I’m a feature writer and editor in south London. My work has appeared in publications like FT Weekend Magazine, Esquire, The Economist, and Port. I’ve reported from places such as China and the US, and interested in using storytelling to break down complex issues, trends, and industries.
Until recently I was the editor of Courier Media, which tells stories at the intersection of modern business and culture across print, email, video, and online, and was responsible for the magazine’s first significant refresh since launch.
For six years I worked at the Financial Times – as commissioning editor, and later as acting deputy editor, of the newspaper’s weekly culture section, Life & Arts. There, I wrote, commissioned and edited features, and launched various new products. Elsewhere, I’ve run journalism workshops at universities. I’ve launched and appeared on podcasts, as well as at events around the UK.
Sometimes I work with organisations and brands, helping them with content strategy, tone of voice, and copywriting (who doesn’t?). In my spare time I play sports. I have a sweet tooth. I like good longform journalism, or magazine writing, or literary non-fiction, or whatever you want to call it.
Scroll down for more information, published extracts, and contact details.
My features and profiles have been published in The Financial Times, Courier Magazine, Port, Esquire, The New Statesman, Huck, Delayed Gratification, The Times, The Independent, Time Out London, Time Out Shanghai, The Economist.
Journalism
Journalism
Selected Clients
Selected Clients
Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Soho House, Facebook, Floom, Biscuit.
Extracts
Extracts
If you’ve been online the past few months, chances are you’ve come across images of meringue swans, pastry peacocks, bras made from oranges, translucent champagne jelly fish with flowers inside, giant butter sculptures, tattooed baby potatoes. The list goes on, but you get the idea. They’re everywhere on social media – outrageous, brilliant, intricate creations made using food, all so perfect it’s never clear whether they’re even edible. Conventional wisdom tells us not to play with our food. Don’t touch it. Don’t move it around. Don’t do anything other than eat it. Yet rules are made to be broken. And, seemingly, we’re breaking them in ever larger numbers.
How playing with your food became art — Courier Magazine
The barmaid places two cocktails on the counter in front of us and declares, “Boys, I made them extra special for you. They’re a fruity floral combination of chartreuse, gin, peach schnapps, cranberry-pineapple punch and a splash of tonic. Is that slutty enough?”
“Damn, yes!” the Fat Jew replies, before sampling the bright pink liquid through a straw. “So. Fucking. Good. Tastes like air freshener!”
Lunch with the FT: Fat Jew — FT Life & Arts
Some of the events are, let’s face it, a little eccentric. Can anyone remember a recent Olympics that passed without a doping scandal? If spectators really want to witness athletes go faster, higher, stronger, Aron D’Souza thinks he has a better solution. He argues that partly because of strict anti-doping rules (which he refers to as the “exploitative practices of the International Olympic Committee”), the Olympics no longer represent the greatest sporting spectacle on the planet, or the epitome of athletic excellence.
His solution is the Enhanced Games: elite sport, plus performance-enhancing drugs. In return for smashing records, million-dollar prizes. The idea is to push the limits of humanity as much as possible, tapping into the wider biohacking movement that’s especially popular with Silicon Valley and tech bros.
Less clear is what it means for athlete safety and sporting integrity. To get a better idea, I went to meet D’Souza at the Enhanced Games offices, based in a private members’ club in west London. On the way, I messaged a friend asking what he thinks about the idea of athletes being encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs in training and competition. “If people want to shorten their lives by jacking themselves up and transforming into freaks, I say more power to them!” he replied. “If someone can throw a javelin 1.2km, sweet, I’ll watch that.”
The outrageous business of greatness — Esquire
There’s a flip side: too much hype can lead to no hype at all. Academic researchers have a term for this – “affective misforecasting” – and use it to describe the gap between the anticipated experience and the actual experience. To that end, keep in mind that creating hype is a delicate balance. No one said any of this would be easy.
Inside the hype business model — Courier Magazine
Everyone loves to hate on book acknowledgements. And although they’ve been around for decades in some form or another at the end of books, the hate has been intensifying. At this turning point, they have an almost universally bad reputation for signalling the moment when writers break out from the style of writing that sustained their work up until that point, when their pared back sentences, restrained and precise, suddenly become filled with adjectives and cliches. Publishers thanked for their patience, editors for their brilliance, loved ones for their unwavering support. You kept me sane. You fiercely believed. It takes a village. So on and so forth.
But I should come clean. I’m an acknowledgements fanboy. And as someone who turns to the thank-yous right away whenever I start a new book, I can attest that they are getting longer. In Lean In (2013), Sheryl Sandberg really lets loose, her acknowledgements running across eight pages and thanking 150 people. A decade later, the cringe has proliferated. Look no further than celebrity books like Prince Harry’s Spare to more literary titles like R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface (both 2023).
When did writers become so melodramatic? Their job is neither debilitating nor essential; often it is exactly what they said they always wished for. Also, it wasn’t always like this, at least not publicly.
In defence of acknowledgements — The Whitney Review
Today pretty much every art form has to run a three-legged race with the sponsors that support its production. After all, big art costs big money. In many respects, of course, it has always been like this.
Without the support of the Medici family of bankers of the 14th and 15th centuries, there is a chance we would not have had the art of Michelangelo, Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci. Alfred Nobel, an arms manufacturer, was also keen to change his reputation following his astonishment at reading his newspaper obituary, headlined “The merchant of death is dead”. (It was actually his brother who had died.) So in 1895 he devoted his fortune to creating prizes for those who confer the “greatest benefit on mankind”.
But it took until the Thatcher decade for Britain’s cultural institutions to fully embrace American-style enterprise culture. Tobacco sponsorship was so prevalent in 1980s Britain that three big London orchestras were supported by cigarette companies, with critics dubbing the London Philharmonic “the du Maurier band”.
Big oil versus big art — FT Weekend Magazine
Venkatesh Rao, a writer and management consultant sometimes referred to as a gonzo economist, recently coined the term ‘domestic cosy’. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, generational insecurity and widening inequality, he explained how escape and retreat were becoming the dominant characteristics of late teenagers and young adults. ‘I’m calling it early,’ he posted on Twitter. ‘Gen Z is gonna be Domestic Cosy. Yeah, you heard it here first.’
The ‘homebody economy’ explained — Courier Magazine
Not so long ago, Liu Dezhi would head to the village square on weekends when he wanted to see a film. In this rural area of Hengdian, nearby to a gritty manufacturing hub and 300km south of Shanghai, itinerant cinema operators would unfurl a canvas screen, plug in some speakers, and screen grainy films in the open air.
“We had to bring our own chairs if we wanted to sit,” says Liu, a 41-year-old factory worker and film buff. “You couldn’t hear the dialogue because of the stray dogs barking at your feet.”
Today, Liu and his friends get their fix at the local state-of-the-art multiplex outfitted with plush seating, 3D screens and popcorn imported from America. When he’s not watching films, Liu stars in them by working as an extra at Hengdian World Studios. Once a barren patch of farmland, Hengdian is now the world’s largest film production studio, and is better known as “the Hollywood of the East”, “China’s Hollywood”, or even more succinctly, “Chinawood”.