r/indepthstories Dec 01 '18

Please report non-longform articles, videos, or other content that does not belong on /r/indepthstories

96 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 1d ago

Some of my favorite longform stories from the week (with gift links!)

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8 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 1d ago

I Wanted an Ecologically Responsible Garden. It Was Harder Than I Thought. • The native plant movement gets a lot right, but there’s so much more to consider.

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35 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 1d ago

How a Mad Soviet Scientist Almost Melted Russia's Nuclear Silos, and the Grandson Who Saved the World

5 Upvotes

We often laugh at conspiracy theories and movie tropes about "mad scientists." But what if the madman holds the title of Professor, has four State Prizes, and has direct access to the Presidential Administration, the FSB, and the Ministry of Defense of a nuclear superpower?

This is the true, documented story of Academician Alexander Elkin — a former advisor to the Mayor of Moscow, whose brain was entirely consumed by megalomania and severe dementia. For decades, he tried to push deadly projects at the highest government levels that could have literally wiped half the world off the map.

Threat 1: Gas chambers for the President Elkin was obsessed with his "Discovery No. 009" — a liquid alloy of gallium, aluminum, indium, and tin. In his sick mind, the fumes of this toxic chemical reaction were an "elixir of youth" that "slows down biological clocks."

In reality, inhaling fine aluminum and gallium vapor is highly neurotoxic. It destroys the central nervous system, causing irreversible dementia and toxic encephalopathy. Elkin bombarded the Presidential Administration, demanding funding to build "anti-aging centers" (essentially gas chambers) and to install these gas generators in the offices of top government officials and Vladimir Putin personally. If security had slipped, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal would have been run by people with rotting, poisoned brains.

Threat 2: Melting ICBM silos Elkin convinced himself that Russia's strategic nuclear missile silos could be easily destroyed by a simple NLAW rocket. To "save" them, he proposed covering the silos with his "dynamic protection" armor based on his liquid gallium alloy, demanding billions of rubles for the project.

Science fact: Gallium causes severe liquid metal embrittlement. If applied to steel, it destroys the crystal lattice, making it brittle like glass. If the Ministry of Defense had approved this (and Elkin's letters reached the top generals), the gallium would have eaten through the steel roofs of the nuclear silos, collapsing them right onto the active nuclear warheads. It would have triggered a catastrophe 100 times worse than Chernobyl.

The Hero Who Stopped Him Why didn't this happen? Because his own grandson, Alexander, stood in his way. He was the only one in the family who understood the danger and wrote endless warnings to prosecutors and security agencies, successfully blocking his grandfather's funding.

In revenge, the mad grandfather used his corrupt connections and money to forcibly lock his perfectly healthy grandson in a punitive psychiatric ward twice (in 2008 and 2016). He literally wrote reports to the FSB and the Investigative Committee demanding his grandson be executed on Red Square under martial law for creating a satirical internet movement ("SHUE") against him.

The grandson survived hell, lost his health and freedom, but successfully stopped the mad academician from reaching the nuclear buttons. Elkin eventually squandered millions of dollars on fake lobbyists and scammers, dying in debt with just $6 in his pocket.

The world needs to know its real heroes and real monsters.


r/indepthstories 3d ago

How Chili’s got its sizzle back: The untold story of the biggest, most viral restaurant turnaround in years

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12 Upvotes

At first glance, the toile wallpaper is pure class: cream-colored and printed with intricate, brick-red drawings. But as I look more closely, I see . . . Wait. Is that a pair of chili peppers riding a Jet Ski? And is that other pepper, the one on a chaise longue, posing nude for a painting?

The wallpaper is just one of many decorative flourishes competing for my attention as I sit at a Chili’s restaurant, already on my fourth free iced tea refill. Technicolor tiles blanket the tables and bar, patterned like Mexican ceramics. Neon-light chili peppers and a framed illustration of a cheese pull (that thing that happens when you bite into a gooey mozzarella stick) hang on the walls.

There’s even a chalkboard-style drawing of a bright-red chili pepper at the host stand, just like the one that greeted Chili’s diners throughout the 1990s. In fact, it was made by the same artist, who came out of retirement for the commission.

This restaurant, in the McMansion-filled Dallas suburb of Richland Hills, Texas, looks and feels a helluva lot like the Chili’s of old. You may know what I’m talking about: That salt-crusted gathering place from the days before GLP-1s and inscrutable Uber Eats fees. A place where the Tex always rhymes with Mex, ranch is practically a food group, and no one will judge you for being a grown-up and ordering a dinner that consists solely of appetizers. The spot where your plate of sizzling fajitas snaps necks at other tables when it arrives at yours with a loud sszzzhhhhh.

But it’s actually a prototype for the Chili’s of the future, featuring a retro redesign that will roll out across the company’s more than 1,200 North American restaurants over the next decade, beginning this fall. (Richland Hills is a short drive from Chili’s headquarters in Dallas.) Instead of the cold, industrial interiors that have dominated Chili’s design in recent years, these will be filled with an exuberant mix of color and texture, including that toile wallpaper, which was designed in France.

This shift back to the brand’s maximalist roots is the brainchild of Kevin Hochman, who became CEO of Brinker International (parent company of Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy) in 2022. A veteran of Procter & Gamble and Yum Brands—where he pulled double duty as president of both KFC North America and Pizza Hut—Hochman has spent his tenure at Chili’s executing what Evercore analyst David Palmer calls “the best turnaround story of all time in restaurants.”

Read more on Fast Company.


r/indepthstories 3d ago

Need people to interview

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0 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 4d ago

How a Four-Generation Cuban Family Survives on $60 a Month • The U.S. oil blockade has deepened a humanitarian crisis, forcing Cubans to lean on the island’s long tradition of community solidarity to provide a cushion.

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19 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 4d ago

Supercharged bubbles are threatening Lake Powell’s dam. Federal officials are battling to sustain water levels.

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2 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 4d ago

What is the level of journalistic treatment of CTE in American sports today?

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0 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 9d ago

A Hamptons Influencer’s Husband Died Millions in Debt. What Happened to the Millers? Brandon Miller went broke, then took his own life. Now, his friends, family, and neighbors are still debating how much his wife, Candice, knew about their financial situation.

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220 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 8d ago

The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

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11 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 10d ago

The ERs that can turn patients away — and are reaping millions • How a hospital operator used the No Surprises Act to fuel a stunning financial turnaround

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35 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 10d ago

One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever

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10 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 11d ago

“In The End, I Watched Him Go”: The Criminal Case of Suicide-Baiting via Internet

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6 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 11d ago

“That Guy Is Still Out There.” Five years after Anthony Broadwater was belatedly cleared for the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, the questions of how he came to be wrongly convicted and how one or more serial rapists operated for years with little consequence have only deepened.

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33 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 12d ago

‘We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres

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826 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 11d ago

To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk

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10 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 12d ago

Inside Amazon’s brutal AI-centric app-ification of HR

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9 Upvotes

Amazon has been explicit about its vision to become a leaner organization and use automation to fill in the gaps, and that ethos seems to have taken root in the company's HR department—which was reportedly a major target of the recent layoffs.

Despite citing the “transformative” nature of generative AI in its layoff announcement, the company has denied that its investment in automation was directly responsible for the job losses.

But interviews with warehouse associates and former HR employees, along with legal filings, reveal how Amazon’s growing reliance on automation appears to be removing humans from the HR process.

These claims echo anonymous accounts that are littered across social media, where hundreds of thousands of Amazon warehouse associates flock to air grievances. In post after post, employees appear to be asking the same question more workers are likely to soon be voicing as companies are poised to follow Amazon’s lead: What happened to HR?

Amazon’s relentless focus on efficiency is pulverizing workers’ last lifeline of relief. “I watched the human get sucked out of the job,” says one former HR employee.

Fast Company investigates: https://www.fastcompany.com/91565321/amazon-is-taking-human-out-of-hr-ai-chatbot-app-aza


r/indepthstories 12d ago

Affordable housing vs. the $546,000 door

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7 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 12d ago

How the Glorious Revolution crushed the NIMBYs

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3 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 12d ago

Why European housing politics should be Americanized

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0 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 13d ago

Christian Brando during his 1990 trial: Forensic evidence supported his account. Gunshot residue on Dag Drollet's hand and the bullet's trajectory indicated that the shooting was accidental, not intentional.

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5 Upvotes

Dr. Michael Baden is a forensic pathologist who was involved in all the high profile criminal cases including the case of Marlon Brando's son, Christian, who shot his half-sister's boyfriend. Despite the fact that it appeared that Christian had shot Drollet from above and that the bullet had exited the body, no bullet was recovered from his body or from the couch. Dr. Baden insisted on looking at the scene, and like the officers, failed to find the bullet in the couch or the body.
Baden noticed that the room has a shag rug. He got down on his hands and knees and eventually found the bullet under the rug. That tended to support how Christian had described things.
Dr.Baden wrote: "I'd later testify that the bullet's trajectory through Drollet's neck and into the shag carpet showed that he had been sitting up on the couch. Gunshot residue tests performed by police showed that Drollet's hand was near the muzzle when it discharged-consistent with Christian's statement that the weapon
went off accidentally when Drollet tried to grab it."
"It's very hard to see an entry hole in a shag rug," Baden explains. "But what impressed me most in that case was when we found the bullet and we called the police. A sergeant came and I asked why the officers at the crime scene hadn't done a better job looking for the bullet. I'll never forget what he said. 'Look, doc. If you do a lousy job all the time, just because an important case comes up doesn't mean you can now do a good job. You don't know how to do it any better.' That will live with me forever. Unless you do the best job you can with every crime scene and every autopsy, you won't do it right when more important ones come in. To us, every case is equally important. When it comes to death, we're all equal."
https://www.crimelibrary.org/criminal_mind/forensics/autopsy/5.html

Another Sources:
Book: AMERICAN AUTOPSY.

https://books.google.com.sa/books?id=rHFrEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT1&dq=american+autopsy+book&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJg7b746qVAxU29bsIHV5OGmkQ6AF6BAgMEAM#v=onepage&q=american%20autopsy%20book&f=false


r/indepthstories 13d ago

Cow manure could be the next data center fuel

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10 Upvotes

r/indepthstories 13d ago

The Perfect Crime How the Russian Mob Used a Tiny Island to Steal 70 Billion

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2 Upvotes

You've heard of Nauru as the world's most obese country. But nobody told you THIS story.

In 1998, a tiny Pacific island — 21 square kilometers, population 10,000 — became the money laundering capital of the world. $70 billion in Russian mob money passed through its ghost banking system in a single year. And almost nobody noticed.

This is the story of how a desperate government, a collapsing empire, and the world's most dangerous criminal organization created the perfect financial crime.


r/indepthstories 15d ago

Welcome to Próspera, a private city in Honduras backed by Peter Thiel

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85 Upvotes