Imogen Hale spent eleven years as a science correspondent before concluding that the more interesting question was rarely whether a claim was true, but why particular claims found particular audiences at particular moments. She now covers the material that sits outside the paper's standing beats: contested science, belief systems, movements that organise around an idea rather than an interest.

Her reporting has taken her through wellness economies, longevity research, and the cluster of practices that circulate faster than the evidence for them. She treats these as data about the people adopting them—what a belief's spread reveals about the institutions it is a substitute for.

Colleagues note that she neither debunks nor endorses. 'A claim that spreads without evidence is still a fact about the world,' she has observed, 'just not the fact its believers think it is. My job is to report what is being asserted, where it came from, and what its reach tells you. Adjudicating metaphysics is someone else's beat.'