The Investigator

Some reporters mine data. Carole Cadwalladr mines people.

- Elisabeth Zerofsky

In the imaginations of her detractors, Carole Cadwalladr’s apartment, in North London, should be empty, except maybe for a wall outfitted with corkboard and covered in news clippings about Mark Zuckerberg and Alexander Nix, the CEO of the now-defunct targeted-advertising firm Cambridge Analytica. But Cadwalladr, I was happy to discover, lives in an elevated row house set in a charming brick complex. On the April afternoon I was there, I saw a small balcony brimming with untamed plants, a bright yellow Smeg refrigerator in the kitchen, and a vintage poster advertising Lucky Strike hanging on a wall. Still, there was evidence of the indefatigable reporting life behind her work for The Observer, the Sunday edition of The Guardian: on a table was a copy of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, a new book by a Turkish journalist named Ece Temelkuran.

Cadwalladr is forty-nine and tall, with wispy blond hair, her style a mixture of femininity and rebelliousness; she often wears a black leather jacket over a flowy top. When I entered her home, she offered me tea. Then she begged my pardon; her throat was sore and her voice was nearly gone. She’d delivered a speech the night before at the National Press Awards, where she’d accepted the title of Technology Journalist of the Year. “I do a lot of events,” Cadwalladr said. “This is the only time I’ve ever been jeered.”