Tag
#2010s
10 articles
NXIVM: The Self-Help Company That Was a Coercive Cult
From the outside, NXIVM looked like an ambitious self-improvement business. Founded in the late 1990s near Albany, New York, it sold expensive courses in 'Executive Success Programs' — personal and professional development, communication, overcoming one's limitations — and it attracted an impressive roster of members, including successful professionals, wealthy heiresses to the Seagram fortune, and well-known Hollywood actresses. At its center was Keith Raniere, whom his followers revered as a uniquely brilliant and ethical man, calling him 'Vanguard' and treating his teachings as a path to a better self and a better world. But behind the seminars and the self-help vocabulary, NXIVM was something very different: a coercive, hierarchical group built around total devotion to Raniere, in which members were financially exploited, psychologically manipulated, and bound ever more tightly to his control. And within it, Raniere built a secret inner circle even darker than the rest — a clandestine sorority called DOS, in which women were recruited under false pretenses, made to hand over blackmail 'collateral' to guarantee their obedience, subjected to extreme dieting and sexual coercion, and branded in the skin with a symbol that, unknown to them, incorporated Raniere's own initials. When survivors escaped and spoke out, and journalists exposed the branding, the whole structure collapsed. Raniere was arrested, tried, and convicted of racketeering, forced labor, and sex trafficking, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. This is the story of how a company that promised self-improvement became an instrument of exploitation, and of the women whose courage brought it down.
Deepwater Horizon: The Largest Marine Oil Spill in History
On the night of 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a massive offshore drilling rig working for the oil company BP in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, was finishing an exploratory well when a surge of high-pressure gas blasted up from the seabed, engulfing the rig in fire. Eleven workers were killed in the explosion and the inferno that followed; the rig burned for a day and a half and then sank, and the well a mile below on the ocean floor began to hemorrhage oil into the sea. The safety device meant to seal the well in just such an emergency — the blowout preventer — failed to work, and for eighty-seven days the broken well gushed crude oil into the Gulf as the world watched a live video feed of the plume billowing from the seabed and a succession of attempts to stop it failed. By the time the well was finally capped, an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released, making it the largest marine oil spill in history. The slick spread across the Gulf and fouled the coastlines of five states, killing birds, sea turtles, dolphins, and fish, devastating the fishing and tourism economies of the Gulf Coast, and inflicting ecological damage that would persist for years. The disaster was not, the investigations concluded, a freak accident or an act of nature, but the preventable result of a cascade of failures and cost-cutting decisions by BP and its contractors — a catastrophe born of choices that put schedule and expense ahead of safety. This is the story of the blowout, the spill, and the reckoning that followed.
uBiome and the Gut-Test Startup That Billed Its Way to a Billion
uBiome arrived with one of the most appealing pitches of the health-technology boom: that by sequencing the trillions of microbes living in your gut — your microbiome — it could unlock insights into your health, from digestion to mood to disease, and put the power of cutting-edge genomics into the hands of ordinary consumers. Founded in San Francisco in 2012, it rode a genuine wave of scientific excitement about the microbiome, raised tens of millions of dollars from prominent venture capitalists, was hailed as a rising star of the gut-health revolution, and reached a valuation approaching a billion dollars. But beneath the science-forward image was a business model that, federal prosecutors would allege, was substantially a fraud — not in the technology so much as in the billing. To turn its consumer curiosity-kit into real revenue, uBiome had pushed its tests into the medical system and billed health insurers aggressively and improperly for them: ordering tests that were not medically necessary, billing for the same samples more than once, and using doctors who were not genuinely independent to authorise the orders. The company's revenue, the case suggested, came less from a breakthrough in health than from a scheme to extract money from insurers. In April 2019 the FBI raided uBiome's offices; the founders were placed on leave and then departed; the company filed for bankruptcy within months; and the two co-founders were ultimately charged with fraud. This article tells the story of uBiome — a quieter, more technical cautionary tale than its famous cousins, but in some ways a more revealing one, because its fraud was hidden not in a fake machine or a missing billion but in the mundane, lucrative mechanics of medical billing.
WeWork and the $47 Billion Office Company That Wasn't a Tech Company
Adam Neumann walked barefoot through New York, flew on a private jet stocked with tequila and marijuana, and told people he intended to become the world's first trillionaire, to live forever, to solve the problem of homelessness, and to 'elevate the world's consciousness.' His company, WeWork, was — when you stripped away the mysticism — a business that signed long-term leases on office buildings, fitted them out with exposed brick, free beer, and communal sofas, and rented the space back to startups and freelancers on short-term, flexible terms. It was, in plain terms, a commercial real-estate company. But Neumann did not sell it as one. He sold WeWork as a technology company, a community, a movement, a 'physical social network' that would transform how people worked and lived; and Silicon Valley, awash in cheap money and hungry for the next world-changing platform, believed him. Backed above all by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, WeWork reached a private valuation of about $47 billion by early 2019, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world. Then, in the late summer of 2019, the company filed the paperwork to go public — and the spell broke. Investors and journalists read the prospectus and found enormous losses, an unsustainable business model, bizarre self-dealing by the founder, and governance so lopsided it bordered on absurd. In about six weeks, WeWork's valuation cratered from $47 billion toward single-digit billions, the public offering was abandoned, and Neumann was pushed out. Unlike some of its fellow cautionary tales, WeWork was not a criminal fraud — no one went to prison. It was something subtler and, in its way, more revealing: a legal, dazzling demonstration of how cheap money and a magnetic founder can inflate a fairly ordinary business into a fantasy, and how fast the fantasy can pop. This is the story of how that happened.
Theranos and the Drop of Blood That Wasn't There
Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to build a company around an idea that sounded like the future: a small machine that could run a comprehensive battery of medical tests — hundreds of them — from a single drop of blood drawn painlessly from a finger-prick, cheaply and instantly, in any pharmacy or home. She called the company Theranos, dressed in a black turtleneck in conscious imitation of Steve Jobs, and spoke in a deep voice about democratising health care and saving lives. Silicon Valley believed her. So did some of the most powerful men in America, who joined her board: former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary James Mattis, and others. So did the pharmacy giant Walgreens, which put Theranos blood-testing centres in its stores. By 2014 the company was valued at around nine billion dollars and Holmes, on paper, was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, hailed on magazine covers as the next Jobs. There was only one problem, and it was the whole problem: the machine did not work. It could not do what she claimed, it never had, and inside the company the tests on real patients were secretly being run, badly, on ordinary commercial analysers — producing results so unreliable that people received dangerously wrong information about their own blood. Theranos was not a brilliant idea that failed; it was, a court would eventually find, a fraud. This article tells the story of how a company built on a drop of blood that wasn't there fooled so many for so long, who finally exposed it, and what it revealed about the culture that made it possible.
The 22 July Attacks and How Norway Refused to Answer Hatred with Hatred
On the afternoon of 22 July 2011, a car bomb tore through the government quarter in the centre of Oslo, killing eight people and wounding many more. As the capital reeled, believing the worst was over, the same man drove to a lake northwest of the city and took a ferry to the small island of Utøya, where the youth wing of Norway's Labour Party was holding its annual summer camp — hundreds of teenagers and young adults gathered to talk about politics, friendship, and the future. Dressed as a police officer, he spent more than an hour hunting and killing them. By the time he surrendered, 69 people on the island were dead, most of them between fourteen and nineteen years old, and the day's total had reached 77 — the worst atrocity on Norwegian soil since the Second World War. The perpetrator was a Norwegian far-right extremist who had planned the attacks for years and who had hoped to ignite a wider war against multiculturalism and the political left. What he provoked instead was something he had not anticipated: a nation that, in its grief, chose deliberately not to become what he wanted it to be. Norway did not respond with mass repression, a security crackdown, or a turn toward the politics of hatred. It responded with rose marches and a sea of flowers, with a prime minister who pledged 'more democracy, more openness,' and with a quiet, collective insistence that an attack on the country's youth and its open society would be answered by more openness, not less. This article tells the story of that day, of the young people who were lost, of the country's extraordinary response, and of the reckoning that followed — while refusing, deliberately, to give the killer or his ideology the attention he craved.
The Macchiarini Scandal and the Surgeon Who Sold a Miracle
Paolo Macchiarini arrived at Sweden's Karolinska Institute in 2010 trailing the aura of a medical pioneer — a charismatic thoracic surgeon who claimed to be doing the seemingly impossible: building new windpipes for patients whose own were failing, by seeding a scaffold with the patient's own stem cells so the body would not reject it. The most audacious version used a synthetic trachea, a tube of plastic, soaked in a bath of stem cells and implanted where a human windpipe should be. It was presented as the dawn of regenerative medicine, published in the world's most prestigious journals, and celebrated by the Karolinska Institute — the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine — as a triumph that might one day grow organs to order. The reality was a catastrophe. The synthetic tracheas did not become living tissue; they degraded, collapsed, and festered inside the patients, who suffered terribly. Of the handful of people who received Macchiarini's plastic windpipes, almost all died. When four senior doctors at Karolinska examined the cases and concluded that he had endangered patients and misrepresented his results, the institute's leadership did not stop him — it cleared him, and turned its machinery against the whistleblowers who had spoken up. It took an American magazine's exposé of Macchiarini's astonishing private life, and a Swedish television documentary, to finally break the story open in 2016. The unravelling cost the careers of university and hospital leaders, produced a landmark reckoning over research fraud, and ended, in 2023, with Macchiarini convicted of bodily harm. This is the story of how a celebrated institution came to protect a man who was killing his patients, and of the colleagues who paid for telling the truth.
The Russian Doping Conspiracy and the Hole in the Laboratory Wall
On the nights of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, in a building that was supposed to be one of the most secure anti-doping laboratories in the world, a quiet operation was running on the other side of a wall. In a storage room next to the official lab, an officer of Russia's federal security service, the FSB, sat with a stock of clean urine — frozen months earlier, when the country's top athletes were still drug-free — and a technique for opening the supposedly tamper-proof sample bottles that were meant to make cheating impossible. As protected athletes competed and produced their mandatory samples, those bottles were passed, in the dark, through a hand-sized hole drilled in the wall between the two rooms; the dirty urine inside was poured out, the clean urine poured in, the bottles resealed, and the results recorded as negative. Russia topped the medal table at its own Games. Two years later, the chemist who had directed the whole scheme — Grigory Rodchenkov, the head of the laboratory — was living under protection in the United States, telling the New York Times and a documentary filmmaker exactly how it had been done. What followed was the most thoroughly documented state-sponsored sports fraud in history: a WADA investigation that implicated more than a thousand athletes across dozens of sports, forensic proof of tampered bottles, and the exclusion of Russia, under its own flag, from the next several Olympic Games. This article sets out how the system worked, how it was exposed, and why — despite all of it — the reckoning was so much smaller than the crime.
The Xinjiang Camps and the Surveillance State Built Around a People
Beginning around 2017, in the far-western Chinese region of Xinjiang, people started to disappear. A relative would stop answering the phone; a neighbour's house would go quiet; a son studying abroad would learn that his parents had been taken to a 'school.' At first the Chinese government denied that anything unusual was happening. Then, as satellite images of newly built compounds ringed with watchtowers and razor wire became impossible to wave away, the story changed: these were 'vocational education and training centres,' Beijing said, voluntary institutions to lift Uyghurs out of poverty and inoculate them against the 'virus' of religious extremism. By the most cited estimates, somewhere on the order of a million people — Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims — passed through this system of camps, the largest detention of an ethnic or religious minority since the Second World War. Around it, the state built something without precedent in its reach: a surveillance apparatus that collected the DNA, iris scans, and voice prints of an entire population, tracked their phones and faces through thousands of checkpoints, and fed it all into a policing app that flagged ordinary acts — praying, growing a beard, owning a second knife, having too many children — as signs of potential terrorism. This is not, in the usual sense of this archive, a mystery. The internment system, the surveillance, and the coercion are documented in China's own leaked records, in commercial satellite imagery, and in the sworn testimony of people who survived it. What remains genuinely contested is the legal name for it — whether it amounts to genocide, as several governments and an unofficial tribunal have found, or to crimes against humanity, as the United Nations concluded — and the exact scale, which Beijing has worked to keep unknowable. This article sets out what is established, what is disputed, and how we came to know any of it.
Fukushima and the Disaster That Was Foreseen
At 14:46 on the afternoon of Friday, March 11, 2011, the seabed ruptured off the Pacific coast of northern Japan in a magnitude 9.0 earthquake — the most powerful ever recorded in the country — and some fifty minutes later a tsunami reaching fourteen metres and more came over the sea wall at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The waves flooded the basements where the emergency generators stood, the plant lost all electrical power, and the cooling systems for three operating reactors went dark. Over the following four days the cores of units 1, 2, and 3 melted, hydrogen explosions tore the roofs off reactor buildings on March 12, 14, and 15, and radioactive material spread across the surrounding prefecture and out to sea. The accident was rated, with Chernobyl, at the maximum level of the international scale — Level 7. More than 150,000 people were evacuated from their homes, some of them never to return. And yet the central fact of Fukushima is not the wave. It is that the wave had been foreseen: that TEPCO's own engineers had calculated, three years earlier, that a tsunami of 15.7 metres was possible at the site, and that the company had deferred, doubted, and shelved the finding rather than act on it. When the National Diet of Japan convened the first independent investigation commission in the country's constitutional history, its chairman, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, wrote that what happened at Fukushima 'was a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.' This article examines the four days the cores melted, the warning that was filed away, the word the operator would not say for two months, and the strange arithmetic of accountability that followed: three executives acquitted in a criminal court, and four ordered in a civil one to pay their old company thirteen trillion yen.
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