Jeff, One Lonely Guy
non-fiction work by Jeff Ragsdale
Jeff, One Lonely Guy is a 2012 nonfiction book by Jeff Ragsdale. It was published on March 20, 2012 by New Harvest. Dave Eggers selected the book for inclusion in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and it was a GQ 2012 "Book of the Year". In 2014 Amitava Kumar included portions of Jeff, One Lonely Guy in his newly released book, A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna. Kumar previously interviewed Ragsdale and wrote about him in The New York Times.
Background
In October 2011 Ragsdale posted several fliers around New York City as a social experiment. The fliers stated "If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me”, followed by his phone number. The fliers quickly went viral after images were posted on Reddit, with Ragsdale receiving hundreds of phone calls and texts daily from people from all over the world.
Ragsdale collected many of the phone calls and texts into a book project similar to Postsecret. Ragsdale compiled the material into a manuscript, illustrating major themes that appeared most often in the correspondences.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6173174. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2014 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jeff, One Lonely Guy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.