Investigative journalism

A horrifying glimpse of Syria’s torture cells

A young Syrian man is walking down a street in Damascus. He is a computer geek who likes rock music and basketball, and he’s enjoying his summer break from university. A car draws up beside him. He’s shoved inside and blindfolded. Shortly after, he finds himself strung up by his wrists in a dungeon. A thick power cable slices through the air and lands on his back. He screams. ‘You want freedom, right?’ yells the torturer. The lash descends again. ‘Here’s your freedom.’ The victim – the authors of Syrian Gulag protect him with the alias ‘Akram’ – had ‘liked’ a social media post criticising the Assad regime. Akram was

A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed

I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other, cigarettes are fun and delicious. On the one hand, they push cigarettes on children, which is unconscionable. And on the other, I remember how I would gather in the park with other children to collectively venerate a ten-pack of Marlboro Lights, our soft, pink fingers shivering and struggling with the lighter mechanism, our untutored lips puffing ineffectually at the speckled filter, all of us beginning to grow woozy from the acrid smoke filling our virgin lungs as we stood there and thought: this is the life. Luckily, Smoke Screen sidesteps

Where is Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen, hiding?

This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human condition. It’s also a book based on a podcast, which brings difficulties of its own. To cut a very long story short, The Missing Cryptoqueen tells the true story of a Bulgarian crook named Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen of the book’s title. In 2014, she set up a pyramid scheme-cum-multi-level-marketing scam based on a fake cryptocurrency called OneCoin. In 2017, having swindled people out of billions of pounds, dollars, euros and just about every other currency on the planet, and with the authorities closing in, Ignatova suddenly went missing.