Andrew Luck Finally Reveals Why He Walked Away From the NFL

If you made it past the headline, it’s because you care enough to know — and after you read this intimate, searching portrait of an athlete struggling to find clarity, you will. Seth Wickersham spent Gary-Smith-in-the-’90s amounts of time with the now-retired Colts quarterback, and it shows. You don’t need to be a sports fan to appreciate a profile this compelling.

At first, Luck wasn’t in the mood to hear it. He couldn’t hear it. He wasn’t sleeping well, he was in pain, he was fighting with Nicole, the team was halfway across the globe without him, and if he stopped to examine his life, the entire world he had constructed might start to unravel, perhaps revealing it to be fatally flawed all along. “I understood myself best as a quarterback,” Luck says. “I felt no understanding of other parts of myself at all.”

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The Great Canadian Baking Show Is a Pile of Wet Dough

In this essay, Alex Tesar delves into exactly why “The Great British Bake Off” is better than “The Great Canadian Baking Show,” dishing up humorous explanations of how the same program concept reveals some big cultural differences. On your marks, get set, read.

Charming, humble participants of all ages and walks of life are brought together to compete, and unlike in many reality TV shows, there are no villains. Nick is a sixty-year-old bus driver from Wales who loves to bring muffins on his morning route! When he’s not busy collecting stamps or singing in his local choir, Rajit makes biscuits for his two daughters!

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How the 1% Runs an Ironman

While not as forehead-slapping a portrayal of wealth as Evan Osnos’ glorious New Yorker story about the world of ultrayachts, Devin Gordon’s dive into how CEOs do triathlons is a worthy successor. Between the $20,000 bicycles and the $15,000 entry fees of Ironman’s XC (“executive challenge”) tier, you’ll find an entertaining read that’s half arched eyebrow, half grudging respect for how fully these weekend warriors throw themselves into competition — without sacrificing convenience.

In Mont-Tremblant, the hotel nearest the starting line was the Ermitage du Lac, a rustic lodge nestled at the base of the stone footpath that bisects Mont-Tremblant’s candy-colored ski village, just a few hundred yards from the swim start on the shore of Lac Tremblant. There was a more luxurious hotel, the Fairmont, at the crest of the hill, but the Fairmont’s luxuries — spa services, swanky bar, fancy bathroom products — hold little appeal for the kind of people who spend their very limited leisure time competing in an Ironman. You’d have to schlep your gear all the way down that hill at 5 a.m.! That’s inefficient. That’s poor optimization. XC runs the way XCers like their businesses to run. For them, true luxury is everything in its right place, operating like clockwork.

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Unmasking “The Scholar”: The Colorado Woman Who Helped a Global Art Smuggling Operation Flourish for Decades

This is the first piece in a three-part series from The Denver Post about the role of a Colorado scholar and the Denver Art Museum in the illicit antiquities trade. In part one, Sam Tabachnik introduces us to Emma C. Bunker, who was known as a prominent Asian art scholar and a consultant, board member, and volunteer at the museum for six decades. (Bunker died last year at age 90.) Tabachnik weaves a fascinating narrative that paints Bunker not as a well-respected scholar but a fraud and sidekick to Douglas Latchford, the disgraced British businessman at the center of a decades-long global operation that trafficked ancient Khmer sculptures and archaeological treasures out of Cambodia and into museums and private art collections around the world. Bunker was integral to Latchford’s smuggling operation, enabling the falsification of documents and legitimizing his stolen collection through her academic work and publications. Court documents and recreated emails are sprinkled throughout for readers who want to dig deeper. And you will.

They were at once viewed as national heroes — foreigners who brought great interest and much-needed capital to their war-torn country — who also are accused of pillaging and shepherding so many of Cambodia’s national treasures to overseas collections.

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Toothache, Bleeding, Farewell

Ex-Yugoslav writer Miljenko Jergović shares a stark and poignant first-person account of the Siege of Sarajevo, 30 years after what became the longest siege in modern history, lasting 1,425 days.

In the first week of war, an 82mm mortar shell hit our garden and exploded in the crown of a cherry tree. Our façade was riddled with shrapnel, there were shards of broken mirror on the dressing table—seven years of bad luck that don’t seem like much now. But as I listened to the first bursts and blasts at dawn on April 5, I wasn’t yet familiar with the acoustics of my city. And I hadn’t learned to count the whistle, didn’t know that those you heard couldn’t kill you. The whistle of the shell that will kill you is always heard by someone else. The whistle is the sound for the ears of the spared

Over the following days and months, I taught myself the sounds of weapons, their discharge and their projectiles’ impact. Mortar bombs, 60mm, 82mm and 120mm. Howitzer shells, 155mm, tank and cannon rounds. The solitary sniper shot, often from the vintage M-48 rifle. Or a more modern one, procured in the West. The detonation of an 82mm mortar shell down in the city, or on our hill, or on the next one. An explosion close by, followed by another a few dozen meters away, and immediately after, the patter of summer raindrops on the tree crowns in an orchard—the shower of shrapnel. To this day I feel uneasy when summer rain starts

And so what I desperately tried to do in the subsequent months and years was to preserve that Sarajevo of mine, save it from the nocturnal heist that took place just before the dawn on April 5, 1992. In a way, that’s the most intense identity reflex I’ve ever had in my life. It took me a long time, maybe all of these last thirty years, to learn to live as a foreigner, even in my own language, in my own country.

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The Death of Daniel Prude and the Birth of a Thousand Lies

In the spring of 2020, Rochester, New York, had the potential for real police reform, with a promising Black mayor — the first woman ever elected as mayor of the city — and a Black police chief. But the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man in a mental health crisis who died at the hands of Rochester PD officers, drew attention in 2020 to the department’s questionable tactics and unnecessary force and violence. Joe Sexton reconstructs what happened the night Prude died, and the plays made in the months that followed by the mayor, police chief, and all involved to cover their asses. At over 15,000 words, Sexton’s narrative is compulsively readable from start to finish — a must-read on police, politics, and power.

Certainly, Warren’s and Singletary’s race didn’t guarantee a policing revolution in Rochester. There had been Black mayors and police chiefs in cities that had seen scandals — in Baltimore when Freddie Gray died; in Cleveland when young Tamir Rice was shot to death; and the Cleveland department was later found by the U.S. Justice Department to have engaged in years of excessive force.

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Biden Is Still Separating Immigrant Kids from Their Families

It’s still happening: At the U.S. border, children are being taken away from their parents or guardians.

Even though the Trump administration is out, family separation continues under Biden. Has anything even changed? Since the start of the new administration until August 2022, there have been at least 372 instances of children being taken away from their families, like 10-year-old Felipe, who fled Colombia with his parents, Victoria and Anton. The Biden administration is separating families in the same cruel way as Trump officials did during the zero-tolerance policy, while some “architects of family separation” have remained in high-level positions of power in Texas and other states.

While the Biden administration has created a task force focused on reuniting families and a pilot program at a Texas border patrol station to bring adult relatives and children together more quickly, the overall mentality toward U.S. immigration policy hasn’t changed.

One or two days later, on or about May 29—the exact date is unclear—Victoria and Felipe were taken to another room from which they could see, but not speak to, Anton. After some paperwork and an interview, an officer told Victoria that they were taking Felipe to have a snack. 

“They opened the door, took him away, and then closed the door,” Victoria said. She had heard about family separations, but didn’t think the U.S. government was still taking kids away from their parents. 

Victoria sensed something was amiss and began asking officials where her son was. “I don’t know,” immigration officials told her repeatedly. Almost six months later, she hasn’t seen him.

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