Jenny Kleeman

Jenny Kleeman writes jaw-dropping, page-turning features that deliver the reader incredible insights into micro-cultures, forgotten stories and human dramas that sometimes seem too bizarre to be real.

When she met America's premier pronatalists – a couple aiming to have tons of kids to save the world – she took us into a chilling world born out of the effective altruism movement and beloved by Elon Musk. You can feel her discomfort to see the children ("Torsten" "Octavian" and "Industry Americus") with iPads hung around their necks, and her shock when later, their father slaps one round the face because he misbehaves at a restaurant. The piece had millions of views and huge impact in the US, with multiple news outlets covering the story and calls for social workers to take the children in question into care.

While much of the world's media once delightedly reported the story of a cheerleading mother arrested for creating deepfakes of her daughter's rivals to get them kicked off the team, it was only Jenny who had the foresight and determination to return to the story several years later. In this feature she unpicks the truth from fiction and discovers that, although this woman had been outcast and condemned by society, nothing had been deepfaked after all. It's a terrific story of moral panic in the age of artificial intelligence.

Finally, she deftly dealt with the hubris of top surgeons when she returned to the story of a liver doctor previously struck off for burning his initials into the organ of an unconscious patient. It's a revealing insight into the macho personalities that too often end up in medicine ("I saw the people who were consultants when I was training, and then I guess I became one myself”) as well as an insight into why NHS scandals so often go unreported.