Da Bears! An Oral History
Twenty-six years ago, Sweetness, Samurai, Iron Mike, the Fridge, and a comic book’s worth of superheroes roared out of Chicago, taking the NFL by storm. By the time the season was over, they had shuffled their way to the Super Bowl. Andrew Santella retraces their glorious season—and finds out why they never built a dynasty.
The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard
When the reverend Ted Haggard was outed four years ago, it was in a ball of biblical hellfire—crystal meth! Gay sex! Unholy massages! Banished from the church he founded, he was forced to wander the Arizona desert selling insurance. Now Pastor Ted returns with his wife by his side, a new church, and a more open theology. Is he chastened? Somewhat. Straight? Hmm. Ready for a second coming? Absolutely.
The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots
With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die
Olympic hero (and 2011 “Biggest Loser” contestant) Rulon Gardner has fallen off trucks, tumbled off tractors, and gotten stuck in a baler. He has been impaled on an arrow, broken his neck, and gashed his knee clean to the bone. He has survived several catastrophic high-speed accidents, endured a frostbitten night in subzero temperatures, and most recently, swam away (barely) from a plane crash in Lake Powell. In between, he pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history and became an American legend. Meet Rulon Gardner, the luckiest man on earth.
Upon This Rock
Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—”If you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off-brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that’s because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please…while praising Jesus Christ. That’s Christian rock.
The Dubai Job
One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel’s vaunted spy agency did things so spectacularly wrong
Out on the Ice
Brian Burke isn’t just a legend of the NHL. He’s a fists-up, knock-your-teeth-out gladiator. But when his hockey-loving son came out of the closet and died soon after, he was thrust into a strange new role: advocate for gays in a macho sports culture. He’s no cheerleader—he looks like he hates every minute of it—but locker-room homophobia may have finally met its match.
Winona Forever
Winona Ryder has this problem, and as problems go it’s pretty solidly in the first-world category, she knows, but it’s a problem, still: She’ll be having a conversation with somebody—an interesting conversation, the kind two regular people have when they discover a mutual admiration for, like, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or something. And then suddenly the person she’s having the conversation with will say something to her that reminds her that (a) she is Winona Ryder, the famous actress, and (b) nearly everyone she meets already has “this whole idea” of who she is, already thinks they know everything there is to know about her, more or less. And inevitably when this happens, she starts thinking about what it is people think they know about her, which is never a good idea, and the conversation never really recovers.
The Jonathan Franzen Award for Jaw-Dropping Literary Genius Goes to… Jonathan Franzen
Say what you will about his cockiness. With the heavy weight of lit-er-ah-ture on his shoulders, the man delivered the greatest all-American novel since… since… well, you get the idea. Chuck Klosterman talks branding, ex-wives, and rock ‘n’ roll with the Updike of our time
Dancing Near the Stars
Profile of “Jersey Shore”‘s Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. “Sure, they all got shithouse drunk and screamed bleeped curse words in one another’s faces and flashed their thongs and referred to girls who didn’t meet their rigorous physical-attractiveness standards as ‘grenades’ and generally embodied every negative stereotype associated with Italian-American culture you can embody without murdering someone for control of a gambling syndicate. But they never seemed less than totally genuine, something you can’t say about the last ten years of ‘Real World’ fuckbots, and they lived, for the most part, by a bro code, and they kept each other in line, and they always said grace at dinner. They were less like the Sopranos and more like the Simpsons—irascible cartoons with skin tones not found in nature, accused of contributing to the decline of family values while actually reaffirming those values. And over the course of two seasons, they’ve grown into the most charismatic characters on TV.”