one many of us experience. Hari says that he and almost everyone around him feels this way, and describes a several-months-long “digital detox”, where he went to live in a small town on Cape Cod with no smartphone and no internet.

But that’s all anecdotal: does Hari actually present any evidence that shortening attention spans is a society-wide problem? There’s a study on how topics appear and disappear on Twitter more quickly now than a few years ago; some research on how many distractions office workers experience; and a dodgy-sounding but headline-ready statistic about how often we “touch our smartphones” each day (2,617 times, apparently).

It’s not until more than halfway through the book, page 176, that Hari drops what should be a bombshell: “We don’t have any long-term studies tracking changes in people’s ability to focus over time.” In other words, he quietly admits that there isn’t really any strong scientific evidence for the main thesis of the book. That’s despite how true the attention problem seems to many of us. It must be said that, on closer inspection, the people I know who complain the loudest about not being able to focus are people who have still managed to write tons of columns, scientific papers, or even books in the past years: even Hari mentions in passing that he wrote a 92,000-word novel while on his Cape Cod getaway, turning the story from an interesting self-help tale into a grotesque humblebrag.

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Clearly, we need some better data to understand how deep and widespread an issue this actually is. But let’s give Hari the benefit of the doubt, and consider how he tries to explain the phenomenon.

Most of the book is dedicated to the causes of our collective attentional problems. The first is, unoriginally, social media. Isn’t it very revealing, Hari writes, that there’s no button on Facebook that you can press to help you meet up with your friends in person? Facebook won’t, he says, “alert you to the physical proximity of somebody you might want to see in the real world”. Hari explains that the whole business model of social media precludes the encouragement of joys like looking your friends in the eye or giving them a hug, and instead is based on keeping you fixated on your screen, scrolling endlessly, never leaving the house.

Except Facebook does have exactly the feature that Hari claims doesn’t (and couldn’t) exist. It’s called “Nearby Friends”. It gives you a little map of where your friends are physically at that moment (if they have opted in). It’s been available since 2014. A two-second Google search would have enlightened Hari. Maybe he wrote that part of the book while he was in internet-free isolation.

The more you think about Hari’s objections to social media, the sillier they become: for years Facebook has been one of the main tools people use to arrange meet-ups and in-person events. It can and does introduce us to people who become our friends in real life. People don’t just use social media because we’re mindless drones, hoodwinked by Big Tech. But Hari barely mentions its benefits, and instead regurgitates (though thankfully, with citation) the catastrophic view put forward by many before him, including Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier.

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Indeed, many of the other causes Hari identifies are rehashings of previous pop-science and pop-psychology books: we aren’t sleeping enough (Why We Sleep); kids don’t play outdoors any more (Free Range Kids and The Coddling of the American Mind); we don’t eat the right foods (a million diet books). Of course, it’s not a crime to write a book that doesn’t provide any new information. But Hari’s irritating, breathless style turns every single fact he “discovers” into a startling revelation, every single expert he speaks to into the absolute best in the world. Hari’s research — a series of interviews for a pop-psychology book — becomes an intense, globetrotting journey of personal discovery. His mind is so often blown that it’s little wonder it has such difficulty in paying attention.

It’s not just that Hari thinks he’s discovered earth-shaking new information. (As Dean Burnett wrote of Lost Connections, Hari “repeatedly presents well-known concepts and ideas … as fringe concepts that he’s discovered through his own efforts”.) He also thinks he’s a hard-nosed scientific truth-seeker. At the start of the book, he solemnly assures us that: “I studied social and political sciences at Cambridge University, where I got a rigorous training in how to read the studies these scientists publish [and] how to assess the evidence they put forward”.

What makes this risible isn’t just that he’s touting his undergraduate degree as if it makes him an expert (a fairly substantial proportion of the population also have one). It’s that Stolen Focus exhibits no talent for assessing evidence. A few times there’s a small concession to a flaw in a study, or to the fact that scientists disagree on a point — but Hari fails to add any of the necessary uncertainty to his argument. After a cursory mention of the “other side,” he usually just blunders on regardless, assuming his argument is right.

The book builds up to Hari’s ultimate theory for why we have all these attentional problems: it’s capitalism itself! Our blinkered focus on economic growth, Hari writes, puts us in a rat-race that ruins the workings of our brains. We should abandon the idea of growth, he argues, and aim for what the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel calls a “steady-state economy”.

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Never mind all the evidence for the benefits of economic growth in alleviating grinding poverty and hellish disease, particularly in the Global South. Never mind Hari’s own assertion that poverty can be another cause of attentional problems. What’s more important than the world making progress is that he, Johann, sometimes has a bit of trouble focussing on his next book.

Hari’s call to kill capitalism is not the only embarrassing, student-level politics in Stolen Focus. He thinks we should have an activist movement called “Attention Rebellion” to do, well, he never actually says what. He thinks we should nationalise Facebook — which would, to be fair, probably solve the problem of how distracting it is, by making it unusably slow and terrible.

When focused on the individual who is easily distracted, he does provide some realistic advice. But that includes things like: pre-commit to getting tasks done; use special software to restrict access to social media; get some decent sleep. It’s all pretty obvious (if, in many cases, easier said than done). With Hari, as was once said about Freud, “what is new in his theories is not true, and what is true in his theories is not new”.

And yet, despite all this, it seems that the media establishment — especially outside the UK, where his unethical past is less known — just can’t get enough of him. His first book is apparently being made into a documentary series presented by Samuel L. Jackson. And from what he’s said in interviews, more non-fiction is forthcoming — not to mention the Cape Cod novel. But this is a writer who’s shown himself again and again to be either untrustworthy, unoriginal, or uninformed. If he’s right to say that our moments of focus are becoming ever-more precious, isn’t it time we started paying attention to someone — anyone — else?

Now The New Yorker has added another name to this list of authorial shame. Dan Mallory has worked in the publishing world most of his adult life. He has also studied at Oxford. Last year, he published a novel called The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn. It went straight to number one in the New York Times bestsellers list – an extraordinary achievement for a first-time novelist. But as so often when such rockets enter the stratosphere, even minor flaws can them break apart.

On the basis of The New Yorker’s profile, Mallory has more than a few minor flaws. Throughout his professional and personal life, he has developed a taste for making outrageous and untrue claims about himself and those around him. It seems he did it to draw attention and sympathy to himself, but also to get out of situations he didn’t want to be in and to get into positions that he did.

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He claimed his mother had died of cancer, that his brother had recently committed suicide and that he himself had terminal cancer. None of these stories was remotely true. But for years he spun versions of some or all of them –and received serious sympathy and professional leeway in return.

He left some clues along the way. At one point, he decided to change his accent from American to British. He devoted his (eventually stalled) Oxford studies to Patricia Highsmith. Neither of which is a crime. But when reading about his career, it’s hard to shake the idea that Mallory read one of the Ripley novels at an impressionable age and thought – interesting character, let’s see if it can be done

Since Mallory has only written one novel, it won’t be raked over in the same way that the fraudulence committed by Frey, Hari, Lehrer and others was. But as he is a person of some talent, not to say cunning, there’s still a fascination in considering why he did it.

It would probably be hard to find a journalist today who has not thought, however briefly, about ‘improving’ a quote, or slightly exaggerating the amount of risk they were under in covering a story. Equally, most journalists have probably suspected a colleague of doing something similar. At the start of my career, I learned this after a conversation I’d had with a hack was splashed all over the following day’s newspaper with my views attributed to “a source in MI5”. I asked the journalist about this a couple of days later. “Who was the source who told you exactly what I told you between our conversation and the print deadline?” I asked. “Ah, erm, couldn’t possibly comment,” came the response.

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Most journalists don’t go the whole hog though. Among the reasons they wouldn’t – apart from basic ethics – is the knowledge that once you’ve started, it would be hard to stop. How do you resist the temptation to polish up the the next quote or source? And the one after that? Would anybody say anything that wasn’t Dorothy Parker-level in your copy ever again?

Even if you’ve never been near the world of journalism, you’ll know about ‘fish stories’ –  stories which are exaggerated in the telling. As the stories grow, you wonder why the person doesn’t stop. It’s the same with Mallory’s life-experience inflation. Most people who have written a CV will have attempted to present the best version of themselves, and an age that admires victimhood over heroism inevitably sees an upsurge in people stressing the obstacles they have had to overcome to get where they have.

But how many times have people been found to have pushed the truth just that little bit further than is wholly defensible?  Many people may have exaggerated some aspect of their life at some point. An awful lot must have considered putting something out there to benefit themselves and only refrained because they considered the consequences and their consciences.

How, though, do you go from mild CV inflation, to falsely claiming you have got cancer in order to get ahead in your profession? That is where the fascination for the spectator lies. How could Mallory possibly look a cancer sufferer in the eye once he’d gone that far?

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If I could summon a diagnosis for him (apart from the ‘bipolar’ one that he and a doctor have claimed for him) it would be good old-fashioned narcissism veering towards sociopathy. As the New York based playwright Christopher Shinn wrote, there is a type of person on the narcissist to sociopath spectrum who cannot bear the illness of others and who can only react to it by either trying to trump it themselves or diminishing it in others. Mallory clearly found enormous benefit in using the alleged deaths of relatives and himself from cancer to control other people.

These cases will keep on coming up. Authors and journalists, as with others in the creative industries, are not always known for their meekness and humility. Not all novelists can stop the invention when they turn from from the keyboard. Trying to be the centre of attention, being written about, let alone praised, brings out devils in many people. And that is why we like to fix on people like Mallory. Not because they are a completely different species, but because they are recognisable as a version of what we might become if every decent and restraining instinct were to go missing.