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,…

“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…

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…

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.…

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…

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 more we learn about the effects of social media on the human psyche, the worse it seems to get. Half of the planet is hooked on dopamine squirts triggered by clever algorithms developed by the world’s finest minds, with the sole purpose of keeping us scrolling. And scrolling, and scrolling. We’re connected to thousands of other humans from the second we wake to the moment we fall asleep. Smartphones are little portals to hell, spraying us with an incessant barrage of information. Worst of all, we convince ourselves that staying connected is necessary for our professional and social wellbeing, that without a live-feed of world news we’d be somehow poorer, lacking a considered opinion on EU trade agreements or Theresa May’s shoes. A project called The Clearing gave me the chance to go…

KSI is pumped. We’re midway through a photoshoot at Dagenham & Redbridge football club and he’s standing in the centre circle, fists balled, roaring in mock ecstasy. This slightly shabby stadium is an incongruous place to meet one of the UK’s most successful content creators; the walk from the station takes you through one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the capital, past peeling, unloved flats, gardens stacked with mattresses, and lamp posts strung with St George’s flags that hang lifeless in the baking sun. But the Youtuber, boxer, musician, businessman and, now, football club owner has plans to put this place on the map. He recently bought a 20 per cent stake in the Daggers – currently playing their…

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…