Longreads

The quest for the perfect dairy cow—starting with Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, a bull who has 50,000 markers on his genome that make him the best sire at the moment:

"While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that's no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring's milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters' productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters' size and udder quality, trump Planet's impressive production stats.

"One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk."

An artist recreates Gettysburg with a lifelike cyclorama—and the painting changes how many people viewed the battle:

"'No person should die without seeing this cyclorama,' declared a Boston man in 1885. 'It's a duty they owe to their country.' Paul Philippoteaux's lifelike depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg was much more than a painting. It re-created the battlefield with such painstaking fidelity, and created an illusion so enveloping, that many visitors felt as if they were actually there.

"For all its verisimilitude, though, the painting failed to capture the deeper truths of the Civil War. It showed the two armies in lavish detail, but not the clash of ideals that impelled them onto the battlefield. Its stunning rendition of a battle utterly divorced from context appealed to a nation as eager to remember the valor of those who fought as it was to forget the purpose of their fight. Its version of the conflict proved so alluring, in fact, that it changed the way America remembered the Civil War."

[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom:

"The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter.

"'Sure you’re in the right place?,' I asked. 'This ain’t no nail salon.'

"'Is Nate here?'

"'Yeah,' I said, 'what’s up?'

"'Marion,' she said, reaching her hand over the counter. I took it and shook. 'You came highly recommended by my niece, Janice. You tattooed a rose on her hip.'

"She looked at me like she expected me to remember. Shit, if I could remember every rose I tattooed on some girl’s hip, I’d be in the Guinness World Records for the best fuckin’ memory."

Alvan Sanborn on New York at the turn of the 20th century:

"After he so far recovers from the shock of his initial disenchantment, however, as to be able to take note of details, he finds that there is some balm in Gilead, after all. At the end of a month he begins to catch the spirit of New York; and at the end of six months he has come completely under its spell, and loves it, as Montaigne loved the Paris of his day, "with all its moles and warts." The radiant white city by the Seine still appears to him at intervals, like the memory of a favorite picture or poem; but it has lost the power to disquiet him with desire. Paris is no longer a perpetual obsession,—the absolute norm by which he judges everything he sees. Indeed, it has passed so far out of his life that he is in danger of being as over-lenient in his judgments as he was at the outset over-severe.

"The truth is that New York is in the throes of creation. With infinite travail it is taking on a body adequate to its needs,—a feat Paris long ago accomplished. The operation necessarily involves disagreeable surprises, and the immediate result, viewed in its entirety, is, it must be confessed, much more grotesque than impressive. An orchestral performance in which each and every performer played a different tune could hardly be less prepossessing."

[Fiction] I WAS IN THE middle of eating some bib-guk-gui-tang Korean shit that Hog was making me try when a woman came in the front door. She just stood there looking at us like she might turn around and bolt, and when the door shut behind her, she jumped forward and looked back at it as though someone had just spanked her ass. I could tell she was a tattoo virgin, all jittery and confused-looking. I glanced at Hog, betting, “Rosary beads. Ankle.” He grinned, his mouth full of noodle slop. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand him. Anyway, he’d be wrong. Everyone was coming in wanting rosary beads these days.

Ramsay Traquair examines "the Canadian type" in 1923:

"Nationality—and character too—is created by opposition. Canada's nationality was created by the United States and is still kept alive by them. Her independence of Great Britain has been assured for years, and she has no doubts on that score; but her independence of the United States is less certain. She has, no doubt, political independence, but has she economic, or social, or cultural independence? The struggle is carried on without ill-will; it is, indeed, often unconscious, particularly from the attacking side. Most Canadians admire much in their neighbor, and are willing to admit that in many essentials of culture she is in advance. But Canadians wish to be themselves; there are few things they dislike so much as being taken for 'Americans.' There is nothing so encouraging as a little struggle, and it is not the least of the gifts of the United States to Canada that she has helped and still helps to produce a national type. Canada, however, at present easily assumes a protective armor against both Englishmen and Americans. She will quite naturally dispense with it as she increases in social and economic independence. But our attitude toward international schemes, such as the St. Lawrence waterway, is deeply influenced by this feeling."

What it's like to be one half of a couple where one partner is HIV positive, and the other is not:

"We go to the mall and spend too much. We go to multiplexes and laugh at bad horror movies. We scrape by, for several months, on turkey sandwiches and canned soup and whatever meals we can eat with my parents. He offers good advice. He listens to me when I talk, which I'm not sure anyone I have ever dated or loved has ever really done. We, at times, have sex that is identical in every position and maneuver and duration as the time we had it before and yet we both, it seems, enjoy it just as much if not more. We have sex without worry."

The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about:

"At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He's a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen.

"That's a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched."

A visit to the Jamesburg Earth Station, an idle satellite communications station located in a remote Californian valley that once helped broadcast the Apollo 11 moon landing:

"And suddenly, there it was, gleaming white against the sky and earth. It cast a long shadow, just like it does on Google Earth. Nothing about the shape or nature of the satellite receiver would surprise anyone who has seen a DirecTV dish. But the scale, the size. It's inhuman. I ran around it and up the metal stairs, looking out at the valley, thinking about the people who'd stood there before, and how they thought they were doing their part for the free world and science and progress. In the photos my fiancee took of me at its base, I was almost too small to see."