A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed

I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other, cigarettes are fun and delicious. On the one hand, they push cigarettes on children, which is unconscionable. And on the other, I remember how I would gather in the park with other children to collectively venerate a ten-pack of Marlboro Lights, our soft, pink fingers shivering and struggling with the lighter mechanism, our untutored lips puffing ineffectually at the speckled filter, all of us beginning to grow woozy from the acrid smoke filling our virgin lungs as we stood there and thought: this is the life.

Luckily, Smoke Screen sidesteps this question to focus more squarely on corporate espionage within the tobacco industry. The show, by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, is of the longform-article-turned-podcast variety. And while the Bureau are understandably keen on their investigative chops, the podcast wins so convincingly because of a cast of star characters.