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 […]
Tag: longreads
An oral history of Friends: JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., ‘Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.’ I took […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 […]
[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life: It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected […]
Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle: The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, […]
A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy: Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has […]
Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling: While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos […]
Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next: John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed […]
A man attempts to track down his middle school teacher and offer a long-overdue apology: Only by chance was I curious enough about the subject line — ‘Customer Feedback’ — to open the email from a man named Larry Israelson. You published an item involving retired teacher James Atteberry and the CASA program. Mr. Atteberry […]
Coming Monday, May 14th: Bloomberg Businessweek and Longreads present “Behind the Tech Longreads”: A night of storytelling featuring Felix Gillette, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance and editor Josh Tyrangiel. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan, 7 p.m., Free admission RSVP on our Facebook Page
How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered: But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables […]
The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals: Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating […]
How psychedelic drugs are helping terminally ill patients face death: Norbert Litzinger, [Pam] Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still […]
[Fiction] A born-again adolescent takes a joyride with his wandering uncle: My parents and I had been waiting for Uncle Skillet to show up for five hours, wasting an entire Saturday as far as I was concerned, and not just any old Saturday but a glorious early summer one of God’s pure sunshine and chirping […]
Survivors and crew members recount the Costa Concordia crash, in which 32 people lost their lives: The Concordia’s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the […]
A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris: In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, […]
On the unmet medical needs of transgender people: The problem is that in the United States, most physicians don’t exactly know what treatment for the transgender patient entails. For an untrained professional, it’s a challenge to provide care to a patient with a penis who wants a vagina, or to a patient who has been […]
A review of Tom Bissell’s new book of essays, Magic Hours: The best thing about Tom Bissell: He is fun. I think of him as “a wild and crazy guy.” I’m by turns entertained and completely aghast at his antics. He is totally obsessive. He’s watched that appalling movie The Room a bajillion times. I […]
[Fiction] A grandmother’s ruminations on a Southern road trip: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge […]
The complicated business of helping Cuban baseball talent find their way to the U.S., and eventually the Major League: At some point — either before leaving Cuba or postdefection — every player needs a baseball agent. The seedier practitioners of this trade are often called buscónes, or searchers. Sometimes they bully clients into paying. ‘I’ve […]
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