The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry

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.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 2, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,431 words)

Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet?

The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page:

“Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a contributor to her new sports-comedy site. Within 15 minutes, she had another idea: ‘Here’s something I just thought of: Instead of becoming a contributor, would you like to join our team as an editor/creator for the memes section?’

“With this proposal, he could make even more money. She spelled out specifics for him: She told him that her ‘initial goal’ for the site would be 2.5 million pageviews per month, which would bring him $38,400 a year. By the fall, they’d have 7.5 million pageviews per month and he’d be making $102,000 per year. Big money for a 19-year-old college student.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: May 1, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,445 words)

Uncatchable

Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found:

“On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something about it. ‘They asked me,’ says Wright, ‘if I was interested.’

“‘You guys kidding me?’ said Wright.

“‘No,’ they said.

“‘Yeah,’ said Wright. ‘I’m interested.’ They talked about it. ‘I ain’t going nowhere walking,’ Wright added.

“‘We’re going to get transportation,’ they said. Jimmy mentioned that he was a skilled mechanic, expert at hot-wiring cars.

“Wright figured that if he did get out, he’d need cash to restart his life. There are always wheeler-dealers in prison who have money, and Wright knew one of them, a man named George Brown, who was serving three to five years for armed robbery. Brown promptly joined the team. They agreed that they were going all the way: Either they’d escape or they’d be shot. Freedom or death.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 1, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,507 words)

Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

The complicated relationship between founders of a startup. Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein lead Turntable.fm, but with very different viewpoints on how to succeed:

“Then traffic started falling. By autumn, it dwindled to less than half its peak, and the very same tech watchers started wondering whether it was all over. Goldstein says he can hear the doubt in the voices of his Silicon Valley friends. ‘I can tell now when people say, “How’s it going?” they mean, “You’re flattening, aren’t you?” ‘

“Chasen and Goldstein agree the music fans are still out there (music site Pandora has 49 million active users, Spotify 17 million). Their disagreement over the answer to the obvious question—how to get them back—has created a rift between them that has influenced both their partnership and the direction of the company. In some ways, it’s a classic split between product and marketing. But their predicament highlights what’s so weird about the social-media business: Nobody understands why certain sites grow, exactly. Yet whether or not Turntable takes off again will determine whether it is worth billions or practically nothing. And with no causal data, all that remains is buzz, conjecture, and gossip—the How’s it going?

Author: Burt Helm
Source: Inc.
Published: Apr 30, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,264 words)

Homecoming

[Fiction] An urban teen moves to Virginia and tries to stay out of trouble:

“When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on the track team at Boys and Girls, a solid B student. A good boy, everyone said. Even as a baby, his mama liked to say, he wasn’t any trouble. He cried so little that she would forget all about him.

“His aunt Tiff was twenty-two and good-hearted, but no one could say that she was good. Ever since Marcus could remember, Tiff was always deciding between boyfriends, and the May when Marcus moved into her apartment was no exception.”

Source: At Length
Published: Nov 1, 2009
Length: 57 minutes (14,448 words)

Machine Politics

How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec:

“That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding the part of the system that he could manipulate into doing what he wanted. Hotz focussed on the ‘hypervisor,’ powerful software that controls what programs run on the machine.

“To reach the hypervisor, he had to get past two chips called the Cell and the Cell Memory. He knew how he was going to scramble them: by connecting a wire to the memory and shooting it with pulses of voltage, just as he had when he hacked his iPhone.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 30, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,890 words)

The Red Flag in the Flowerpot

A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era:

“Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Ben told Barbara.

Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.

“I read it over a few times to make sure. Did Ben really have doubts about the Deep Throat story, as it had been passed down from newsroom to book to film to history?”

Published: Apr 29, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,907 words)

My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller

How young Colton Burpo’s visit to Heaven became a word-of-mouth best seller, and what it means to a writer raised fundamentalist:

“When I was not quite 4 — about the same age as Colton Burpo — my own newly born-again parents sat me down to impart the good news about Jesus, the son of God, who was born in a manger surrounded by sheep and donkeys and ended up being nailed to a cross on a hill and dying there. On the third day, he rose from the grave (you could tell it was he from the nail holes), and he did all of this to pay for my sins. If I accepted him into my heart, I would be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. Otherwise, I would burn eternally with the Devil in hell. So we needed, urgently, to pray.

“‘Right now?’ I said, or something like that. I remember not feeling 100 percent ready to ask this undead man, with his holey extremities, to dwell inside me.”

Published: Apr 28, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,885 words)

Mitt Romney’s Dark Knight

“If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then [Eric] Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.” Meet the former Boston Herald reporter-turned-consigliere to the presidential candidate:

“It was January of 2008, the last time Romney ran for president, and Fehrnstrom was getting in the face of an Associated Press reporter in a Staples store in South Carolina. The reporter, Glen Johnson, had just challenged Romney during a press conference, interrupting him in the middle of a claim that he didn’t have lobbyists working on his campaign—Mitt definitely did—and when the press conference was over, Romney rushed after Johnson to press his case. ‘Listen to my words, all right? Listen to my words,’ Romney sputtered, smiling through gritted teeth. That’s when Fehrnstrom stepped in and cornered Johnson in front of a Post-it notes display. ‘You should act a little bit more professionally instead of being argumentative with the candidate,’ he hissed at Johnson. ‘It’s out of line. You’re out of line.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 25, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,004 words)

The Tabloid Turncoat

On former News of the World editor Colin Myler, who was blamed by Rupert Murdoch for the phone-hacking scandal. He’s now taking on Rupert as editor of the New York Daily News, the tabloid rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post:

“The fun is going to be in competing against a man who first saved his career, then nearly ruined it. When Rupert Murdoch brought Myler to the Post, in late 2001, the move was a step down. For a decade, he’d been editor-in-chief of one British tabloid or another, most recently the Sunday Mirror, playing the Fleet Street game with brio. But then he crossed a line. In April 2001, in the midst of the trial of two soccer players accused of assaulting a Pakistani fan, Myler published an article that suggested racism as a possible motive. The problem was that the judge had prohibited consideration of a racial motive, and in England there are strict laws about honoring such prohibitions—’Journalism 101,’ says one of Myler’s Fleet Street colleagues. The judge in the case immediately called for a retrial, and even though Myler had consulted company lawyers, he was pushed out in disgrace.”

Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,778 words)