Tareena Shakil was 24 when she ran away to ISIS-held territory in Syria with her one-year-old son in 2014. Soon after arriving, she realised she had made a terrible mistake and escaped. She was there for less than three months, a short period which has defined the rest of her life. After getting back to the UK, Shakil was convicted of joining ISIS, making her the first - and to date, only - British woman to serve jail time for this offence. In 2019, she was released from prison. Now, in what is, to put it mildly, a pretty wild segue, she is trying to make it as an influencer, dispensing relationship advice to 50,000 followers on TikTok. I profiled Shakil for the most recent issue of the Guardian’s Saturday magazine.

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about terrorist groups: what attracts people to join them and how recruitment functions, the limitations of terror laws, and what rehabilitation might look like. I’m particularly interested in knotty questions around culpability and redemption, which are often overlooked in favour of simplistic narratives about irredeemable evil.

For a while, this was a hot topic: during the five years that the so-called Islamic State (IS) held territory in Iraq and Syria – from 2014 to 2019 – an estimated 900 people from the UK, including around 150 women, made this journey. During this time, “jihadi brides” were rarely out of the British press. This was the tabloid term for the women who had left their homes in the west to travel to ISIS-held territory, and they were the object of intense, often prurient fascination. Probably the most famous is Shamima Begum, who was 15 when she travelled to Syria with a group of school friends in 2015, and 19 when the British government stripped her citizenship, after she resurfaced in a refugee camp following the fall of the last ISIS stronghold. But what about the others who made this journey? Some are, like Begum, stranded in north-eastern Syria, stripped of their citizenship. But others returned to the UK. What was the fall-out for them? And how can a person begin to rebuild their life after doing something so drastic?

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Shakil was escaping a turbulent marriage when she made the rash decision to leave the UK with her one-year-old son and travel to Syria. She had been speaking to ISIS recruiters online, and now understands what happened to her as a process of grooming. In prison in the UK, she took up every opportunity for rehabilitation. Here’s a section from the story describing her time in prison:

Soon after being sentenced, Shakil wrote down on a piece of paper: “This is the start of for ever.” It marked a decision to use her time while incarcerated to make sense of the decisions that had led her there. Shakil engaged with every rehabilitative service available: therapy, domestic violence courses, deradicalisation. Faith had helped her to survive the worst times in her life, and she believed, as she still does, that she was only able to escape Syria because of God’s mercy. She spent long hours reading and talking to the prison imam, who helped her to see how the brutality of IS ran counter to Islamic teaching about mercy, and to understand the distortions the recruiters had made. It was a slow, emotional process, redefining her personal relationship to God and to religion, and it’s the thing she is most grateful for.

She was released in 2019, the same year that Begum’s citizenship was stripped. Since then, she’s worked hard to build a normal life from the wreckage of her decision: finding work, forming new friendships, slowly rebuilding a relationship with her son.

I met Shakil, who is now 36, on a drizzly February day in the lobby of a plush hotel in Birmingham, a spacious room with sufficient distance between the tables to talk without fear of being overheard. I didn’t know what to expect. When we’d chatted briefly a few weeks earlier, Shakil told me she was sick of talking about Syria all the time and I wondered if she would be defensive about the more controversial aspects of her back story. I’d spent the train journey from London thinking about how best to approach tough questions, like why she decided to take a toddler with her to IS-held territory, and how aware she had been of the group’s violence before she left. But in person, I found her bubbly, warm and disarmingly open – and she didn’t hesitate to answer any of my questions, even though talking about the impact on her son was clearly incredibly painful. I’ve written a lot about extremist groups like IS, and UK terror law over the years, and it is rare to hear someone talk so frankly about the reality of life with a terror-related conviction.

Reinventing herself online as a TikTok agony aunt, offering no-nonsense tips on the dating game, is a surprising move for someone in Shakil’s situation. After years being dubbed “the Towie jihadi” by the tabloids because of her love for the reality show The Only Way is Essex - the Sun’s front page story about her departure had the headline “The only way is ISIS” - she told me she is motivated by a desire to communicate on her own terms, and to show that a good life is always possible.

Shakil bristled at the comparison to Begum, who spent much longer in IS territory than she did, but it’s hard not to see the story as something of a counterfactual. Begum’s citizenship was stripped on the basis that she was theoretically, through her parents, eligible for citizenship of Bangladesh - a country she had never visited. Shakil, too, would be eligible for another citizenship (in her case, Pakistani, through her father).

“I believe in second chances,” Shakil said. “When you’ve nearly died as many times as I have, you get a thirst for life.”

You can read the full story over at the Guardian.

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Reading/listening

• I have been totally absorbed by the new Observer podcast The Foundling, which tells the story of a woman who was found on a country lane as a newborn baby.

• This New Yorker story about the mysterious death of a baby, and how irregularities in the investigation led to sweeping changes on breastfeeding and pain relief, is a couple of months old, but it’s fascinating and well worth your time.

• Excellent story in the new magazine Equator (which you should check out if you haven’t already) about the Pakistani state’s attempt to erase Imran Khan from public life.

International students have been in the news a lot over recent years. Back in 2019, Boris Johnson set a target of attracting 600,000 each year by 2030. This target was surpassed in 2020, a decade ahead of schedule. But as students started to affect net migration figures - bringing families with them, staying on after graduation to work - the mood in Westminster soured and successive governments moved to reduce their numbers. First, Rishi Sunak’s government changed visa rules so students could no longer bring their partners and families with them, then introduced a minimum salary threshold of £38,700 for a skilled worker visa – a near 50% increase. When Keir Starmer’s Labour came into power in 2024, they increased the threshold again to £41,700, and announced plans to reduce the post-study work visa from two years to 18 months.

But even as the government tries to make Britain a less attractive place for international students as part of a wider push to reduce immigration, universities continue to spend massive amounts of money on attracting them. In 2023, British universities collectively spent £500m on education agents - a vast, largely unregulated network of middlemen who recruit foreign students who want to study abroad. The reason is simple: UK universities make a loss on every home student, whose fees are capped at a level grossly devalued by inflation, and instead rely on the higher fees paid by foreign students.

I was interested in the people caught in the middle of this - the students who are being proactively recruited by British universities, often taking on massive amounts of debt in the hope that it will be a pathway to a better life, only to find that the promise they are accepting (debt now, opportunity later) has been reset by forces beyond their control.

That’s the subject of my latest story for the Guardian Long Read, which is out today. It focuses on Indian students, who since 2022 have been the biggest group of international students in the UK. The image that most people still have of foreign students is rich-kids from the globe-trotting elite. But that’s no longer the case; over the last decade, universities have cast the net wider and wider. I spoke to a former education agent who described a system that actively kept students in the dark:

To pay their fees, most students she spoke to planned to take out huge loans, often secured against their parents’ homes or agricultural land. They did so on the assumption that after graduation, they would earn enough to pay back the loan. “They had no idea about sponsorship, no idea about visas. They just thought, ‘I’ll go there and I’ll get a job,’” Kapoor told me. From what she saw, admissions consultants rarely enlightened them. “Agents do anything to avoid further questions,” she said. “The attitude was: you’re just another application to me, and I have targets to complete.’”

Many students take this huge financial risk thinking they’ll be able to work during or after their degree and get some return on investment, earning enough to pay back a chunk of their loan, or securing a good job that allows them to stay in the UK. But that is getting harder and harder to achieve, between a tough job market and increasingly tight visa restrictions. Rather than the better life they imagined, many find themselves stuck doing menial work to survive. I knew that this was true of a lot of people, from speaking to professionals working in the field and from looking at social media - where there’s a whole genre of videos in which Indian students share “a day in the life”, showcasing their work in Amazon or Evri warehouses. But it was harder than I expected to find people willing to speak frankly about their experiences. I spoke to so many students while I was reporting the story. All of them knew others who were in massive amounts of debt, or experiencing extreme financial hardship, but the people actually in this situation were reluctant to speak about it. I can understand why - there is so much shame bound up in financial issues, and there’s the added facet here that families are often implicated in the debt as loans are frequently secured against parental land.

In the end, I spoke to two students stuck in this situation: one who I found through an Indian student group, and another who I came across via a post on Reddit in which he’d shared his desperation. I found their stories so distressing: one bad decision and a lifetime of debt. Sam - the student I'd found via Reddit - described the months after graduating from his masters in finance:

Sam continued to stick it out in the UK, but his costs were mounting. In the spring of 2025, six months after graduation, the fixed loan repayments of £300 per month kicked in. He needed extra work, and through friends, found shifts at a vegetable packing factory on Dundee’s outskirts, washing and packaging vegetables for Tesco and Aldi. The commute was an hour and a half on public transport, so he split the taxi fare with a group of other students and recent graduates who were doing the same job. He worked 10-hour shifts at minimum wage. “By that time, my ego had died, so I had accepted: OK, we can do this,” he told me.

You can read the full story here.

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If you’re in London, I’m speaking on a panel with some brilliant Guardian Long Read colleagues - editor David Wolf and writers Sirin Kale and Samanth Subramanian - tomorrow evening (that’s Wednesday 8th April). It’s an event to mark the publication of the latest Long Read print magazine. It’s a beautiful, weighty mag and I am delighted to have a story in it. We’ll be at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town from 6.30pm. Come along! Tickets and more information available here. It’s £7 (or £16.49 if you want a copy of the mag too) but I have a few guestlist spots remaining - email me and I can sign you up, first come first served.

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This is the first piece I’ve published in a year (in fact, my last piece was out almost a year to the day ago) as I took most of 2025 off for maternity leave. For the same reason, I’ve been entirely absent from Substack - but I’m back now and will be posting more regularly, with updates on my work, thoughts on reporting, and links to what I have been reading. Hello to old readers and those who have joined during my long hiatus!

This is a quick update to let you know that I had a story in the Guardian’s Long Read section on 8 April. It’s a profile of the barrister Monica Feria-Tinta, who has worked on a series of groundbreaking environmental cases - including the first to successfully argue in an international court that in failing to mitigate climate change, a state could violate citizens’ human rights, and a landmark case arguing that a cloud forest in Ecuador should have its own legal rights. The piece is also about a much wider shift taking place in the world of climate activism, with this type of lawsuit increasingly being used to hold states and corporations accountable for environmental harm, and to provide a legislative backbone to campaigning. In legal terms, this is not a straightforward proposition:

Since the early 1980s, communities and campaigners have turned to the courts to fight back against polluting industries. But traditional environmental claims are geographically specific – as in West Virginia, say, where locals sued the chemical firm DuPont for failing to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into their water supply. Climate litigation presents very different challenges. A vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal status quo. “It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of human rights law to shift to grasp that.”

It’s not a silver bullet; put bluntly, states and corporations can ignore lawsuits, which take many years to put together, cost sometimes exorbitant sums and, even in the event of a victory, may be subject to appeals processes. But it’s an increasingly powerful tool in the arsenal, alongside protest, campaigning and political negotiation. I really enjoyed speaking with Monica about her work; she’s from an indigenous background in Peru, and came to the UK as a political refugee, making her an unusual figure in the world of the English bar. She sees this outsider perspective as an asset (many crucial early cases about climate change and rights were fought by indigenous groups around the world), and is idealistic about the law and its power to create incremental change.

You can read the full piece over at the Guardian website - and Monica has a book about her work out now, too.

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I also had a story out in Prospect magazine towards the end of April, about the crisis in British maternity services and the insidious problem of racism. The impact of this is starkly evident in the statistics; Black and Asian women are more likely to die in childbirth and to suffer a host of other complications. But what can be done about it? I spoke to Donna Ockenden, the senior midwife in charge of several high profile reviews of failing maternity services, and other experts to try to answer this question.

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Ordinarily, I’d talk more in this newsletter about the process of reporting these stories, but I’m going to keep it extra brief this time as I had a baby last month! (After my own, thankfully uneventful journey through British maternity services). As a result, I won’t be reporting or writing much for the rest of this year, though I may pop back into Substack when I feel vaguely sentient. I hope you’ll still be here on the other side of my maternity leave - thanks so much for subscribing and reading thus far. And if you have suggestions for good, easy-to-absorb audiobooks (fiction or non-fiction) and podcasts, I would be delighted to hear them.

I have a story out in the Guardian Long Read this week - about a medical experiment that took place over 50 years ago but keeps resurfacing.

Here are the basic facts: in 1969, as part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women in the English town of Coventry were fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent. The entire experiment took just three weeks; four days eating the chapatis, and tests at the government’s atomic lab 17 days later. The findings were unremarkable, and it might have been entirely forgotten about, were it not for a documentary-maker called John Brownlow.

In the 1990s, inspired by reporting in the US about human radiation experiments in the post-war years, Brownlow started investigating to see if anything similar had happened in the UK. The Coventry experiment was one of many examples he found. He tracked down a woman who had been part of the experiment, and found that she had not understood that she was being exposed to radiation and had never given her informed consent. Brownlow’s film on human radiation experiments aired in 1995. It revealed a number of shocking experiments, including the fact that British scientists had sent the body parts of dead children to the US to test the impact of nuclear fission on bones. It caused a huge stir - both in Coventry and around the country. While in the US, revelations about human radiation experiments led to a major governmental panel, a series of class action lawsuits, and a public apology, in the UK the response was more muted - essentially, an inquiry by the Medical Research Council concluding that the experiments were fine by the ethical standards of the time. Gradually, the scandal faded from view.

The story of the radioactive chapatis resurfaced again in 2023, when a historian called Louise Raw wrote a series of tweets about the case which went viral, prompting news coverage and - once again - panic in Coventry. This was when I heard about it, and I immediately wanted to know more. Although a huge number of stories were written about the Coventry study when it went viral in 2023, most drew on the same source material; namely, the 1995 documentary and a follow up story published in India Today in the same year.

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As with any long-form piece, my main question was what I could meaningfully add to the story. The crucial events took place 55 years ago, and most of the people directly involved have died. The women in the study were over 50 when it took place, so to my knowledge none of them are alive, and their children are now in their 60s and 70s. The MRC does not hold a list of the women who took part in the study - and did not have this information even in 1995 when the documentary aired - and so tracking down families was a difficult task. The first thing I did was reach out to Shahnaz Akhter, an academic at Warwick University who is researching the study and trying to trace families. She was able to connect me with Kalbir, a woman who believes her mother was part of the study:

Kalbir was shocked to discover that after the documentary had aired in 1995, their mother said she was one of the participants. Kalbir had been living away from home and no one had mentioned it to her. Now she was devastated. Her mother had died two decades earlier, and Kalbir was left with so many questions: “What happened? What was the aftercare for them? What are the implications? Did this affect their health afterwards?” Food in their house was always shared, and Kalbir panicked that she or her siblings could have eaten the radioactive chapatis too.

In addition to exploring the impact on families, I was keen to understand the motivation of the scientists. Peter Elwood, the researcher behind the study, is still alive, now in his 90s, but after some back and forth he declined to be interviewed. So I turned to documents, digging out everything I could on the subject. I started with two inquiry reports produced after the documentary aired, as well as the original study itself and Elwood’s other studies on iron absorption in the 1960s. I also found an extensive interview that Elwood had given to an oral history project about his research in 2000, where he discussed this study and the response to it. (This was incredibly helpful in putting together the story).

What I found fascinating was that, despite the sensational phrase “radioactive chapatis”, the aim of the study was almost mundane: to test how effectively iron is absorbed from fortified flour. It was part of a series of experiments Elwood was doing to work out if types of flour and fermentation affected iron absorption. He’d previously done a very similar study, also using radioactive isotopes, with friends and colleagues as subjects. The reason the Coventry experiment became so controversial came down to language and translation issues. Most of the women spoke Punjabi, with only basic English, if that. It was not a requirement at the time to use professional interpreters, and in some instances the women’s children translated, which is not ideal, for obvious reasons. The end result was that at least some of the women had no idea what they were agreeing to. All the available evidence suggests the level of radiation the women in Coventry were exposed to was very low, but this has almost ceased to be relevant given the fundamental question of consent.

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The importance of patient consent was hotly debated in the medical field at the time of this experiment:

At the time Elwood was working on his iron studies, the culture of medicine was paternalistic. Most doctors believed they were best placed to make decisions about risk on behalf of their patients. Consent was often seen as at best unnecessary, and at worst actively obstructive to the pursuit of knowledge.

. . .

In the 1960s, two physicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic – Henry Beecher in the US and Maurice Pappworth in the UK – separately sounded the alarm about widespread unethical practices. They highlighted two main issues: first, that studies were carried out without patients being given the opportunity to consent, and second, that some studies exposed them to unjustifiable levels of risk. “In their zeal to extend the frontiers of medical knowledge, many clinicians appear temporarily to have lost sight of the fact that the subjects of their experiments are in all cases individuals with common rights,” wrote Pappworth in 1967.

By the mid-1970s, it was broadly accepted that informed consent was important, and ethics systems were embedded in medical research.

From the vantage point of today, it’s quite mind-blowing to see how the issue of language was glossed over, both at the time of the study and when it was re-examined in the 1990s. Human experimentation has disproportionately been conducted on people who are disenfranchised in some way - poor, racialised minorities - and I think we’re still reckoning with that history today.

You can read the full story over at the Guardian.

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I feel like all I’ve been reading recently is news articles and opinion pieces about how terrible everything is. I imagine you’ve also had enough of this. So instead, here are a couple of podcasts that I burned through lately.

• I was totally absorbed by The Pitcairn Trials. A third of the men on a remote overseas British territory were tried for rape and child sexual abuse. The subject matter is obviously grim, but it’s told with utmost sensitivity, and explores the many challenges in bringing true justice in a tiny and remote community.

• On a different subject, I was also really stuck into Kaitlyn’s Baby, a bizarre story about a woman who has scammed scores of doulas in Canada by faking pregnancies.

Thank you for reading! Apologies to regular readers that I have been posting less frequently than usual. I’m due to have another baby in less than two months and am in slightly mad countdown mode trying to finish different projects before then. I’ll keep updating here when I can. Until next time!

Hello and happy new year! I’m slowly creaking back into gear after two weeks in a haze of roast potatoes and CBeebies. I actually intended to send this post before Christmas, but a festive bout of norovirus meant I downed tools slightly earlier than expected. So while I should really be looking to the year ahead, I’m instead casting my eye back to 2024 in the great freelance journalists’ tradition of rounding up the work I was most proud of last year.

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Here in the UK we’ve heard a lot about local authorities going bust because of equal pay claims. In my first Guardian Long Read piece of this year, I wrote about the inspirational women in Glasgow who discovered they were being paid far less than their male counterparts and started a campaign for justice. They’ve been fighting for almost 20 years.

• For Prospect magazine, I explored the case for direct cash transfers as a way to prevent homelessness. A significant number of people end up homeless because of debts to the government, or rent arrears to the council, and given the much higher costs incurred by keeping someone in temporary accommodation (not to mention the human cost of becoming homeless), it seems a no-brainer.

• As Ukraine marked the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I spoke to Ukrainian refugees in the UK for this GQ piece. They told me about the pain of displacement and the difficulty of being trapped in limbo, navigating British politeness, and flying back to Ukraine to access dentistry.

• I think this, for the Guardian Long Read, was the best piece I worked on all year: the story of Stuart Potts, a man who has turned his home into a homeless shelter. Stuart lives in a one-bed flat in Manchester which he opens up to anyone who needs a place to crash for the night. With a history of drug addiction and street homelessness himself, he knows the power of offering a helping hand. I loved spending time with Stuart and the people who passed through his flat.

• In the summer, I went to France to report a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about deaths caused by extreme heat. David Azevedo was a construction worker with no prior health conditions who died in the 2022 heatwaves. I spoke with his family about how the tragedy unfolded. I found this story deeply affecting; in the west, we can all have a tendency to think of climate change as something happening far away, but it’s already having a profound impact close to home.

• I enjoyed writing a few opinion pieces this year, particularly this one for the Guardian on the problem with public inquiries. It gave me the chance to think more deeply about something I’ve been wondering about for a while: are public inquiries a way to ensure accountability, or to kick it down the road?

• I haven’t done much writing on parenting, but I reported a piece for the Sunday Times magazine about the massive rise in tongue-tie procedures and how it might be linked to increased pressure on women to breastfeed.

• November in the UK is poppy season - these red flowers are ubiquitous, pinned to shirts, coats, affixed to train stations, buses, cars and shop window displays. For the Guardian Long Read, I dug into the recent history of poppy-mania, and explored how war remembrance became a stand in for a host of conversations about national pride.

• For my final long feature of the year, I wrote a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about the rising threat of 3D-printed guns, with blueprints easily available online, and regularly shared in libertarian and far right circles. With access to a huge tranche of police documents, I focused in on a case in Finland, where a far-right cell manufactured 3D-printed guns with the intention of starting a race war.

It also struck me that it’s been a year since I started this Substack (I launched it in the first week of January 2024). It’s been really lovely to have this space to share my work and reflections on it - so thank you very much for coming along with me for the ride, for reading, sharing, and responding. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

When I started working on a story about the rising threat of 3D-printed guns a few months back, I wasn’t expecting the issue to suddenly be catapulted to the top of the news agenda. But that’s what happened after the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the US on 9 December. It seems that Mangione, who has been charged with the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson, was in possession of a “ghost gun” that might have been partially made with 3D-printed parts. This hasn’t actually been confirmed yet - further testing is needed to ascertain what Mangione used to construct the gun. But it’s a stark reminder of all the ways in which advances in technology are already complicating gun control around the world.

My story, which was in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, isn’t actually about ghost guns (which are typically constructed using incomplete frames and receivers, two key components of a firearm). It’s about the rising popularity of the FGC-9, a semi-automatic weapon for which blueprints are easily available online. FGC stands for “fuck gun control” while 9 refers to the 9mm bullets it uses. If you don’t know much about these weapons, here’s a short primer from the article, explaining why the FGC-9 has proven so much more popular - and dangerous - than previous models of 3D-printed guns:

The FGC-9 changed everything. Unlike those early models, the FGC-9 includes no regulated components: it can be made using just a 3D printer and parts available from a hardware store; it requires only some metalworking skills. Today, 3D printers are available for a couple of hundred pounds, while strong plastic polymers to print with are relatively inexpensive. The upper and lower receivers of the FGC-9 (the barrel assembly and trigger sections) are fully 3D-printed from plastic, as are the pistol grip and stock. The magazine can also be printed. Unlike previous 3D-printed gun models, it is a semi-automatic weapon. “It was revolutionary,” says Dr Rajan Basra, a researcher from King’s College London who studies 3D-printed weapons. The FGC-9 is now thought to be the most popular 3D-printed weapon in the world. It is particularly difficult to police, given that it doesn’t involve illegal parts. As Basra says, “You can’t regulate a steel tube or a spring.”

As always with a subject like this, the challenge was working out how to turn it into a story with real, human stakes. I wanted to focus on one particular case, but this wasn’t a simple proposition. Thus far, most criminal cases involving these guns have related to the manufacture of the weapons rather than their use; most people have been apprehended before they’ve actually committed an act of violence. When I was speaking to experts, the case that came up again and again was that of a small group of far-right activists in Finland who had been sentenced for manufacturing four FGC-9s with the aim of using them to incite a race war. It was emblematic of the problem in many ways, since 3D-printed guns have so far proved most popular among the far-right (along with organised criminals).

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The next challenge was working out how to actually report on this case, given that everyone involved is serving a criminal sentence and the lead suspect Viljam Nyman was a loner with few friends outside the far-right scene. In the UK, it’s extremely difficult to report on criminal cases. We do ostensibly have Freedom of Information laws, but as any journalist knows, most state bodies are now well-practised at evading requests, and it’s common for responses to come long after the time limit of 20 working days. Generally speaking, police records aren’t available under these laws anyway, unless the case pertains to you: an individual can make a subject access request to get any records the police hold about them, but a journalist can’t request those same records. I’ve written before about how, despite our principle of open justice, it’s essentially impossible to get hold of court records if you weren’t actually sitting in the courtroom. On top of this, investigating officers rarely give interviews about their cases - of course, there are exceptions, particularly for reporters who often cover the crime beat and are well-connected with police forces (which I’m not) - but in my experience most police officers and forces simply stonewall or ignore requests.

It turns out things are very different in Finland. On the advice of a very helpful and generous Finnish journalist, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the relevant police force, and within a couple of days was sent a trove of thousands of pages of documents, including full transcripts of interrogations and Telegram chat logs between the suspects. I also sent a request to the district court that had heard the case and, within a couple of weeks, they sent a copy of the full court judgement which contained really useful details about the proceedings. And when I emailed the police force’s press office, the lead officer on the case responded himself immediately agreeing to an interview. It felt a bit like stepping into an alternate universe, reporting-wise, to simply be handed so much information without having to fight for it or think of endless work-arounds.

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It was a new exercise for me to try to write an engaging story while primarily relying on documents, rather than interviews and interactions with actual people. The hardest part was trying to get a sense of the culprit’s motivations. Interestingly, in the police documents, a lot of personal information about the suspects was redacted - things I’d consider quite basic and uncontroversial information, like their employment history, as well as a document written by the lead suspect outlining his own radicalisation. This document was cited extensively in the court judgment, though, so I was able to quote from that. This was really useful in building up a sense of his motivation and character, and ended up being the opening to my story:

Long before he started making guns with a 3D printer, Viljam Nyman was a kid who was bullied. In a document police later found on his computer, titled “The life story of how I became a far-right extremist”, Nyman described his childhood in Lahti, a city in southern Finland, being picked on by other kids and feeling abandoned by the adults around him. He wrote that this experience taught him something: “‘Be yourself’ or ‘don’t care’ were really bad pieces of advice. Violence and power, or the threat of using it, were actually the things that mattered. Equality and accepting difference were just words on paper, naive and idealistic fantasies. Human nature, in reality, was discriminatory and racist.”

The Finnish journalist who’d advised me on getting hold of the documents said that this is a norm in Finland - generally, personal information about individuals is redacted from official documents. In a similar vein, journalists don’t tend to publish the names of suspects in criminal cases unless they are given a substantial sentence. This meant that in all the Finnish coverage of the 3D-printed gun case I was writing about, Nyman was named, but his three collaborators were not, simply because their sentences were shorter and they were found guilty of slightly less serious crimes. It’s very different to the UK, where local papers often publish the full names (and in local papers, street addresses!) of people in court for even very minor offences. We have less information at our disposal but tend to publish every shred we have.

After spending some serious time with Google Translate and Chat GPT’s translation function, I had a lot of Telegram message exchanges and police interview transcripts to work with too. You can read the story here. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about 3D-printed weapons in the weeks and months to come.

Reading/listening

• I enjoyed this New Yorker profile of the philosopher L. A. Paul, who wrote a book about the transformative experience of becoming a parent, and the decision to become one. (Now’s as good a time as any to mention I’m pregnant, and am expecting my second child in the spring!)

• I whizzed through the CBC podcast Bad Results, about a Canadian company giving dodgy paternity test results, with often devastating consequences.

• This New York Times magazine story about an Uyghur man’s escape from China is a reminder of the claustrophobic and all-encompassing nature of China’s persecuton of this minority group.

Thanks for reading! As always, do share this on social media or forward it on to anyone who might be interested. I’m really limping towards the end of the year but will be back in your inbox in a couple of weeks.

This week I gave a guest lecture about long-form writing to a group of undergraduate journalism students. They had lots of great questions - how to move from subject to story (something I still sometimes struggle with), how to think about structure, and how to manage research and notes. There was even a question about whether or not to record interviews, and how best to manage going through audio afterwards. I love nothing more than talking about really nerdy aspects of reporting process so here we go.

I record pretty much everything when I’m reporting a piece, as well as making notes. This has been very much on my mind recently because I’m deep within the process of going through audio transcripts and notes for a couple of different pieces. Earlier in my career, transcribing audio was probably the single thing I spent most time on. I couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do it, and it’s an essential, if time-consuming job. That has radically changed with the advent of AI transcription services. Otter.ai is the best-known provider, and is the service I’ve used the most. The company changed its pricing structure a couple of years ago, making it much more expensive and with worse terms. I’ve also found it increasingly glitchy. (Case in point, this week I recorded a Zoom call straight into Otter.ai. It showed up that it had recorded the full 29 minutes but for reasons I still don’t understand it transcribed only the first 35 seconds). It is also absolutely terrible at transcribing most accents that aren’t American or English received pronunciation. I’ve increasingly been moving to using Transkriptor, which is cheaper than Otter.ai, transcribes in hundreds of languages, and is pretty good with a wide range of accents.

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Amid the rapid gain in convenience it can be easy to forget there are serious risks when it comes to using AI transcription services. A memorable piece published by Politico in 2022 explored this, after a journalist who interviewed an Uyghur activist got a weird request from Otter. As he writes:

We make privacy versus utility tradeoffs all the time with our tech. We know Facebook sells our data, but we still post baby pictures. We allow Google maps access to our location, even though we know it leaves an indelible digital trail. And even savvy, skeptical journalists who take robust efforts to protect sources have found themselves in the thrall of Otter, a transcription app powered by artificial intelligence, and which has virtually eliminated the once-painstaking task of writing up interview notes. That’s an overlooked vulnerability that puts data and sources at risk, say experts.

The story is a sobering reminder that it’s important not to give everything over to tech companies, and that despite the allure of convenience, journalists need to remember their responsibilities to vulnerable sources.

On a more abstract note, I’ve also been thinking about what else is lost when we give this boring but important aspect of reporting work over to the machines. Here’s the great nonfiction writer John McPhee talking about transcription in a rare interview he gave to the Paris Review in 2010:

First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You’re copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I’m typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I’m done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

And so now you’ve got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn’t have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way — it’s much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.

I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here — it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out.

I think I still get ideas for structure and how to put a story together when I’m reading through transcripts, even if they’ve been automatically generated, but it’s true that I probably lose something in terms of hearing where the pauses are, the tone of voice. I’m generally happy not to be transcribing everything myself any more, but McPhee’s words are a good reminder to think about how else to accrue those ideas.

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Reading/listening

• I am enjoying the latest Serial podcast, The Good Whale, about efforts to rehabilitate the star of the hit 1990s movie Free Willy. It’s a good antidote for anyone feeling overwhelmed by bleak political news.

• Lovely New Yorker story about India’s polyglot linguistic culture and Hindu nationalist efforts to push Hindi.

• Really excellent Guardian Long Read piece about the ethical complexity of trying to save extremely premature babies.

As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll be back soon. (Hopefully with some work to share, if I can ever finish going through the reams of audio transcripts AI has helped me to accumulate).

A few years ago, in early November, I was in a driving lesson. We drove down a street in Chingford, on the outskirts of London, where every lamppost had a giant poppy strapped to it. Remembrance poppies have been worn in Britain since 1921, to commemorate soldiers killed in action. Originally worn on shirt lapels for a single day, 11 November, Armistice Day, they’re now typically worn for more than a fortnight and they appear everywhere - projected onto monuments, knitted onto postboxes and, in this case, attached to lampposts.

“Wow, look at those giant poppies,” I said, without thinking.

“Yeah,” said my driving instructor. This was a man who until this point had said basically nothing to me other than instructions on gear-shifts and parallel parking, so I didn’t expect further comment. No. He took a deep breath. “People round here are really patriotic. It’s good to see actually, because you can’t even be proud to be British anymore.” This marked the start of a lengthy rant that started with poppies, travelled through national pride and bafflingly ended with the comment “people can’t even decide if they’re boys or girls these days”. I nodded silently, hands glued to the wheel.

It was awkward. But it also crystallised something I’d been thinking about for a while, and continue to think about, which is the way in which poppies - ostensibly a symbol of remembrance for soldiers killed in action, and a fundraising drive for veterans - have become a stand-in for a whole host of other conversations, like patriotism, national pride, and loyalty to a certain version of Britishness. As poppy-mania has surged and the culture of poppy-policing (whereby public figures face torrents of criticism for appearing without one) has become increasingly insane, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always like this. In my latest story for the Guardian Long Read, published last week, I dug into this, with the aim of trying to work out why and how we reached Peak Poppy.

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I spoke to the first person to decide to put a poppy on a football shirt, back in 2003. No teams had worn poppies before that, but by 2011, it was a norm defended by the prime minister and the heir to the throne. I also spoke to tabloid journalists about what an easy win poppy stories are. (“That Fifa ban in 2011 was a moment where we realised poppies would give us a lot of mileage,” one former Sun reporter told me. “And year after year, that has proven to be true, not just in sports.”) And I was delighted to revisit the 2016 incident where, worried about potential backlash, some hapless BBC put a poppy on the Cookie Monster.

As always with a story like this, I did a ton of research and couldn’t include everything. Here are some of my favourite bits of trivia that got cut from the final version:

• In 1972, concerned about dwindling interest, the Royal British Legion - the charity that runs the annual Poppy Appeal - launched the somewhat regrettable Miss British Legion beauty pageant. The young women who competed, known as “Poppy Popsies”, sold poppies wearing short skirts and heavy make-up. (It lasted a decade, and didn’t make much difference to the fundraising drive).

• In the 1990s, again concerned about falling interest, the RBL tried new ventures, launching car and lorry poppies (both of which are still available) and poppy-themed scratch cards (which are not).

• Dating back to the National Front in the 1980s, far-right groups have held Remembrance Sunday marches to the Cenotaph, including a violent protest in 2023 supposedly “defending” the monument from pro-Palestinian protesters. In 2009, Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, wore a poppy in June while he campaigned for a European Parliament seat. (The RBL wrote an open letter appealing to his “sense of honour” and asking him to stop politicising the poppy, which Griffin ignored).

• In 1995, the Sun called “poppy chiefs” at the RBL “barmy” when the charity said they didn’t want to be jingoistic and glorify war.

• Broadcasters put a huge amount of effort into making sure on-screen talent has poppies. The BBC orders boxes direct from the RBL for their international bureaux, since viewers expect correspondents abroad to be wearing one (even though poppies are not available abroad) while TV soaps order them early so that actors can wear poppies for the episodes due to be screened in the remembrance period.

Such is the culture around poppies that I was expecting to get hate mail after writing this, but in fact I’ve had some really thoughtful emails from readers, including a number of veterans who are uncomfortable with the sense of enforcement that can surround the poppy. You can read the full story over at the Guardian website - or, if you prefer, listen to an audio version.

Reading/listening

• After the US election result I’ve seen a lot of hot takes around on how it might affect UK politics, but the best thing I read on this subject was this story on the excellent Substack Democracy for Sale, about the role of conservative US donors in the UK.

• This is a very moving story about a group of pioneering female cyclists from Afghanistan and their escape from the country after the Taliban takeover.

• Like many people I’ve been gripped by the podcast Kill List, about a hitman-for-hire site on the dark web. The site itself is a scam, but the people making orders don’t know that and have a serious intent to kill. This leaves the journalists in a race against time, trying to warn potential victims.

Thanks for reading! As always, feel free to get in touch in the comments or by replying to this - and share it somewhere if you found it interesting. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

On 29 October 2004, a young woman walked into Wembley Point, an office block in west London. She took a lift up to the 21st floor, where the workplace canteen was situated. She bought a coffee, sat at a table near the window, smoked a cigarette and leafed through a copy of the Guardian. Then she stood up, climbed onto the table, opened the window and jumped out. The woman, who died that day, was never identified. Twenty years on, her identity remains a mystery.

Last year, I wrote a long piece for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about the case, following efforts by a team of amateur investigators to track down the Wembley Point woman, as she has become known. Working for an organisation called Locate International, these volunteers have trawled council records, interviewed witnesses and pounded pavements in their quest to identify her. It has not been an easy task. As I wrote in the story:

The only clues to the woman’s identity are the things she left on the table. A seven-day bus pass issued three days earlier, on Tuesday 26 October, bought at 7.07am on Seven Sisters Road in north-east London, more than 10 miles away. £5.20 in cash. A copy of the Guardian. An empty pack of cigarettes. A black carrier bag bearing the lettering “CPNY”. The oil painting. Measuring 60cm x 30cm, it is a mostly abstract work featuring different figures and monochrome patterns that look as if they could be derived from tribal art. On the right are bodies dancing, or falling. At the centre is a blank white space where a face should be.

One of the things that drew me to this story was the haunting idea that someone could die and apparently not be missed. This conjures all the ways in which someone can fall through the cracks: living a transient life, forming shallow relationships. While I was researching the story, I watched the incredible 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life (available to watch online here) about the tragic story of Joyce Vincent, a woman who died in her flat but was not discovered until three years later. One of the most painful aspects of this film was how many people knew and loved Joyce - but had dropped out of touch over the years, or assumed that she was simply spending time with other people, or had closer friends who would be checking if she was okay.

The story of the Wembley Point woman is deeply sad, but I also found it strangely hopeful talking to the volunteers dedicating so much time and energy to identifying her and trying to restore some dignity in death. Locate International is a fascinating organisation. Founded by two former police officers in 2019, it trains and mobilises volunteers to investigate cold cases of missing people or unidentified bodies, with the kind of pavement-pounding work that police forces often lack the resources to do. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the often destructive trend for online sleuthing whereby true crime fans end up harassing families or disrupting criminal investigations. The team trying to track down the Wembley Point woman have become deeply invested:

To the people investigating, this woman has become a real person rather than just a case – the details just out of reach, but somehow within touching distance. Watts keeps returning to the possessions. “She didn’t just have a nine-to-five. She had a broader mind, a creative element – even if she didn’t create that artwork, she appreciated it.” Tilley worked on the case for two years, before stepping back to focus on her PhD. But she still thinks about the Wembley Point woman: “I would sometimes dream about her and the moments just before she jumped. Without even realising it, you get so attached, and you talk about her as if she is someone you know.”

It’s been a year and a half since I published that piece, and I thought I’d share an update. After the story was published, Locate received 47 leads, which have all now been investigated or ruled out. The most promising was from a translator who came forward and said she recognised the woman as another translator for a solicitor who helped victims of human trafficking. She thought the Wemebly Point woman was from French-speaking West Africa, someone who had been trafficked into Belgium before coming to the UK. The tipster had visited this woman’s home and said she smoked the same cigarettes (Marlboro Lights) and had artwork on the wall similar to the mysterious oil painting. It all sounded so promising that Locate thought they had solved the case. But eventually, they tracked down the West African translator that the tipster remembered, and confirmed she had returned to her country of origin. She was not the Wembley Point woman after all. It’s yet another example of how challenging it is to identify someone with so little information, and after so much time has elapsed.

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Others came forward to say they had seen the Wembley Point woman at the office block in the weeks prior to her death, which suggests she was a regular there. This makes sense; when I interviewed people who had worked in the building, they all said the canteen was not frequented by members of the public. Another tip suggested she may have worked as a cleaner or casual contractor, hidden from other members of staff, which may explain why no-one working in the building identified her after her death. Other tips have suggested she was involved in the Chestnuts Arts and Community Centre in Seven Sisters, close to where she purchased her bus pass from, or that she may have been involved with West African cultural groups in the area.

It’s still tantalisingly out of reach, but to mark 20 years since her death, Locate is appealing again for more information - in particular anyone with knowledge of West African or arts groups in Seven Sisters in the early 2000s, people who worked in cleaning or catering for Wembley Point in the same period, or indeed anyone who thinks the description or story sounds familiar. If you think you might know something (however small), you can contact them on appeals@locate.international

Reading/listening

• I wept all the way through this Guardian Long Read profile of the Palestinian journalist Wael Dahdouh. It’s an incredible account of one man’s personal tragedy, and the best thing I’ve read on Israel’s relentless targeting of journalists in Gaza.

• The Tortoise podcast Dangerous Memories is completely absorbing and gripping. It looks at a self-described “healer” who took over and ruined the lives of a group of privileged young women in London.

• On a completely different note, this New York Times feature about the people harangued by grudge-holding crows is full of amazing facts. (Did you know a crow can hold a grudge for around 17 years?)

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My recent work

It’s been a long time since I last wrote to you! Here are a few pieces I’ve published in the interim.

• At the end of August I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian about government plans to fight extreme misogyny as if it were terrorism.

• More recently, I enjoyed delving into the world of private members clubs - from elite establishments to community hubs - for the Observer Magazine.

• For Hyphen, I wrote about the fractious debate over gentrification of London’s Brick Lane, which is the heart of the British Bangladeshi community. I loved learning more about the history of radical activism in this area.

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And finally - apologies to regular readers for my total lack of posting recently. It’s been a hectic couple of months for various reasons, but I am hoping to resume regular service now. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks - and in the meantime, if you found this useful or interesting, do share it on social media or forward to a friend. Thank you, and I’ll be back soon!

Earlier this week I read this excellent article by Sirin Kale in the Guardian about natural birth ideology and how it took root in the UK - even at the expense, sometimes, of healthy birth outcomes. (Sirin writes compellingly about the negative impact of NHS hospital targets designed to keep C-section rates low). It’s a subject that elicits really strong views, and after reading the story I was reflecting on why I’ve always been quite sceptical of natural birth.

I think it’s in no small part because of a story I reported in 2019 about maternal mortality in the developing world, which meant I had to look at how viscerally dangerous childbirth can be for many women. (And how important effective medical intervetion is). It focused on a trial that found that the out-of-patent drug tranexamic acid was incredibly effective in reducing deaths from post-partum haemorrhage, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. For the story I travelled to Pakistan and Nigeria to report on why post-partum haemorrhage is such a big killer in those countries, and to explore the challenges in getting the drug to people who need it.

The story was for Mosaic, which was run by the Wellcome Trust. Mosaic is sadly defunct, so I thought I’d share the article here today. Just a warning - it contains some fairly graphic descriptions of traumatic births, haemorrhage and medical procedures. And since it was written in 2019, the situation in these countries regarding drug accessibility may have changed.

The article is below, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Thank you for reading.

Twenty-eight weeks into her first pregnancy, Rabia’s worst fears were realised. She went into labour, and the baby was stillborn. The bleeding started the next day.

“It was severe bleeding, uncontrolled,” Rabia recalls. “The doctors and nurses were changing the bed sheets after every two or three minutes. They were red with blood.”

She was at a hospital in her hometown of Taxila, north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad. The hospital was small and poorly equipped; it employed hardly any gynaecologists, and did not have the facilities to give Rabia a blood transfusion or to surgically explore the cause of the haemorrhage. As her condition worsened and the bleeding continued unabated, panicked medical staff referred her to a larger hospital, over an hour’s drive away, in the nearby city of Rawalpindi.

By the time she reached the next hospital, everything was a blur. She had lost so much blood that she was experiencing multiple organ failure: her kidneys, liver and lungs were all beginning to fail. In Pakistan, blood banks are generally in short supply, and on top of this Rabia has a rare blood type. In a race against the clock, doctors tested the blood of the relatives who had travelled with her.

Her husband desperately called friends, colleagues, anyone he could think of who could quickly get to the hospital. Those that matched gave blood, which was transfused into Rabia immediately. At the same time, doctors sought to stop the bleeding and warned her family that she might not survive. But, after ten days in hospital, she made a full recovery.

As she struggled to make sense of her experience, Rabia – who five years later is now 31 and studying for a PhD in environmental sciences – looked up every medical paper she could find about the horror she had experienced. As she read, she realised that she was one of the lucky ones. Postpartum haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal death worldwide, responsible for around 100,000 deaths every year.

The condition is usually defined as blood loss of more than 500 ml within 24 hours of a vaginal birth, or more than 1,000 ml, together with signs of decreased blood circulation, following a caesarean.

While around 6 per cent of women giving birth all over the world – in rich and poor countries alike – develop postpartum haemorrhage, 99 per cent of deaths from it occur in low- and middle-income countries.

Put bluntly, if you develop postpartum haemorrhage in the UK or France, it is extremely unlikely you will die. If you develop it in Pakistan or Nigeria, there is a significant chance that you will. This disparity applies to maternal deaths across the board: 99 per cent of maternal deaths take place in low- and middle-income countries.

A level of bleeding after giving birth is normal, because a woman has to bleed when the placenta detaches. But for some women, this does not stop. Postpartum haemorrhage can have various causes, but by far the most common is uterine atony. In simple terms: during delivery, the uterus squeezes to push the baby out away from the uterine wall, to which it is attached via the placenta. All being well, the uterus would then contract and seal off the bleeding. Sometimes, that doesn’t happen, so the uterus remains dilated and blood flow is uncontrolled.

In other cases of postpartum haemorrhage, the placenta might not detach entirely. Or the uterus might rupture, causing bleeding inside and out. Or the vagina might be torn, which can cause severe bleeding.

Typical treatment for postpartum haemorrhage involves uterine massage, and drugs such as misoprostol, oxytocin or ergometrine, all of which help the uterus to contract. If this treatment doesn’t work, doctors might take surgical steps – manually removing trapped parts of the placenta, placing temporary sutures on the uterus, stitching external or internal lacerations on the vagina, or, in extreme cases, performing a hysterectomy and removing the uterus altogether.

It can be difficult to identify the cause of the bleeding; during the time this takes a woman may lose a critical amount of blood and, as Rabia did, suffer multiple organ failure. For many, this will cause irreversible damage or death.

It is notoriously difficult to obtain reliable statistics for maternal mortality; a 2015 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) noted that many countries “lack comprehensive systems” for recording these deaths and that “underreporting” is rife.

On the best estimates available, the global maternal mortality rate fell by 44 per cent in the 25 years from 1990 to 2015. While this is a vast improvement, it still means that around the world, more than 200 women die for every 100,000 who give birth.

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In 2009, Haleema Shakur-Still and Ian Roberts, two research scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, began to wonder if they might be able to add a tool to the arsenal in the battle against maternal death. They had been working on a clinical trial of a drug called tranexamic acid. The drug, which makes it easier for the body to stem bleeding by stopping blood clots from breaking down, was out of patent and therefore cheap.

It had been invented by husband and wife Shosuke and Utako Okamoto in Japan in 1962. The Okamotos thought it might be a useful treatment for postpartum haemorrhage, but they could not convince local doctors to perform a clinical trial. Instead, tranexamic acid was picked up by a pharmaceutical company and used as a treatment for heavy periods and after tooth extractions.

Shakur-Still and Roberts’s trial, CRASH-2, tested its use on people who were bleeding badly from injuries. The results were striking. If the drug was given intravenously within three hours of injury, it reduced the risk of death by a third. As the two scientists worked with doctors around the world, the subject of postpartum haemorrhage came up again and again.

“Doctors in Nigeria were seeing women come into the emergency department having given birth elsewhere, and bleeding to death,” says Shakur-Still. “It’s so far removed from our experience here [in the UK] that I didn’t even believe that was a reality, until I started looking at the data.”

In March 2010, Shakur-Still and Roberts launched the WOMAN (World Maternal Antifibrinolytic) trial, working in 21 countries to test whether tranexamic acid might similarly reduce deaths from postpartum haemorrhage. The double-blinded trial enrolled 20,000 women with postpartum haemorrhage, randomly assigning them to receive either 1 g of intravenous tranexamic acid, or a matching placebo, in addition to usual care – which would typically consist of uterine massage, one or more of the drugs aimed at helping the uterus contract, or surgery.

Nigeria was the first country to come on board for the WOMAN trial. Around the country, 53 hospitals took part. University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, a sprawling city in southern Nigeria, was the organisational centre.

The thing about postpartum haemorrhage, doctors say, is the chaos. It is a race against the clock to stop the bleeding and find the cause before the patient loses a critical amount of blood and goes into irreversible shock.

Nike Bello, a consultant in gynaecology and obstetrics at UCH Ibadan, has treated too many cases of severe postpartum haemorrhage to count. “[In some cases] we did every single step of surgery, one by one, and she still died. Even after we removed the uterus and ligated all the arteries,” she says. She works at a large, well-equipped government hospital, an expansive complex set back from a traffic-clogged road. The most severe cases end up here, women referred from more basic facilities, often having lost massive amounts of blood before arrival.

Those that stand out in Bello’s mind are the ones that lived. One woman came in having given birth elsewhere, bleeding from lacerations to her vagina. The wounds had been packed with gauze, but it had not stemmed the bleeding. The gauze was soaking red, blood dripping through. “I looked at the vagina and it was all avulsed, it was like someone took a razor to it and shredded it to bits,” says Bello. “I really can’t explain what they did.” Seeing how severe the blood loss was, she decided to take the woman to surgery immediately.

The anaesthetist intervened: there was no blood to replace what she was losing, he said, and what if she died in surgery? In Nigeria, the desperately underfunded healthcare system works on a pay-as-you-go model, where patients and their families must purchase anaesthetic, drugs or blood before medical procedures can be carried out. Payment can be deferred for surgery if a patient cannot afford it, but not for drugs.

The reasoning is that hospitals can absorb the cost of the doctors’ time on surgery but cannot afford to replace medicines that have not first been paid for. If blood banks have stock of the right blood type, patients must buy it before they can receive a transfusion. As there are limited supplies of blood, more often than not, they also have to find a donor. This woman’s family did not have the funds to purchase the blood, and needed to go home to look for more money, which could cause a fatal delay.

“We are saying that if we arrest the bleeding she might die – but if we don’t arrest the bleeding she will die,” Bello told the anaesthetist. “I would rather the patient dies while I am trying to save her than watch her die without trying.”

They took her to surgery. Bello sewed the multiple wounds on the vagina, but the other tissue around it began to tear. As she stitched, the family returned with enough money for four pints of blood. The transfusion was given, and the wounds were eventually sealed off. The woman’s life was saved.

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Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world; according to the WHO, the country accounts for 19 per cent of all maternal deaths worldwide. Around 800 women die for every 100,000 births. While this figure has lowered over the past two decades, it is still the worst in sub-Saharan Africa. Postpartum haemorrhage is the leading cause. As in other parts of the world, eclampsia – a complication resulting from high blood pressure – is a close second.

Even when a woman survives postpartum haemorrhage, it can have devastating consequences. Oladapo Olayemi, another consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at UCH, once treated a nurse, an employee at the hospital, who haemorrhaged after giving birth to her first child. The bleeding was severe and nothing was working to make it stop.

As Olayemi operated, he realised he would have to remove her uterus in order to save her life. The woman survived, but for three months afterwards, she would not speak to him, ignoring him when she passed him in the corridor. “Childbearing is a major aspect of our social life,” says Olayemi. “It is seen as a social success to have children, and she only had one. This means you are reluctant to remove the uterus – you have to weigh saving her life. Sometimes you take that decision too late.”

Only 32 per cent of women in Nigeria deliver their babies with a skilled attendant; the vast majority deliver at home, at a basic health facility, or with a traditional midwife. This means that if a woman begins to haemorrhage, there can be long delays before she gets the right treatment. Often, by the time she reaches a large hospital like UCH, she will already have been to two or three smaller hospitals along the way.

This, added to the financial pressure of having to buy medicines and blood before treatment, is a serious logistical problem. Against this context, it is clear why doctors at UCH and elsewhere in Nigeria were eager to take part in the WOMAN trial. But given the scale of the challenges, could tranexamic acid help?

The trial ran for six years, during which time Utako Okamoto, the co-inventor of the drug, died (her husband, Shosuke, had died in 2004). When the results came out in April 2017, they vindicated the Okamotos’ original thesis that it could be effective for postpartum haemorrhage. If tranexamic acid was administered within three hours of birth, the risk of death reduced by 31 per cent, around a third. “It buys us time,” explains Bello. “It makes the bleeding slower, so you can replace blood and fix the problem.”

Before the trial, there were concerns that the drug – which encourages blood clotting – might have an adverse effect since pregnant and lactating women are already prone to blood clots. But the trial showed that it did not. “For us in Nigeria, [the results] are very significant,” says Bukola Fawole, a professor at UCH and Nigeria’s project lead on the WOMAN trial. “If postpartum haemorrhage accounts for 25 per cent of all maternal deaths, and if we utilise tranexamic acid in every woman who is bleeding sufficiently early, it will reduce almost a third of those deaths. For us, that is huge.”

The WHO updated its recommendation on using tranexamic acid for postpartum haemorrhage in light of the WOMAN trial. But almost two years after the results came out, the drug isn’t always easily available in the countries that need it most. Tranexamic acid is cheap, heat-resistant, easy to store and to produce, and it is proven to save lives. Why aren’t we using it everywhere?

In 2010, Rizwana Chaudhri, the dean of Rawalpindi Medical University in Pakistan, attended a conference for obstetricians and gynaecologists in London. She picked up a leaflet that asked: “Would you like to be part of a trial to save mothers?” As she sat in the conference hall, she got out her phone and emailed right away. “Postpartum haemorrhage is one of the main killers in our country,” she tells me. “Anything we can do to save even one human life, with any added drug, would be beneficial.” She soon became the WOMAN project lead for Pakistan.

The Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi, where Chaudhri practises, was the centre of the trial. Twinned with the capital Islamabad, Rawalpindi is Pakistan’s fourth-largest city, a densely populated maze of streets. Pakistan’s population is rapidly growing: this hospital alone delivers 21,000 babies annually, Chaudhri says. Demand far outstrips the facilities.

On the postnatal ward, beds are shared by two women, sometimes three, and their babies. In the nursery, where premature babies and those with jaundice or other serious problems are cared for, incubators designed for one baby are filled with five or six, lined up next to each other with name tags around their wrists.

This is a government hospital, so patients receive free medical care, and no one is turned away. It serves a huge geographical area encompassing both urban centres and far-flung villages. Like UCH in Ibadan, it is a referral centre, and by the time women reach this hospital after giving birth at home or in a basic health unit, they may have already lost a critical amount of blood.

“Death usually occurs when there is a delay,” explains Chaudhri. “The golden period is the first three hours. There are three main delays. The first is decision making. The woman is not empowered enough to decide, ‘I’m going [to the hospital].’ The family decides and they may have to contact their males. The second is money – they may not have transport. The third is the distance they have to cover, and that they have no idea where to take them, so they go from one facility to another.”

According to Sadia Khan, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology, the Holy Family Hospital typically sees two women a day with severe postpartum haemorrhage. The role of poverty and the marginalisation of women is hard to ignore.

“In Pakistan, the fertility rate is high and the inter-pregnancy interval is low – a woman might be having a baby every year, which is a risk factor,” says Khan. “Especially in rural areas, the mother is probably the last person in the household who is the priority.”

Poor nutrition means that more than 50 per cent of Pakistani women of reproductive age are anaemic, compounding the problem of postpartum haemorrhage: if a mother’s haemoglobin levels are already low, she is less able to withstand heavy blood loss. The vast majority of women do not seek any antenatal care at all, meaning they might be unaware that they are anaemic and therefore at high risk of complications.

In the most extreme cases of haemorrhage, women enter a state called disseminated intravascular coagulation, when all the blood in their body fails to coagulate. This can cause bleeding from elsewhere – the gums, the nose. At this stage, it is very hard to save their life.

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In 2016, two years after her stillbirth, Rabia was pregnant again. She had read everything she could find online about postpartum haemorrhage, and spoke to her family doctor in Taxila to ask what could be done to prevent a recurrence. The doctor told her about the trial for tranexamic acid. Rabia left the appointment and scoured the internet for information about the trial.

“I found the whole literature, the WOMAN project, this trial going on globally,” she says. As the due date approached, she anxiously prepared. Her husband gathered blood donors from among their friends and family, and this time they went straight to a large hospital when she went into labour.

After giving birth to a healthy baby girl, the bleeding started again. The horror of her last experience, the uncontrolled bleeding and the organ failure, rushed back to Rabia. “I was thinking that history is going to repeat,” she says. An injection of tranexamic acid was delivered, alongside other measures such as intrauterine packing with gauze and manual removal of placenta pieces that had failed to detach. Miraculously, it seemed to Rabia, the bleeding stopped. Within a day, she had made a full recovery. The tranexamic acid “made a difference, definitely,” she says.

When the trial results came out in April 2017, the doctors who had worked on it in Pakistan were jubilant. Tranexamic acid, which stops blood clots from breaking down, works in a totally different way from other drug treatments for postpartum haemorrhage, which mainly focus on helping the uterus to contract. “If the patient has had the uterotonic drugs and needs two transfusions, the addition of tranexamic acid means the need for blood transfusions is reduced, as is the need for surgery,” explains Khan. “It’s easily available, cheap, very effective. It’s a magic drug.”

Zainab lives in Ibadan, Nigeria. When she went into labour seven years ago, she decided to go to UCH, where she worked as a health attendant. She felt perfectly well, but it was her first child, so she didn’t know what to expect and didn’t want to take any risks. Her husband was at work, but she didn’t ask him to go with her. She walked into the hospital herself and presented at the labour ward.

At first, things went smoothly. Her child was delivered, a healthy baby boy. After that point, her memory is hazy.

“I can’t even explain, the music changed within two seconds. I knew I had a baby boy, but the only thing I can remember is opening my eyes and seeing I was in an anti-shock gown.” These compression garments are sometimes used to stem bleeding.

Zainab remembers a doctor explaining to her that a trial was going on, and that there was an injection that might stop the bleeding. She agreed to have it. She was absolutely sure that she was going to die. The doctors administered tranexamic acid along with a blood transfusion. She doesn’t know how long it took, but the bleeding stopped.

“I thank god that research was going on there,” she says. “In short, I am alive. My baby is doing fine. Without that research, I might not be alive today.”

Although she was careful about her health and sought medical support during her pregnancy, Zainab had never heard of postpartum haemorrhage.

“I knew women were dying in delivery, I knew things happened, but I thought I could never be a victim.” In May, her son will be seven. She often thinks about the trial. “If this drug was not available, where would I be today? Who would be taking care of that poor boy?”

In fact, now that the trial is over, tranexamic acid is not available in much of Nigeria, or in many other countries where maternal mortality is high. Nigeria’s health minister Isaac Adewole, a gynaecologist by training, issued a directive recommending that every hospital in the country stock it. But progress has been slow, in the face of underfunding and poor infrastructure.

“The drug is available, but not as widely available as we would wish,” says Bukola Fawole, the country’s WOMAN project lead. “We want it to be available in every nook and cranny.” He and his colleagues have been running sessions with gynaecologists, obstetricians and midwives to raise awareness of the drug. These efforts are ongoing, but the problem of distribution remains. Tranexamic acid is not produced in Nigeria.

The price increased after the trial results – perhaps because of increased demand, as well as a simultaneous collapse in the Nigerian currency. During the trial, the drug was provided for free to the 50 hospitals that took part. Today, even those hospitals do not all stock tranexamic acid, because of the cost and the difficulty of finding a reliable supplier.

According to Tolulope Adebisi, the pharmacist at UCH in Ibadan, it can be challenging to get hold of tranexamic acid. Hospital pharmacies work privately, on a supply-and-demand basis. If a doctor doesn’t prescribe a drug, pharmacists won’t stock it, but this can become a vicious circle, as doctors won’t prescribe drugs that are not routinely stocked.

“Drug companies don’t want to tie up their capital with drugs like that, except if they are sure of a ready market,” says Adebisi. “They prefer antibiotics, antimalarials, things that are fast-moving.”

At a large teaching hospital such as UCH, pharmacists have well-developed relationships with a range of suppliers, and are more easily able to stock tranexamic acid.

“We have our regular reliable suppliers,” she says. “For smaller hospitals, it might be more difficult to access.” A vial of 500 mg of tranexamic acid can cost 1,500 naira (£3.20), and two would be needed for the recommended dose. This is significantly more expensive than the other drug treatments for postpartum haemorrhage – a further deterrent for patients. According to Adebise, some cheaper versions of the drug are becoming available, but they are still not widely accessible.

This is all the more frustrating, because where tranexamic acid is being used, it appears to be having an effect.

“We still encounter postpartum haemorrhage a lot, it is still very common, but they don’t die,” says Oladapo Olayemi, one of the consultants at UCH. “Locally here, the hospital has adopted it, and the impact was immediate.” He notes a general improvement in maternal outcomes alongside the impact of tranexamic acid – with traditional midwives, for instance, being faster to refer women to hospital when they are experiencing haemorrhage.

Maternal mortality remains high in certain countries for a complex host of reasons going far beyond the actual medical complications – from poor nutrition to the marginalisation of women.

In much the same way, the challenges in implementing new treatments are multifaceted. Studies suggest that there is typically a time lag of 17 years between a successful clinical trial result and a drug being widely in use around the world. The reasons for this can vary. It takes time to change human behaviour, and for doctors to integrate a new treatment into their arsenal. Drug supply can also be an issue. And in countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria, where state infrastructure is weak, implementation of recommendations can be slow.

In some countries that took part in the trial, such as Uganda, tranexamic acid is barely being used.

“The infrastructure is just not there in some places,” says Ian Roberts, one of the trial directors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

This problem is not unique to tranexamic acid. Creating a market for a new drug, or for a new use of an old drug, is a laborious and unglamorous process. In international development parlance, this is referred to as “market shaping”, attempting to create a balance where there is enough demand for a drug to make it profitable for pharmaceutical companies but also good value for the countries purchasing it.

Many doctors have been unaware of what tranexamic acid can do. In Pakistan, faced with so many cases of postpartum haemorrhage and too little use of the drug to treat it, Rizwana Chaudhri decided to take action.

“What is the use, putting in so much effort and money, and it goes on the shelves?” she says. The country has a well-developed pharmaceutical industry, and unlike in Nigeria, several companies produce tranexamic acid domestically, meaning that it is cheap and easily available.

Soon after the trial results, Chaudhri got in contact with one of the largest of these, Hilton Pharmaceutical. In the absence of public funding to disseminate news of the successful results, the company funded Chaudhri and her colleagues to hold seminars around the country to inform clinicians about the new use for tranexamic acid. So far, sessions have been held in Pakistan’s major cities – Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta – with plans for more over the next year.

Given its easy availability in the country, the drug was already widely used for a variety of conditions, but if it was used for postpartum haemorrhage, this was ad hoc given the lack of clinical evidence.

“Previously, even if it was practice to give tranexamic acid, it was usually given late – if you tried everything else and that failed,” says Chaudhri. “But this trial has proved that this is first-line management. Everybody who has the knowledge is now using it.”

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When it comes to reducing maternal mortality, there are many contributing factors that have nothing to do with the drugs on offer. In both Pakistan and Nigeria, as well as in a host of other lower-income countries, women in rural areas may not have easy access to a proper hospital in which to deliver; if they are referred, there are often no ambulance services to transfer them.

Even if gynaecologists and obstetricians at hospitals know what to do and how to do it, staff at more basic healthcare facilities will still be ill-equipped to treat postpartum haemorrhage.

“We need to train people,” says Chaudhri. “Even if they’re not well-versed with all the procedures, they should know how to transfer the patient, do the packing and give an IV line.”

The next stage of the WOMAN trial will explore whether tranexamic acid can prevent postpartum haemorrhage when it is given to high-risk women, such as those with anaemia, before any haemorrhaging has started.

“For lots of women, by the time they start bleeding, it’s almost too late,” says Haleema Shakur-Still, one of the trial directors. “We wondered if we give tranexamic acid even before they start to bleed, whether you can prevent postpartum haemorrhage happening in the first place.” The researchers are also exploring alternatives to intravenous use, such as a drinkable dose or intramuscular injection.

This would make treatment much easier at basic health units, where staff may not have the expertise to administer a drug intravenously.

In late 2018, Rabia gave birth for a third time, to her second healthy child. Having experienced postpartum haemorrhage twice, she made the decision, with her doctor’s advice, to have a caesarean. An injection of tranexamic acid was administered. There were no complications. “My experiences were horrible and when I recall that time, it is terrifying,” she says. “To conceive is a great thing. But the matter of concern is to have a safe pregnancy, a healthy baby and healthy mother.”

There’s a story that periodically does the rounds online, rewritten on content-churn sites and feel-good Instagram accounts. It’s about Margaret McCollum, an elderly doctor living in London. Her husband Oswald Laurence was an actor, and back in the early 1950s recorded an iconic voice-over announcement familiar to anyone who uses the London Underground: “Mind the gap”. Reminding passengers to avoid the gap between the train and the platform, Laurence’s message played at every northbound Northern Line station for years. It was gradually phased out, and at the time of his death in 2007, it was only playing at Embankment station in central London. McCollum went regularly to the station to hear her husband’s voice, until one day in November 2012, she found that the recording had been replaced. McCollum was devastated, and contacted Transport for London, who provided her with a CD of the recording and, moved by her story, worked to reinstate the recording at Embankment. "Since he died I would sit and wait for the next train until I heard his voice. On 1 November he wasn't there. I was just stunned when Oswald wasn't there anymore,” she told the BBC in 2013, when they covered the reinstatement of the recording.

Over a decade later, this story is still regularly repackaged, with headlines like “This story will MAKE YOUR DAY” and “This is what true love looks like”. On the surface, the situation is unusual - the iconic nature of the recording, the specific location - but I think part of the reason it’s so enduringly popular is how relatable it is. How many of us long to hear a loved one’s voice one more time? Most of us, I’d guess.

I am telling you about this because I actually have my own version of it: an interview that my grandmother gave to BBC Woman’s Hour in 2017, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India. (If you’re interested, the episode is here, and she appears about 30 minutes in). My grandmother, Sabiha Husain, was born in Indore, in India, and moved to Karachi, then the capital of the new state of Pakistan, as a bride around the time of Partition. She and my grandfather were married the day after Gandhi was assassinated, and their wedding celebrations had to be drastically toned down as a mark of respect. Soon after marriage, she rebelled against her in-laws to go to the refugee camps surrounding Karachi to help provide aid to the thousands of displaced people converging on the city. I’d heard snippets of these stories, but it was always hard to draw out details from her. I’m a journalist, and my mother is a writer, and a few times, we talked about trying to write down some of my grandmother’s memories, or record her talking about them. I actually attempted to do this a few times, but whenever I got the dictaphone out, she would clam up, start answering in monosyllables and evading my questions. So I gave up.

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Then in 2017, she ended up agreeing to do an interview with Woman’s Hour, as part of the BBC’s coverage of the 70th anniversary of Partition. When I listened to it for the first time, it stopped me in my tracks. The interview contained those few familiar details - the toned down marriage celebrations, the voluntary work - but there was so much I’d never heard her talk about. She described the panic steadily creeping up as news of killings and displacement spread to Indore. She talked about hearing the news that a train carrying Muslims had been stopped and everyone killed. Interviewer Kirsty Starkey asks how she felt hearing that. “Deep, deep sadness,” my grandmother says. “You just think that everything is going to be for the best, but the killings and the ugliness of the whole thing was very disturbing.” She goes on to talk about her brother being in Delhi when violence really set in there. “He was staying in the Imperial hotel, and he had Hindu friend, and he found out that the people would mark the room, and they said, ‘Tonight, these are the rooms that we are going to attack.’ And one of the rooms was my brother's room. And this friend came to my brother and he said, ‘Just get out. Leave everything.’ My brother was unaware of anything that was going wrong. He came wearing the one set of clothes that he was wearing and nothing else with him.”

Although we were very close I’d never heard her talk about Partition in those terms - the fear, the anxiety, the violence. Listening to it for the first time in 2017, I thought about some of the people I’ve interviewed over the years, and how sometimes perhaps it’s easier to open up to a stranger than to the people closest to you. My grandmother died in 2020, a few months into the Covid lockdown. (I wrote about her death, and our relationship, in a New Statesman piece a year later). Although I’d seen her every couple of weeks for my entire life - bar a few periods living outside of London - I didn’t see her in the days leading up to her death, because of the lockdown. After she died, I played the Woman’s Hour recording a lot, listening to that incredibly familiar voice telling extraordinary stories.

It was Pakistani Independence Day yesterday (Indian Independence Day is on the 15th), and it’s now been 77 years since Partition. That made me think of this recording for the first time in a while, so I looked it up and played it again. Unexpectedly, it made me laugh, because she’s introduced as being “in her 90s” rather than with a specific age, which I know will be because she was being coy about exactly how old she was, which, by the time you’re admitting to being in your 90s seems a bit futile. Then the amusement gave way to a flood of emotion. It’s uncanny to hear the voice of someone who has died, just chatting away as if they were still here. Uncanny, but wonderful, and I am very grateful that it has been preserved.

Reading/listening

• This Guardian Long Read essay by Israeli historian Omer Bartov, looking at shifts in Israeli public opinion since 7 October, is fascinating, and I found it genuinely illuminating.

• Truly insane reporting in this profile of Ecuador’s new president and his war on narcos, in the New Yorker.

• I was gripped by this Vulture story about the warring narratives of four writers enmeshed in a messy romantic situation, involving an affair and a divorce. Gossipy in the best way.

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My recent work

• I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian about public inquiries, and whether government uses them to avoid accountability rather than take it.

• My first feature in the Sunday Times magazine! It’s about the rise in tongue tie surgery on babies, and whether this is being hastened by the pressure on women to breastfeed.

• The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast did an episode based on my recent reporting on heat death in Europe. (You can read the written piece here, and my Substack post about reporting it here).

Thank you for reading! As always, please share this with anyone who might be interested - forward the email, post it on social media, all of it helps. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

When I first started working on my book, Karachi Vice, I had no idea where to start. Publishing is an opaque world, and despite having been a journalist for the best part of a decade by then, I didn’t really know how to put a book proposal together or who to send it to. The foundations of writing a book of narrative nonfiction are much the same as writing a standalone piece – a clear story with narrative drivers or a thesis about the world - but I was unsure about how to scale up what I was doing, and what precise components a book proposal needed to include. In the years since publishing my book, it’s something that friends and colleagues have asked me about at different points, and since many of the readers of this newsletter are interested in writing in one way or another, I thought I’d share my advice.

A book proposal is, for obvious reasons, much longer than a pitch for a long-form magazine article. A book is typically 80,000 – 100,000 words, so we’re talking ten times longer (or more) than a long-form article. When it comes to the proposal itself, there is no hard and fast rule for how long it should be – but a ballpark figure might be around 15,000 words. You’ll need to do some pre-reporting and heavy background research; the editor will want to know whether there is enough material there to sustain a whole book, and to get a sense of your style and tone. The purpose of the proposal is to explain the idea, the structure and the material as clearly as you can while also making it read compellingly.

There is no rigid format for a book proposal, and length and style might vary depending on the idea, but there are some elements which are generally useful to include:

• Overview: Include an overview that sets up the background, summarises the ground the book will cover and explains briefly a) how you'll do it and b) why you think people will want to read it or why it fills a gap in the market. You don't need to go into the market point in too much detail: the aim is to show an awareness of which other books exist on similar terrain so that agents or publishers know you've thought about who might want to read it and why. (As opposed to thinking only about why you want to write it). This overview should be written in a way that aims to draw the reader in and sell the book – like an extended pitch – rather than in a flat, factual style. Length can really vary – it might be several pages, or a few paragraphs. There aren't any set rules.

• Biography: Write a page or so about yourself – basic biographical information, and why you're the best person to tell the story. If your own biography is particularly relevant to the idea, then you might want to use this section to talk about how you’ll approach the book, rather than placing it in the overview. Again: no set rules.

• Chapter breakdown: In my view this is the hardest part. You need to outline how you will structure the book and what would go into each chapter. This is extremely difficult when you haven't done all the research yet! This is where pre-reporting comes into play. While no-one would expect you to have done all the research for the book at this stage, you do need to have enough to write a convincing chapter breakdown, which requires having a clear idea of the different elements of the story. Each chapter needs a summary of a paragraph or so, saying what the content will be. Try to write these summaries in an engaging way, remembering that throughout this proposal, you want to give a flavour of what the book will be. You might even think of them as mini-pitches.

• When you are writing the chapter breakdown, bear in mind that you're not going to be bound to this structure when it comes to writing the actual book. The purpose of this section is that editors need to know that the story can be sustained over the length of a book and that you've got some sense of how to corral the material. To give you an example, when I wrote my proposal, I knew I wanted to write about five people in Karachi. I had interviewed two at length, and met one briefly, but I hadn’t identified the other two yet. I had an idea of who I wanted to write about, or at least which types of stories I wanted, but I had to use some placeholder characters for the purposes of the proposal – people I’d read about elsewhere but hadn’t actually met myself – who were then replaced in the actual book.

• Sample chapter: Here you need to write through one full chapter from the book, so that editors can see your writing style and approach. It can be from anywhere (no need for it to be the first chapter), so choose whichever chapter you have the most material on. This chapter is crucial, as a way to showcase your writing style, the material, and the approach you will take. As well as the sample chapter, I think it can be useful to include a prologue (if you're going to have one in the book) as that allows you to set the scene and tone.

In terms of process, most book deals (though not all) are negotiated by agents. If you don’t have an agent already, you might well use the proposal to approach an agent. The agent will then, most likely, work with you on finessing it, before they send it out to publishers on your behalf. The book can change significantly once it's sold. 

If you found this useful, you might be interested to hear that I’m soon to be teaching a course in literary long-form journalism with Granta’s new Writers’ Workshop. It starts in October and will be a six-month course, taught mostly asynchronously online, during which we’ll cover the fundamentals of coming up with an idea, pitching, research and reporting, structure, and writing techniques. At the end of the course, students will have a 10,000 word piece of nonfiction to pitch, or use as the starting point for a book proposal. You can find more information and sign up here.

I’m currently deep within the process of writing the course materials, which has been an interesting exercise. I’ve been enjoying delving back into some long-form writing that I love, and finding the best examples of certain tricks of the trade in action - conveying lots of information with a light-touch, writing compelling and vivid character studies or descriptions of place. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the kind of practical advice I would find useful. So if you do decide to sign up, expect more of the kind of tips you found in this email, along with lots of reading, practical exercises, Q&As with guest writers, and more.

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Reading/listening

• This Sunday Times magazine story about the trad wife influencer Hannah Neeleman is a compelling and actually very sad read. (It’s paywalled: archive link here).

• I am horribly dependent on my phone, and while I think I would go insane on a silent retreat, I really enjoyed reading Rachel Connolly’s FT essay about how one such retreat helped her reset her relationship with tech.

• This New Yorker piece about Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance and his strange relationship to the politics of the family is eye-opening.

As always, if you know someone who might find this useful, please forward it on - or share on social media, it all helps! Thanks for reading and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

On 13 July 2022, David Azevedo, a 50-year-old construction worker, went to work in the midst of a heatwave in France. By the end of the day, he was dead. Doctors determined that he died of a heart attack caused by severe heatstroke. In a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, I told the story of what happened to David, and the devastating impact it has had on his close-knit family.

David was working outside in the sun, with limited shade, and for long hours. He was not elderly, he did not have any underlying health conditions: his death was caused by exposure to heat. In western countries - certainly in the UK, where I live - we can still have a tendency to think of climate change as something that is happening far away, or as something that will endanger us in the future. But as extreme heat becomes an annual occurence, so too do soaring death tolls. This is happening now, and nowhere is adapting fast enough.

While I was reporting this story, one point came up again and again: the difficulty of clearly establishing which deaths are directly caused by heat. Elderly people, or those with heart conditions, die because of the extra cardiovascular strain caused by high temperatures: it takes time to work out which deaths were hastened by the weather. As I wrote in the piece: “The human body’s reaction to heat is complex: there is no set temperature at which heat is dangerous to human life; no specific limit to the time that can be safely spent outside. This is why one person might collapse and die in the heat, while another working alongside them might emerge unscathed.”

This posed a reporting challenge - I had been asked to tell the story of a single heat death, and it took a long time to get beyond the statistics to find a family who knew their loved one had died because of extreme temperatures (and who wanted to speak out about it - in some countries, where heat deaths at work are becoming more common, companies pay compensation to families and ask them not to speak to the press). More seriously, this complexity makes it time-consuming for public health bodies to establish exact death tolls from heat waves, and difficult to communicate the danger. As one researcher told me:

“Unlike other disasters, which are happening in real time, we only really know the true impacts of extreme heat weeks or months after the event itself – it comes from analysing death records, for instance,” says Julie Arrighi, associate director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre. “This is challenging from a risk communication perspective. With extreme heat, you end up talking about population-level statistics, which are harder to connect with.”

I suppose the main purpose of a story like this, which singles out one particular case, is to humanise statistics which otherwise feel abstract. This is true even when the statistics are terrifying: one study looking at excess mortality data across 16 European countries estimated that 70,000 people died due to heat in the summer of 2022.

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Psychologists use the term “compassion fade” to describe the idea that our capacity to feel compassion diminishes as our exposure to suffering increases, and the term “psychic numbing” to refer to the tendency for individuals or societies to withdraw attention from traumatic past experiences or overwhelming future threats. The American psychologist Paul Slovic has researched this, finding - perhaps unsurprisingly - that we’re more likely to be moved by personal stories than by the suffering of groups of people or whole nations. He’s written: “Large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling)”, while “we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need”.

Climate change is almost the definition of an issue so overwhelming and massive in its implications that it is difficult to look at head on. So it follows that the individual story of one death is almost more shocking - or at least, easier to relate to and understand - than a huge headline figure. I certainly found that while I was reporting on David’s death. I had heard the statistics each year about death tolls from heat in Europe, but it was talking to a devastated family that really made it hit home to me what those numbers mean.

The full story is available at the Guardian website; please do read it.

Reading/listening

• I love Tortoise’s podcasts, and am riveted by their new one, Dangerous Memories, which tells the story of a dodgy healer who erroneously convinced affluent young women they had been abused.

• This Guardian Long Read story about Britain’s last court reporters is a delight from start to finish. (Regular readers of this newsletter might recall I recently wrote about some of the challenges of UK court reporting!)

• Fascinating New Yorker story about an “audio investigator” who investigates crimes that are heard but not seen.

My recent work

• For the Observer, I went out on the campaign trail with Jess Phillips in Birmingham before the election, and spoke to young Tories about the future of the party in the aftermath of their party’s historic defeat.

• For Hyphen, I wrote an op-ed about intimidation of female candidates and how the problem pre-dates the recent crop of pro-Palestine activism.

Thanks so much for reading! As always, if you found this interesting, do post it on social media, or forward to a friend - it all helps. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

On Sunday afternoon, a crowd of people gathered outside an art gallery in Ilford, in east London. They were all wearing white, and many held placards with photographs of a smiling woman with dark curly hair and the words “Zara Aleena, never forgotten” or “Together we walk for Zara, united against male violence.” This was a vigil, organised by Zara’s family, to mark two years since the 35-year-old was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered by a stranger as she walked home from a night out.

Last year, I published a long piece about Zara - what happened to her, the person she was, and her family’s urgent fight to create meaning from this senseless tragedy. I have kept in touch with her family since then. Zara’s case has stayed with me perhaps more than anything else I’ve written about, for a number of reasons. When she died, we were the same age, and both Londoners of Pakistani origin. Her aunt Farah Naz knows my mum, which is how I ended up covering the case. Talking to Zara’s family and friends in the immediate aftermath of her murder, I had a real sense of what a wonderful person she was - someone who made time for everyone, was always ready to laugh - and how much her loved ones had lost. But it’s more than that too: the fact that systemic failings so clearly contributed to her death.

Despite the fact that most violence against women happens at the hands of someone they know, over the last few years, the names of women murdered by strangers have become totemic: Zara Aleena, Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, Sabina Nessa, Jan Mustafa. These names are used as a shorthand for the ways in which society fails to protect women - misogynistic policing, a crumbling justice system and the prevalence of male aggression in public spaces. The names are undeniably powerful. But it can also be easy to forget that these were real women, with real families experiencing unimaginable grief. At the vigil on Sunday, this grief was front and centre. Zara’s friends and family wept, alongside members of the local community, politicians and women’s rights activists. It was an event both personal and political.

One of the most extraordinary things was that so many other families of women whose names have become emblematic were in attendance. Mina Smallman, mother of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman - murdered by a stranger in a park in 2020 - gave a rousing and furious speech: “I am campaigning because two women of colour didn’t matter to the police.” (The Smallman family had to conduct their own search when Bibaa and Nicole went missing, as police didn’t help, and later two police officers were jailed for taking selfies with the sisters’ dead bodies). Sarah Everard’s parents were in the crowd, as were relatives of Sabina Nessa and Jan Mustafa. These families are united by the absolute worst thing imaginable, members of a grim club that no-one would choose. In her speech, Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women campaign, thanked them for channelling their trauma into activism: “Your fortitude is a gift to women and girls.”

After a series of emotional, angry speeches, the group marched through Ilford to the residential street where Zara was murdered. Here they held a minute’s silence for murdered women, before symbolically walking Zara home: she was murdered just 10 minutes from her own house. This was the third vigil the family has held; the first took place in 2022, just a week after the murder. At the time, Zara’s aunt Farah told me: “We needed to do something before we became paralysed with grief. I’m not going to get closure, but the community held us in their arms that day as if to remind us not to give up on humanity.”

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Just a few days before the crowd gathered in Ilford, the inquest into Zara’s death concluded. It confirmed what her family had long suspected: that her death was preventable. Her attacker Jordan McSweeney was only free because of failings by probation, police and the prison service. As I wrote last January, when the probation inspectorate report on the case came out, he had 28 convictions for 69 previous offences, and a documented history of domestic violence. He had served nine prison sentences with more than 100 incidents in prison. But despite all this, when he was released on probation in June 2022, his risk level was classified as “medium” because his offences, behaviour in prison and wider criminal history were not considered as a whole. This “medium” risk designation meant that when he failed to turn up for a single probation meeting after his release, the decision to recall him to prison was not treated with urgency.

The inquest elaborated on these failings, concluding: “Zara's death was contributed to by the failure of multiple state agencies to act in accordance to policies and procedures - to share intelligence, accurately assess risk of serious harm, [and] act and plan in response to the risk in a sufficient, timely and coordinated way". In an emotional address to the vigil on Sunday, Farah spoke about how painful the inquest has been, but said: “It was something that was right. The whole process was right. Some things work.” That really struck me. It seems such faint comfort that one single process should work, when so many systems in this case - and countless others - miserably failed.

I have been thinking a lot about the impact of failing systems over the last couple of weeks, as the general election approaches and the country takes stock of what 14 years of disastrous Conservative rule have done to Britain. On Sunday I published a Guardian comment piece about catastrophic issues in the criminal justice system, which multiple agencies and experts warn is literally on the verge of collapse. In and of themselves, the stats are shocking:

On average, it now takes nearly two years for a criminal case heard in crown court to go from offence to verdict. This creates a fundamental problem with access to justice, as criminal cases are more likely to collapse as victims of crimes – desperate to move on with their lives – withdraw from legal proceedings. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Delays in the court system mean there is now the highest number of prisoners on remand for 50 years in England and Wales, while overcrowded prisons – caused in part by people spending months on remand – further delay the courts.

It is no surprise that the criminal justice system has reached this point. Successive government policies have seen UK prisoner numbers more than double over the past 40 years – from about 41,000 in the early 1990s to 88,000 today. This long-term trend has been turbocharged since the election of the Conservatives in 2010, the party simultaneously championing longer sentences while slashing budgets for prisons, legal aid and courts. Since 2008, the number of adults sentenced to more than 10 years in prison has trebled, while the Ministry of Justice – responsible for prisons and courts – saw unprecedented cuts: 43% of all courts in England and Wales have closed.

Prisons, courts and the probation service are all at breaking point, beset variously by staff shortages, lack of expertise after botched reforms, underfunding and high demand. In this context it is little surprise that grave errors were made in McSweeney’s case. On Sunday, Clare Waxman, the victim’s commissioner, addressed the crowd and summed it up succinctly: “Every agency failed: police, probation and prisons. These failings led to Zara’s death. Her death was preventable.” This is the strongest case for change I have ever heard.

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Reading/listening

• This Guardian essay about the absolute mess of university finances is illuminating and perceptive.

• I’ve been enjoying Fur and Loathing, a podcast investigating a 2014 chlorine gas attack on a furry convention.

• Last week I revisited this remarkable 2015 Propublica story about a rape investigation, and it is just as good as I remembered - thoroughly reported, sensitively told and gripping. (It’s also been adapted into a Netflix miniseries).

Thanks so much for reading. As always, if you found this post interesting or useful, do share it online or forward to someone else who might like it. And if you are in the UK, get out and vote today! I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

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Earlier this month, an old photo popped up on my phone, reminding me that it’s been two years since I published a Guardian Long Read story headlined “Seven stowaways and a hijacked oil tanker: the strange case of the Nave Andromeda”. This was an investigation into the alleged hijacking of an oil tanker off the coast of the Isle of Wight in October 2020. After the ship’s captain called in a threat to the coastguard, the British state reacted with full force, sending out the military, who secured the ship against the supposed threat in a nine-minute operation. Seven terrified Nigerian stowaways - the alleged hijackers - were arrested. Top politicians gave inflammatory interviews about the threats at our borders. But within a few months, all charges against the seven stowaways were dropped.

The story mostly dropped out of the news after that, but I was interested in what had actually happened on the ship, and how something that seemed so extreme had faded from view. I spent months trying to track down people who were on board the ship - both stowaways and members of the crew. What I found was a much less dramatic, sadder story, about desperation and how western states try to evade responsibility for migration. The reporting took months - with a long pause in the middle for maternity leave - and it ended up being the first thing I published after my daughter was born.

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I have been really busy with other writing recently and haven’t had time to compose a good Substack post, so I thought I’d share an excerpt from an interview I did about the stowaways story. This was for Nieman Storyboard, part of their regular series of story annotations, which offer “deep dives into story work through annotations of the text by the journalists involved”. They’re such a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain - I loved this annotation by Rachel Aviv explaining how she produced her New Yorker story on America’s troubled teen industy.

I annotated my stowaways story with details about how I went about the reporting and how I chose to present the information. I also did a short interview with Chip Scanlan (who, by the way, has a great newsletter about writing, which you can find here), about this piece and my work more generally.

Here’s the interview, and you can find the rest - and the full annotation - over at the Nieman Storyboard .

How does the story fit into your reporting portfolio?
Over the years I’ve taken this approach on a wide range of subjects, returning to a story that hit the headlines in an inflammatory or hysterical way, then speaking to as many people on the ground as possible to build up a sense of what really happened. These include a 2017 report on the Trojan Horse scandal in Birmingham schools (which has since been the subject of a “Serial” podcast), which took 18 months to report; a 2018 look at the UK government’s attempt to investigate British soldiers over alleged war crimes in Iraq; and a 2020 investigation into the Gatwick drone. The way that this alleged hijacking had been portrayed as a terrifying threat to British shores fit in with the increasingly hysterical way that migration and particularly asylum seekers are portrayed in the media and by politicians, so I was interested in going back and reporting it in a more considered way.

Could you describe your writing process?
When I write for the Guardian Long Read, I typically gather a lot of material, and then when I think I’m mostly done with the reporting, I put together a detailed bullet-point plan. This is usually set out in five sections, and I bullet point in detail what will be included in each. I always start this process thinking I don’t have enough material and then end up writing a plan of 3000 words for a story that’s only meant to be 5000 words. Then I send this to my editor to look over and give feedback on, and I use this as the basis for writing the piece. In some ways, this is the stage of writing that I find most difficult, when you have a vast mass of material and you’re faced with a series of decisions about how best to order it and make it hang together.

A story like this has a clear timeline, so that made it slightly easier to structure. I don’t always end up sticking exactly to my plan when I sit down to write, but in this case I mostly did, except for the fact that when I wrote the plan I had yet to speak to Michael, and he ended up featuring very heavily.

Once I actually start writing, I work more instinctively. It’s been quite interesting for me to reflect on these questions about why I made particular structural or word choices, because I often don’t think too much while I’m doing it. I tend to write, fairly quickly, a very rough draft — which I call “draft zero” — with the aim of simply getting all the words down on a page in roughly the right order, without worrying about making it good. This draft zero is usually way too long and very messy. Then I spend some time going through that, tightening it up, moving things around and cutting words out, until it’s formed into an acceptable first draft.

How long did it take you to report, write and fact-check this piece story?
In all it was about 16 months, but with a gap of several months in the middle while I was on maternity leave. In terms of the reporting itself, the first stage was to see if I’d be able to find anyone at all who had been on board the ship. My editor said we needed to speak to an absolute minimum of three people to make the story viable, so I had something concrete to aim for. This was not an easy task as, other than the captain, the names of the crew were not in the public domain. At that stage, I didn’t even know their nationalities. And only two of the seven stowaways had been named in the press. So the first stage of identifying who I was looking for and then trying to track them down took quite a bit of time. I’d almost, but not quite, completed the reporting as my due date approached. The crucial thing that was missing was an interview with a second stowaway; at that stage I had only spoken to John. I took some time off work, but early in the new year I returned to the story, and managed to find Michael on Facebook. I met him in the spring. I also traveled to Manchester to interview John in person, as previously we’d spoken only on the phone. I completed a few other missing interviews, and wrote the piece up soon afterwards.

Reading/listening

• I was genuinely shocked by this Washington Post story about an Emmy-winning documentary which showed the faces of Afghans working with the US military, despite warnings this could pose a serious threat to their lives. One of them is now dead, in an apparent Taliban revenge killing. (The story is paywalled but an archived version is here.)

• Excellent, clear reporting on the problems with the Troubles Act, by my former colleague Daniel Trilling in the London Review of Books.

• This Esquire piece about why debut novels are struggling to breakthrough is bleak but fascinating.

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Thanks so much for reading this far. As always, if this is interesting or useful to you, please forward it on or share it! I’ll be back in a few weeks, when I hope to have a bit more time to write something new. Until then.

I spent much of last week frenetically discussing the New Yorker’s massive reported feature on Lucy Letby via WhatsApp and DMs. I didn’t do this publically, and won’t link to the piece or go into too much detail about it. This is because doing so risks violating contempt of court laws, given that Letby is subject to ongoing court proceedings. These laws prohibit the publication of anything that might potentially prejudice a court case and prevent a free trial. The legal test is whether a particular piece of media creates “a substantial risk of serious prejudice”. (Archie Bland wrote a very well-argued Guardian piece about how these laws are outdated, to say the least, in the era of the internet: between social media, access to international news, and a readily available news archive, jurors can read whatever they want).

In brief, using court documents and transcripts, the New Yorker journalist Rachel Aviv questioned the soundness of Letby’s conviction. This was totally at odds with pretty much all the reporting of the case in the UK’s own media, where most reporting on the verdict (in August she was found guilty of murdering, and attempting to murder babies on a neonatal ward) took her guilt as fact. This was a huge story in the UK and I think it is interesting that an American magazine covered it from a completely different angle to the British press. Sometimes there is a real groupthink in any national media - I am including myself in this - and it takes an outsider to make a different argument. But something else that struck me is that there’s a strong culture in US journalism of probing potential miscarriages of justice. In the UK, there’s a much stronger tendency to accept court judgments as fact.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this might be. Some of it, I think, is related to contempt of court laws. These kick in as soon as legal proceedings do, and given how dysfunctional and beset by delays the justice system is after 14 years of austerity, this means a long period in which reporting is prohibited. As Bland writes:

“it now takes an average of more than 300 days from the time of charge to the completion of a case, and if an arrest is publicly known the contempt clock starts even earlier.”

Publications and individual reporters and editors can face serious fines or even jail time for violating the rules. Plus, no-one wants to prevent a fair trial or delay a court hearing by publishing something prejudicial. Regardless, the end result is an extended periods in which reporting is impossible, and these periods get even longer if there is any kind of re-trial - as in the Letby case - or appeal.

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But I think another significant limiting factor is the logistics. I don’t think most people understand quite how difficult it is to report on court cases in the UK after the event. My small forays into court reporting have always left me feeling like I must be missing something. The UK operates on a principle of open justice, which means that anyone can, in theory, attend a trial - not just the press but the public, too. This sounds straightforward but in practice it’s not that easy to even find out when a case is going to be heard. Listings are literally stuck on a piece of paper on a billboard in the relevant court on the morning of, or you can phone the court the day before to check the time of the session. Being able to do this requires knowing which court to call and roughly when it’s going to happen, neither of which are a given.

As a journalist, if you’re in the courtroom, you can report freely on what’s said in the courtroom - by barristers, witnesses, defendants, and so on - unless the judge imposes specific reporting restrictions. You will, most likely, also have acccess to a bundle of evidence and/or documents that will be passed around in the press gallery. You can make notes and report on these. You’ll hear the defence and prosecution make their opening and closing statements - sometimes print-outs of these statements are even handed out to the press gallery, or emailed round attendant journalists afterwards so they can quote accurately. This is all great - if you’re there.

The difficulty comes if you want to revisit a trial that you did not attend, as Aviv did in her New Yorker story: she wrote that her reporting “drew on more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts”. This might not jump out to most readers, but my first thought was: “how much did that COST?” In the US, journalists often use court transcripts to re-examine cases - they tend to be fairly readily accessible for free. In the UK, the situation is different. Court cases in the UK are usually recorded but not transcribed. So if you want a transcript, you have to pay for it to be transcribed by one of the court’s approved transcription agencies. I once looked into this, and found that it was £180 per hour plus VAT. Bearing in mind that most court cases sit for 4-6 hours a day and a case might run for weeks (the one I was looking into sat for four weeks; Letby’s for six months) you are quickly racking up costs of thousands or tens of thousands. When I found this out I thought I must have made a mistake, but I checked with various people and this is actually how it works. The prohibitive costs ares also a massive problem for people in prison who want to appeal convictions.

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There’s no clear system for getting any of things you would have had free access to if you were sitting in the court room - bundles of evidence used in court, victim impact statements, prosecution and defence closing statements, the judge’s sentencing remarks. You literally can’t get them unless you manage to track down one of the lawyers involved and they decide to share it with you. (And this is hard to do, unless you already have some kind of connection with the legal teams, or unless they really want coverage. I’ve tried to do it several times with limited success).

Most papers have court reporters whose job it is to attend the big criminal courts daily and report on what’s going on; they’re in the room every day, often darting between multiple trials and producing on-the-day news coverage. This is invaluable public service work, not least because those people are embedded in the courts and know what’s coming up when. But the kind of long-form, in-depth, after-the-event re-examination of a trial that the New Yorker piece did is simply really, really difficult to do in this country - not just legally, but logistically.

Reading/listening

• I am probably not the first person to recommend this to you, but the new series of the OG podcast Serial is truly excellent. It’s about Guantanamo - fresh, surprising stories told by insiders - and it’s a great example of what good long-form journalism can do. The fact that so much time has passed since some of the key events means that people are ready to share their stories in a way that might have been impossible before. It’s really enlightening

• This Guardian Long Read story about Amit Shah, Narendra Modi’s right-hand-man, is excellent.

• We hear incessantly about small boat crossings, but this Prospect feature on the criminal prosecution of a teenage migrant who piloted a dinghy that sank in the Channel offers a view of the human impact of harsh immigration policies.

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Thanks so much for reading! As always, if you enjoyed this post, please share with anyone who might be interested, post on social media, hit subscribe, etc - it all helps it grow. Until next time!

Stuart Potts lives in a modest one-bed flat in Greater Manchester. Ever since he moved in, back in 2020, he’s set it up as a makeshift homeless shelter, letting an ever-changing cast of strangers sleep on his sofa and in the caravan he has parked outside. By any measure, this is an unusual thing to do, but Stuart sees it as logical: if you can help, you should. He is always trying to help. A few years back, homeless himself, he squatted in abandoned buildings and set those up as de facto homeless shelters too. For my latest piece for the Guardian Long Read, which came out last week, I profiled Stuart and the extraordinary work he does.

A large part of what made Stuart’s story so compelling to me was Stuart himself. He is doing something worthwhile - letting strangers stay in his house for free and for as long as they need to - that tells us something about the dire state of housing provision in this country. But he’s also funny, straight-talking and slightly off-the-wall. In writing it, I wanted to convey, on a basic level, why he is so interesting to spend time with, so that the reader wants to spend time with him too. Describing what someone looks and sounds like, the kind of stories they tell, can be a lot of fun, especially if someone is as lively as Stuart. (There were reams of our conversations that I regretfully couldn’t include, like a long story about falsifying a drugs test by putting apple juice in a condom.)

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I’ve been thinking about what elevates a straightforward interview piece into a profile. The key thing, I think, is not just time spent with the subject, but an effort to understand and explain what makes someone tick. Discussing the art of the profile a few years ago, New Yorker editor David Remnick talked about the importance of narrative and character, adding that a good profile “may even resemble a short story except that it's all factual”. This might mean offering some analysis, a sense of someone’s motivation and the way they move through the world, their way of being. When I was working on this story, my editor David Wolf sent me some examples of writers doing this well. Here’s one of them - Patrick Radden Keefe writing about Anthony Bourdain in the New Yorker back in 2017:

Bourdain, who is sixty, is imposingly tall—six feet four—and impossibly lean, with a monumental head, a caramel tan, and carefully groomed gray hair. He once described his body as “gristly, tendony,” as if it were an inferior cut of beef, and a recent devotion to Brazilian jujitsu has left his limbs and his torso laced with ropy muscles. With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus. 

Regular readers of this newsletter will know I am huge fan of Radden Keefe and I was interested in his thoughts on profile-writing. I found this interview with him from a couple of years ago in which he talked about writing the Bourdain profile, and the discomfort inherent in the process:

It’s awkward. I remember having a conversation with Anthony Bourdain about this. I spent a year working on the profile, and I said something to him about how if any of us were shown a very close-up photo of our own faces in a harsh light — I don’t mean designed to be unflattering, I just mean in a way that wasn’t airbrushed or tweaked — that would make most of us uncomfortable. In a strange way, if a portrait that I’m writing about somebody doesn’t induce a little bit of discomfort in them, I would almost feel that I hadn’t done my job. It would be weird for me to have somebody come back and say: “Thank God, finally, somebody’s captured my true essence as I see myself in the mirror.” I’m not the ventriloquist for the person I’m writing about. There’s always that little bit of dissonance there.

I recognise this; when you have spent significant time with someone and built a relationship, it can feel strange - intensely personal - writing a description of their physical appearance or the way they talk. It’s hard not to imagine them reading it and hating it. You have a responsibility to the reader, to be as honest and accurate as possible and to make the story as engaging as you can. But you also have a responsibility to the person you’re writing about, to represent them fairly. (I always want someone to recognise themselves in what I write about them, even if they don’t always like every element).

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In Stuart’s case, the thing that I kept coming back to was that he couldn’t really explain why he does this extraordinarily generous thing. He is someone who has a lot to say about the cruelty of the welfare system, Britain’s crumbling social safety net, and financial inequality, often talking in an astonished tone as if he can’t believe the absurdity of it all. But every time I asked why he does what he does, he clammed up. This is how I ended up describing it in the story:

Potts is bombastic and funny, full of righteous outrage and profane humour. But when I asked what made him approach Bolton – a stranger to him, someone with a serious drug addiction – and offer to take him in, he was uncharacteristically lost for words. “I’ve always done stuff like that,” he said, then tailed off. “Love of people I guess.” He can’t explain why he did it, and can’t understand why other people find it strange.

You can read the rest over at the Guardian website - I am really proud of this one and I hope you like it.

Reading/listening

• I finally had time to read this remarkable New Yorker story about life in Al-Hol camp, the detention camp in Syria where 50,000 people from former ISIS territory are imprisoned indefinitely. We usually hear about this camp in relation to foreign ISIS recruits whose western countries don’t want them back, but this explores the less-discussed fact that people who were victimised by ISIS are also trapped in this forever prison. It’s an incredibly vivid and nuanced portrait of a dire situation.

• Loved this Guardian Long Read essay about how the idea of trees communicating with eachother may have accelerated into the popular consciousness quicker than the science justifies. I was especially interested as I wrote a (very different) piece about trees last year, which - among other things - explored why people feel so passionately about them.

• It’s a couple of months old, but I enjoyed this New York magazine piece about the podcaster/influencer/academic Andrew Huberman and how he maintained multiple relationships with different women for years.

My recent work

I had a couple of other pieces out last week too, making me appear much more prolific than I actually am. Here they are:

• For Hyphen, an online magazine, I wrote about the myth of Muslim “no-go zones”, something which resurfaced this week in the reaction to the mayoral elections in the UK.

• Ten years ago, a group of young single mums facing eviction occupied a tower block in East London to protest the housing crisis. I caught up with them to talk about what’s happened since, for the Guardian.

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Thank you so much for reading! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post (or any others) - you can do that in the comments or by replying to this email. And please do share - post on social media, forward to a friend - if you think others might find it interesting. Thanks so much, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

My Spotify Wrapped round-up last year was sobering. Three of my five top artists were, respectively, the voice actors playing Elsa, Anna and Kristoff in Frozen. The app had deemed me such a super-fan that I was played a short thank-you video from the actress who plays Elsa, excitedly thanking me for my support. My top musical genre of the year was “showtunes”. This wasn’t entirely surprising - it was, after all, the year that my 2-year-old daughter discovered Disney, and the year that I discovered how distracting Disney soundtracks are on car journeys. But quite how easily my toddler’s music preferences had defeated my own in the eyes of the algorithm also made me realise that I am listening to a lot less music than I used to.

Until a few years ago, I listened to music while commuting, at the gym, pottering around the house. Now, instead, I spend every spare second listening to podcasts. I am obsessed. I listen to them while I’m cooking and eating lunch, making dinner, popping to the shops, getting ready in the morning, sitting on the tube, having a bath. In short, any moment that might have previously been spent listening to music or - imagine! - in silence, I am now jamming information into my ears. Podcasts are not all the same. I personally can’t stand the genre that can be summed up as “two guys have a chat”. I prefer the six- or eight-part narrative series, which are essentially well-told, deeply reported non-fiction stories (when they’re good). I sometimes branch out into news-based podcasts, especially those that tell one story in each episode, like Tortoise’s Slow Newscast or (a classic) The Daily from the New York Times.

I wonder if something about listening to podcasts feels a bit more intellectually edifying to me than watching YouTube or TV. Or maybe it’s the fact that I can ostensibly do other things at the same time as listening. Either way, I don’t feel guilty about hours of the day going on listening to podcast episodes in the way that I do about wasting time staring at my phone, even though, let’s be honest, it’s probably not much better. Sometimes I listen to podcast series so quickly that I can’t recall a single detail about it a few weeks later.

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One of my closest friends shares this podcast habit and we’re in a constant back and forth about recommendations, often with the slightly frenzied tone that befits our addiction. (“Enjoying this one, but don’t trust me, my standards are so low,” she texted me the other day). Recently, we were both been struggling to find a good new series to listen to. Wondering whether I should sign up to a subscription service to listen to something, I messaged her: "would I actually PAY to not be alone with my thoughts?”

It was a joke (mostly). but I do sometimes wonder whether it’s good for my brain to have such a constant input of words and story. I spend most of my life reading, writing and talking, and I suspect we all probably need some moments without words - for instance, listening to music and letting your mind wander - to synthesise information, process emotion and event, reflect, mull things over, have ideas. At the moment, I am probably in silence only when I am working, showering, or sleeping. All other possible moments of downtime are filled with murder investigations, miscarriages of justice, scams, political intrigue and profound/whimsical [delete as appropriate] human stories.

Back in 2016, as the podcast boom was just getting underway, the podcast (sorry, this is getting meta) Freakonomics did an episode on this exact question. In it, Jack Gallant, a computational and cognitive neuroscientist in California, explains a study in which subjects were put in an MRI and played episodes of The Moth Radio Hour. The scientists found that when listening to audio content, the brain is working much harder than had previously been thought. Gallant explains the most likely reason for this is that podcasts are stories, which are inherently engaging: “You get lost in stories.” It’s not clear if this harder work is a good thing for our brains or not. On the episode, Gallant said of podcasts: “They make your brain hum. Whether that humming is mysterious and delightful kind of depends on whether you wanted your brain to hum or not.”

I think, sometimes, I don’t want my brain to hum. Recently I had a very busy patch of work and although I still habitually put a podcast on while having lunch or walking to collect my daughter from nursery, I started to notice that I couldn’t fully absorb what I was listening to. My mind was wandering and I either had to rewind or just switch it off altogether. I have no intention of giving up the habit, but perhaps occasionally, it isn’t so bad to be alone with my own thoughts.

Reading/listening

• This Guardian Long Read story about County Lines convictions is so, so good. It tells the story of a man who was caught up in drug-dealing as a vulnerable young person and ended up prosecuted for human trafficking. It explores, among other things, the blurred lines between victim and perpetrator.

• I enjoyed this New Yorker piece about one of the original trad-wives, a woman from Cheltenham questioning her legacy. Who knew this movement originated at least partly in the UK!

• This Vittles essay about a Romanian programme to give all school children bread and milk - and how it failed - is a fascinating look at how food culture adapts when political and economic systems change.

• Given the theme of this newsletter, it would be remiss if I didn’t recommend a podcast. This week I have been burning through To Die For, which is the story of a woman who claims to have been a “sex spy” for the Russian secret service. It’s a gripping, sometimes grim, look into a hidden world.

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You might notice that I’ve recently switched on the paid option for this newsletter. I’m not planning to paywall anything for now, but if you do choose to pay, you’ll be supporting my work and helping me produce more of it in a media-environment that is almost hilariously hostile to freelance writers. You’ll also have my eternal gratitude! As always, you can also support in other ways - sharing this newsletter with anyone who might like it, or posting on social media, etc etc. Thanks so much, and I’ll be back in a few weeks.

A few years ago, I went back to my secondary school to take part in the careers fair. It was set up in a kind of speed-dating format, with people of different professions - mostly parents and school alumni like me - sitting at desks around the main hall. Students interested in our particular industry could come and sit down to ask questions one-on-one. I think I was the only journalist there, and although my table was less busy than that of the doctors and research scientists, I did have a steady stream of students asking how they might get into journalism.

Mostly, they asked things like “do I need to study journalism at university to get a job” (answer: no), or “could I still have a career as a writer even though my A-levels are all science subjects” (answer: yes). But one girl took a very different approach. She walked over to my table, sat down, and without saying hello asked: “So, how much creative freedom do you have?” I mumbled something about being a freelance journalist, which means that I get to choose what I work on - I tend to generate my own ideas and, if they’re commissioned, see them through. She nodded thoughtfully and, without missing a beat, asked: “What are you going to do if the ideas run out?”

That was, genuinely, her final question. After I’d answered, she nodded, cheerfully said “thanks!” and moved onto the next desk, leaving me with my existential dread. It’s not an exaggeration to say I still think about this girl all the time. What is she doing now? Was she real or simply my anxieties come to life? This must have been at least five years ago and “what are you going to do if the ideas run out” still echoes around my head every time I find myself with a blank Word document and the entire internet stretching out in front of me, trying to decide what my next project could be about.

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The answer I gave her was that ideas don’t really run out: it’s like training a muscle to start noticing things you read or hear in a different way. As that muscle develops, you start to have a better sense of what the basic building blocks of a good story look like. Before I went freelance back in 2012, I’d been unhappy in a staff job for a while, and felt like I might never have another idea in my life. This wasn’t a great starting point for launching a career contingent on coming up with stories and pitching. But I found that - like anything - once I started, it got easier. (Being excited about work again helped too, as did the terror of suddenly not having a salary).

When you’re in the habit of thinking about ideas, you start filing away interesting tidbits you read or hear somewhere in your brain so that they can spark something later on. I write a lot of this stuff down in lists - sometimes in draft emails to myself, or in the Notes app on my phone. A lot of them are total garbage. But often something as straightforward as a throwaway sentence in a news story that made me think “huh? what’s what about?” has been enough to generate a piece that I loved working on.

Mostly, I think I stand by this answer. I still have moments where I feel like I will never have another creative thought. This is typically when I’m under pressure to come up with an idea speedily (helpful!), or when I’ve been too busy with day-to-day work to actually read the news or talk to people - all these things are so crucial to helping ideas naturally germinate. But I’ve now passed through enough of these periods to know that the ideas usually do start flowing again, especially if you’re reading, talking, and listening. I would love to hear your thoughts on generating ideas. And if you are the girl from the careers’ fair, PLEASE tell me how you are doing.

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Reading/listening

• This New Yorker story about 14 years of Conservative rule is masterfully done, if incredibly depressing. It didn’t necessarily reveal anything I didn’t already know, but seeing it all set out so clearly is utterly damning and enraging.

• The Spectator columnist Taki is pretty openly racist and misogynistic. I didn’t realise he had also been convicted of attempted rape by a Swiss court. This Atlantic story about the trial and the reaction (or lack thereof) in the British media is fascinating.

• Have you noticed everyone on social media talking about being “dysregulated” or needing to “regulate” their nervous system? I enjoyed this piece in the Cut, about this new example of therapyspeak.

Thank you so much for reading - and a special hello to all the new subscribers who have joined since my last post. It’s great to have you here! As always, if you enjoyed reading this, please hit subscribe, share it online, or forward it to a pal who might be interested. This newsletter is in its infancy, and it really helps. Until next time!

“It’s been a brutal year for the media industry” increasingly feels like a statement you could accurately make at any point, in any year. But 2024 has, so far, been brutal. Press Gazette has been tracking journalism job cuts in the UK, US and Canada, and counted almost 1,000 by the end of January - after at least 8,000 in 2023. It’s a bleak enough picture that the New Yorker published a cheerful essay headlined “Is the media ready for an extinction-level event?” I’ve seen numerous journalists online saying that when young people ask for advice about pursuing a career in media, they no longer know if it’s ethical to tell them anything other than “do something else”.

I’m not quite there yet, perhaps because I’ve been freelance since 2012, so I haven’t experienced firsthand multiple rounds of redundancies. (Though, of course, freelancers do experience the shrinking budgets and diminishing number of publications to pitch to). With so many journalists now becoming self-employed - whether by choice or circumstance - I thought I’d share what I’ve learned in (almost) 12 years of being freelance about how to make it work in an unstable industry.

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1. Create a buffer fund.

Work out what you need to cover your basic costs for a month and keep it in a separate account. You will 100% get stuck waiting for payments and it is a huge relief to know you can still pay rent when that happens. If you use it, top it back up when you can. I’ve read advice online saying that you need at least six months in savings or whatever. If you can do that, then great! It wasn’t ever possible for me to save that much, but I do think that having a month’s costs in reserve is the minimum. If you’ve been laid off and become freelance unexpectedly it might take longer to sort this out, but it’s definitely something to work towards to make self-employment sustainable.

2. Pitch a lot, pitch everywhere.

Think widely about places you could write for – international publications, online only, special interest magazines – and research the kinds of pieces they run (style, word lengths, subject matter) and rates. Earlier in my freelance career, I used to make big lists of outlets to approach - a longer wish list and a shorter list of immediate priorities - so it was there if I felt stuck for inspiration.

The depressing thing about this is that so many of the outlets that are going bust are those online publications that offered opportunities for young, untested writers, like Vice. But I’m not totally pessimistic. There are still opportunities, and new online publications springing up all the time (even if they don’t last long). I think the important thing is to avoid relying too heavily on just one outlet, so that you’re not totally screwed if it closes. If you’re starting out, think creatively about ways into getting published in national magazines or newspapers - is there a story you’re particularly well-qualified to tell? Or a specific slot that a magazine runs every week? On a recent episode of the Freelancing for Journalists podcast, Rebecca Liu, a commissioning editor at the Guardian magazine, pointed out that there’ll always be an editor desperate to fill those slots.

3. Develop a thick skin.

It doesn’t mean you’re stupid or have bad ideas if someone says no. Go back to the editor with new ideas, or repurpose the rejected pitch for another mag. I’ve had stories accepted after two or three rejections elsewhere. Everyone has dud ideas sometimes! I loved this Fence piece from a couple of years ago where great writers shared their stupidest pitches.

4. That said - don’t just copy and paste pitches.

Have a look at where you’re pitching to. This doesn’t have to be hugely in depth, just a quick search to see if your story has already been covered, a browse to see if they run reported features/opinion/whatever you’re pitching.

5. Follow up on pitches.

Lots of editors have flooded inboxes so won’t reply immediately or might miss your email, especially if it’s a cold pitch. That doesn’t mean they don’t like it. I usually send a brief follow up email after a week or so. I’m amazed by how many people I speak to are nervous of doing this! When I was an editor, I never found it annoying to get a polite follow up - usually I’d genuinely forgotten to reply.

6. Make it easy for the editor.

When pitching, include a brief sentence or two about who you are and what your work history is, with a link to any published work relevant to the publication or story you’re pitching to. Make it as easy as possible for whoever is reading the email.

7. Try out writing for lots of places.

The longer you’re freelance, the easier it’ll be to work out which places are not worth your time because the rates are too low for the level of work or because they’re so consistently late to pay.

You’ll also get a sense of the balance of work you can manage - so one thing I’ve realised (the hard way) is that I can happily work on lots of projects at once but find it very challenging to be writing more than one longform reported piece concurrently.

8. Make lists all the time.

As you get more busy, it can be difficult to keep on top of contesting demands, deadlines, interviews, and admin. No one else is keeping track of your workload and usually no one is reminding you about what you have to do and when.

9. Look at different income sources.

This is a big one! There’s no shame in not earning all of your money from producing journalism. In fact, as the media industry faces its “extinction-level event”, it’s sensible to have a few strings to your bow, and most freelance writers I know do. My writing and reporting is the most visible part of what I do, but I’ve almost always had some kind of extra income. For years, that was an editing job a couple of days a week at the New Humanist magazine. Now I don’t have a regular gig but I occasionally do copy-writing, proof-reading, editing, speaking. Look into all those things, plus teaching, consultancy, doing reports for think-tanks, etc. These things can all bolster your income and provide some stability in an incredibly unstable industry.

10. Be professional.

This is basic advice, but it’s important. Don’t overpromise what you can deliver. File your copy on time and without loads of typos. If there’s a delay for whatever reason, let the editor know in good time. Be polite. Communicate clearly.

11. Invoice immediately!

Plan in some dedicated time for admin, otherwise you don’t get paid. Remember to factor in the (shitty) fact that most places only pay after publication – so if you’re spending six months on a project, that’s six months before you can even start the process of getting paid. Put money aside for tax.

12. Figure out what you need to focus.

Again, kind of basic, but for me it’s important to get up, have a shower and get dressed as if I was going to work, even if I’m staying home. If you need to get out of the house to focus, work in a library or coffee shop.

13. Find a community.

It can be isolating to suddenly work on your own, so try to offset that. For me, that’s trying to keep my freelance work to office hours so I can socialise at the weekend and in the evenings, and having freelance friends I can talk to and bounce ideas off. There are scores of different freelancing podcasts and online communities if that’s your thing.

14. Enjoy the freedom.

I like being able to go to the gym in the middle of the day, stop working at 3pm if I’ve finished, get up and go for a walk if I’m stuck and come back to it later, and so on. Freelancing is stressful in lots of ways, so allow yourself to enjoy the benefits too.

Reading/listening

• This Guardian Long Read piece about the crackdown on protest, focusing on a series of incredibly punitive court cases in Bristol, is riveting and enraging.

• It’s tough to keep reading harrowing stories from Gaza, but make time for this wrenching Associated Press report on a woman who lost her twin babies who were born after 10 years of trying and fertility treatment.

• Tortoise Media’s new podcast series Who Trolled Amber? is an amazing insight into the disinformation industry.

• In keeping with the theme of this newsletter, I liked this heartfelt Defector piece about how the money produced by art (including in the media) has not disappeared, but is increasingly going to the people at the top and not the artists.

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My recent work

Here’s some stuff I’ve published recently:

• I wrote a short feature for the Observer about lads’ mags, marking 30 years since the launch of Loaded magazine by talking to the women who worked there.

• For GQ, I talked to Ukrainian refugees in Britain, who are uncertain about their future two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

• For the Guardian, I wrote a column about equal pay claims in Birmingham being unfairly blamed for the council’s bankruptcy. (Based on my recent long read on the broader fight for equal pay).

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