Standing outside a squat, residential tower block on the outskirts of Harlow on a grey winter afternoon, it seems hard to believe this is the headquarters of a media organisation with links to the English far right and the Russian propaganda machine. Along the route from Harlow town centre, someone has climbed every lamp post and strung hundreds of St George’s flags, which hang limply in the drizzle. There’s another draped from a balcony at the frivolously-named Spinning Wheel Mead estate, where the flat I’m looking for awaits down a shady passage. It strikes me as exactly the kind of place a journalist might meet a sticky end in a schlocky pulp novel. The warning I’d received earlier that day – “be careful with this story, it involves some deeply unpleasant characters” – runs through my mind as I step into the gloom. ••• The London Post website is a dizzying place. Scrolling through a blunderbuss of articles, I hover over a story about the opening of a new Tesco in Hounslow, stretched over an interminable 300 words; there’s a piece on the Federation of Master Builders celebrating Women in Construction Week, and a post about Brockwell Live’s planning application being approved by Lambeth Council. Most appear to be copied almost word for word from press releases (I recognise some from the emails cluttering my own inbox) and none are attributed to real people, instead bearing the ubiquitous “Ldn-Post” byline that’s responsible for around 23,000 articles. Some stories bear the hallmarks of AI but most appear to have been filtered through the eyes and fingers of a human. Delve a little deeper, however, and you start to notice anomalies: there are stories promoting unregulated gambling websites, such as a piece from February about CoinPoker, a “decentralised crypto casino” which 71…

Every now and then, sometimes once or twice a year, sometimes less, a place opens that combines all the right elements in just the right order to create the rare alchemy that we call the “it” restaurant. Gloria did it with its maximalist Italian amore della vita, as did Gymkhana with its studiously crafted modern Indian cuisine and heavy, wood-panelled aesthetic, and so did both the Bob Bobs with their mad Anglo-Franco-Russian menus and daft champagne buttons. These places seem to come preloaded with an easy, laid-back confidence that other equally accomplished ventures by equally accomplished chefs will never – can never – reach. They create a feedback-loop of critical acclaim that sends them to the top of the wishlist of every food connoisseur within 500 miles. Sessions Arts Club is one of those restaurants. It’s housed on the fourth floor of a massive Grade II listed former courthouse in Clerkenwell, the entrance deliberately tucked away with no discernable signage, allowing the anticipation to grow as you circle this imposing palace to gastronomy again and again, pondering how you might get inside. Is there an open window I could shimmy through? Some kind of sewer grating? Once you spot the comically small menu tacked to a railing beside a pretty red door, you enter what feels like the ground floor of a castle: a claustrophobic little corridor with a stone staircase sweeping overhead. A man at a small desk invites you to take a tiny elevator to the fourth floor, where you pass through a velvet curtain into Sessions Arts Club proper. Logistics suggest this is probably the only way to get from A to B, but it serves to amplify just how grand this dining room is. Triple-height ceilings are clad in peeling pastel paint reminiscent of Wilton’s Music…

The ‘customer’ in the fried chicken shop didn’t touch his meal. Instead, he photographed the kitchen door’s keypad and left. ‘Corporate spy,’ muttered the cashier before showing me three identical incidents caught on his security cameras. This is the opening line of a pitch I received from a writer called Joseph Wales, entitled “London’s Fried Chicken Wars: Espionage, Betrayal and Social Media Sabotage.” Wales promised that after “six weeks of undercover investigation” he could shine a light on the murky, sometimes violent world in which temporary staff turn out to be spies from rival chains, social media feeds are regularly flamed by troll armies and fake mystery shoppers plant dead flies in rival stores. These claims could be backed up, he said, by FOI requests to local councils, screenshots from private Whatsapp groups and police reports linking chicken shops from Brixton to Tottenham with organised crime. He even claimed that, during his investigation, a restaurant manager handed him a napkin with a scrawled warning: “Be careful who you eat with.” It’s the kind of pitch that grabs you by the shirt collar. It has it all: colour, characters, a sense of place. It examines something niche but speaks to something wider. The only problem? It was completely made up. It didn’t take long for alarm bells to start ringing. Why would a restaurant manager write his sinister message on a napkin, where it could be used as evidence, rather than simply growling it in a menacing fashion? Wales claimed he was sitting in a branch of Chicken Cottage in Stratford – but there is no Chicken Cottage in Stratford. The more I looked into the story, the more absurd it all seemed. I went back through the pitch and immediately spotted the tell-tale signs: numbered headers divided into bullet points.…

“Midlife is a point of no return, that place in a journey where the beginning is further away than the end.” So writes Patricia Cohen in her excellent examination of middle age, In Our Prime. This line flashed into my mind when I stumbled across a terrible piece of information, released by the ONS: the median age for a man in the UK to die is 82 years old. I am 41 years old. I have passed the point of no return. If death is a black hole, I am within its event horizon. We will soon ask you to return your seat to the upright position as we begin our final descent. Middle age is a tricky thing to pin down, not least because it’s a club at which nobody wants to be a member. Those, like me, who are standing dubiously at the velvet ropes, hoping the bouncer doesn’t let us in, think that real middle age begins at 50 or even 60, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we? “It’s entirely constructed,” says Dr Eliza Filby, a historian of generational evolution. “It’s not biological like puberty.” I can console myself with the knowledge that until recently there was no middle age. Before the 20th century, life expectancy in developed countries was less than 50. You were young and then you died of consumption, or fell into a threshing machine. There wasn’t any need for the term “middle age” so nobody bothered to come up with one. It was only with the advent of leisure time and increased life expectancy that a recognisable definition of “midlife” began to emerge. Advertising execs soon realised that people with property and managerial jobs were the ones with all the money, and that selling them the dream of an extended youth was a lucrative business. Filby says the modern…

I feel lightheaded, short of breath and the room has started to spin. Intense waves of heat radiate from my mouth throughout my entire body. The pain is searing, like someone is holding an open flame to my tongue. After a couple of bites my throat starts to swell, my lips are raw, my face has turned a reddish-purple, I am sweating profusely and my eyes are streaming. This is what happens when you eat the hottest chilli pepper money can buy. In the borderlands where Chinatown meets Theatreland, close to the money-laundering sweet shops and fridge magnet emporiums of Piccadilly, you will find Dave’s Hot Chicken. It has some 250 branches across North America, a smattering of outlets in the Middle East and, as of December, a solitary European venue on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Rupert Street. Partly thanks to London’s Tiktok community, round-the-block queues have become so ubiquitous that Dave’s Hot Chicken now has a permanent nylon rope outside to keep people in line. The draw? The world’s spiciest chicken tenders. At just before 11am on a grey Friday morning, however, only three builders loiter outside, all clad in high-viz vests, paint spattered boots and jumpers straining to cover vast, round beer bellies. After a few minutes we’re invited into a nondescript food hall that contains fire-engine red furniture and garish, graffitied walls. I’m not here to judge the decor, though. I’m here to beat the record for eating tenders made using the infamous Carolina Reaper chilli. Someone managed two and a half. My goal is three. How hard can it be? You probably have a picture in your mind’s eye of who might order these absurdly hot creations: lads, lads, lads. And you’d be right. “Yeah, it’s mostly groups of blokes,” says Dave’s Hot Chicken…

I enter a grand lobby, all lofty ceilings, marquetry floors and art deco fittings. An effusive concierge in a natty blue suit takes my bags, hands me a keycard to my suite and directs me to a bank of sofas, where I’m furnished with a crisp glass of viognier. I catch the eye of Paulene, who tells me she’s been on the cover of Vogue. Soon we’re sashaying arm in arm down a flight of marble stairs, exchanging stories about how we ended up here. We settle into a row of seats in the library for the evening’s entertainment: a spirited lecture on the sinking of the Titanic, delivered by a relative of someone who sailed aboard the ill-fated vessel. Were you to stumble upon this place – and were you to make it into the secure building – you would be forgiven for thinking it was a new five star bolthole for the international jetset. But this isn’t a hotel and, at a mere 42 years old, I’m the youngest person in the room by several decades. This is Auriens, a Chelsea-based “later living” community where the minimum age is 65 and the average is north of 80. It’s a retirement community rather than a care home – you must be relatively healthy and mobile to move in and there are no doctors on site, although nurses and carers can be organised for an additional fee. Residents are offered everything from state of the art medical check-ups and custom meal plans to a 24 hour concierge and a calendar packed with social events, all in a bid to keep them happy and healthy long into old age. I’m the first journalist to check in for an overnight stay to find out how the super-rich are seeing out their dotage…

Ten of us sit in a semicircle around a makeshift altar. In front of us lies a small statue of Buddha, various rocks and crystals, some pine cones, a carved mushroom, a small chemists’ weighing scale, and a wooden bowl filled with psychedelic ‘truffles’. We’re in a lodge on the outskirts of Amsterdam overlooking woodland and a picturesque pond. A tall man called Chi calls us forward one by one, eldest to youngest. First up is Debbie, a sprightly American in her early 50s. She kneels before the truffles – similar in appearance to the ones you might grate over a bowl of pasta, but lacking any discernible smell – weighs pieces on the scale and transfers them into her own, smaller bowl. Chi performs a short ‘blessing’, asking that the truffle spirit guide Debbie on her journey, and taps her on the head with the wooden mushroom. Nervous like the rest of us, she tips all 20g into her mouth, and is hastily advised to spit it back out. “Take your time,” cautions Chi. “These are living creatures, an intelligent species. Commune with the medicine.” Debbie’s faux-pas is a welcome distraction. People have travelled from all around the world for this moment, and an anxious energy has settled over the room. Our group includes a Brazilian couple in their late 40s, a mother and daughter from New York City and a former US Marine. Two days of meditation, talking circles and ‘sound therapy’ have led towards this moment, when we will consume a bowlful of psychoactive truffles and, with any luck, embark upon a spiritual journey deep into our own subconscious. When my name is called, I pick out half a dozen walnut-sized chunks and a handful of smaller pieces. Chi taps me on the head with the mushroom…

From the top floor the Royal Docks’ Millennium Mills there’s a stomach-churning, 10 storey hole. It used to house a Rube Goldberg-esque flour processing helter skelter, back in the building’s heyday in the first half of the 20th century. Now it’s little more than a skeleton, stripped back to brick and concrete, the 1933 art-deco frontage the only clue as to its illustrious past. Each of its thousands of windows have been smashed, the result of generation after generation of children sneaking into the site in the 33 years it’s lain derelict. Only a few reminders of its past remain – Armitage Shanks urinals, for instance, have stood the test of time – and they now stand as rather creepy memorials to a bygone era, hidden amid the damp and decay. On the ground floor of the neighbouring Rank Hovis building, the rusting remains of industrial machinery lies in neat piles; nobody wants to throw the stuff away but neither are they sure what to do with it. Millennium Mills was a functioning factory until 1981, by which time it was being used to produce Winalot dog biscuits, but it closed its doors for the last time when the docks entered its terminal decline. Since then there have been several attempts to redevelop the space, including an ambitious project to build an aquarium, despite the site being miles from the lucrative tourist trail. As of April this year it finally went under redevelopment (my tour came after the remaining asbestos had been stripped), and it will soon form the flagship building in a new project consisting of 65 hectares of business, residential and commercial space, including 3,000 new homes. But Millennium Mills is far from unique: there are hundreds of similar sites scattered across London; former jewels in our industrial crown, built to last,…

Professor Jordan B Peterson’s apartment smells of meat. It’s 8am and his wife, Tammy, is fastidiously slicing a pile of steaks, frying them, and shovelling the unadorned results into a stack of Tupperware containers. It was Tammy, his childhood sweetheart who now works full-time for Peterson PLC, who greeted me when I arrived at his serviced apartment near Holborn, leading me into an unremarkable, open-plan room with laminate floors and a depressing view. It seems almost laughably austere for a man who makes $80,000 a month from online donation site Patreon, plus royalties for his million-selling book 12 Rules For Life. Peterson, for the uninitiated, is probably the most influential conservative thinker in the world today – although, as he’s keen to point out, he doesn’t have a great deal of competition. An academic and clinical psychologist by trade (he ran a full-time practice until last year), his YouTube lectures offering interpretations of bible stories and no-nonsense advice for young men are routinely watched by millions, and he sells out auditoriums across North America. Two years ago things were very different. A professor at the University of Toronto, he had a moderate profile on Canadian television, and had written an academic book that sold as well as academic books tend to. Everything changed when he spoke out against a law that could – in theory if not in practice – compel Canadians to use trans people’s preferred gender pronouns. He made a video decrying the “attack on free speech” and was briefly suspended by the university. He had struck a nerve. Suddenly someone was articulating what millions of conservatives had always felt in their gut – that political correctness had gone mad; that leftie, snowflake, Social Justice Warriors were dictating what good honest people could and couldn’t say; that traditional…