The Long Read

This week: a Vietnamese filmmaker's approach to cultivating artistic sensibility, the volunteer guardians who maintain cycling's most brutal race, and how Augusta National's phone ban creates the last egalitarian space in American sports.

How to develop your sensibility according to Trần Anh Hùng

Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng has spent three decades making cinema of extraordinary delicacy — films like The Scent of Green Papaya and The Taste of Things that find profound emotion in the smallest gestures. This extended conversation reveals his methodology for developing what he calls "sensibility" — the artist's capacity to perceive and translate subtle emotional truths. Hùng discusses his practice of observing without judgment, his resistance to conventional narrative structures, and why he believes contemporary culture's obsession with speed and impact diminishes our ability to see clearly. He articulates a complete philosophy of attention that applies far beyond filmmaking — a framework for anyone trying to develop deeper perception in their work.

Deez Links · 22 minutes

The question is not how to make people feel something quickly, but how to create the conditions where they can feel something true. This takes time. This takes patience. Most of all, it takes the courage to work with very small things.

Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix are the soul of the Hell of the North - cycling's toughest race

Paris-Roubaix is professional cycling's most punishing single-day race — 160 miles across northern France's cobblestone farm roads that destroy bikes, bodies, and careers with equal enthusiasm. But the race exists only because of Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, a volunteer organization that spends the entire year maintaining, cleaning, and protecting the 29 cobblestone sectors that make the race legendary. This profile follows the Amis through their year-round work: power-washing centuries-old stones, negotiating with farmers who'd rather pave over the sections, and standing guard against municipal officials who see the cobbles as obstacles to modern infrastructure. What emerges is a meditation on the devotion required to preserve something beautiful and brutal in a world that prefers smooth efficiency — and why some forms of difficulty merit fighting for.

The Athletic · 18 minutes

No VIPs at Amen Corner shows how the Masters flattens America's celebrity caste system

Augusta National's famous phone ban creates something almost impossible in 2026 America: a space where celebrities become anonymous. Dwyane Wade, Niall Horan, and other boldface names describe the surreal experience of attending the Masters, where no selfie requests exist because no phones exist, where their usual protective apparatus of handlers and barriers becomes unnecessary because the golf tournament's rules flatten all social hierarchies. The piece examines how Augusta's rigid protocols — no phones, no autographs, no running, speak in whispers — accidentally create the most egalitarian space in American sports, where fame provides no advantage and everyone experiences the event identically. When institutional power is strong enough to override celebrity culture, it feels revolutionary in an age when everything else bends to accommodate the famous.

The Athletic · 16 minutes