A severe economic downturn in Cuba has fuelled record migration to the United States, with boat crossings on the rise.

Egyptian authorities announced the recovery of a heavy sarcophagus lid from the United States on Monday at a ceremony in Cairo.

In the United States, sports can dominate kids’ whole lives. Weekends are filled with games, tournaments, and travel. For the most talented, participation in club teams can lead to state teams, followed by national ones. Then, with the pursuit of college sport scholarships, and eventually playing in the NCAA, a teenager’s entire identity can become intertwined with athletic success. In chasing that dream, “a young person starts giving up all the other aspects of their life,” Francesca Cavallerio, a sports psychologist and lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom, told me.

That single-mindedness can become a hindrance when athletes realize that they’re not going to turn pro. According to the NCAA, less than 2 percent of college athletes go on to play professional sports. (Even if they make it that far, the average professional career length in football, basketball, baseball, and ice hockey is three to five years.) Many young athletes don’t realize what sports provided until that point: the security of having a defined role in a closed world with rules and guidance. After graduation, an uncertain future might await. “All the great transferable skills that you gain as an elite athlete can be extremely useful, but only if you actually find a new path, a new goal,” Elodie Wendling, a researcher in the University of Florida’s department of sports management, told me.

Transitioning out of a linear education system into regular adult life can be a challenge for any 20-something; adding in the end of a long sports career can make it even harder. At an age when most people are embarking on their careers, elite athletes are already wrapping one up, and facing issues that most people don’t confront until later in life. Retired athletes, much like the rest of us, would benefit from having more than one identity in life—they’re just forced to learn this lesson young.

Post-sports life comes with many profound adjustments, but also trivial ones. “I was so used to eating every night grilled chicken, rice and vegetables, and a salad, and one piece of bread and water,” Savannah Jordan, a former professional soccer player, told me. Jordan was a natural athlete in a competitive family, dabbling in several sports before soccer took her to the University of Florida and a two-year stint playing professionally. From the age of 13, she felt like the sport was a full-time job. Jordan’s every meal choice was controlled by coaches. “Now I go out and look at a menu, and my natural instinct is that I can't have any of [those foods], because my mind was so trained,” she said.

After retiring, Jordan understood that she had the freedom of personal choice. But that wasn’t easy either: So many elements of her life as a soccer player—right down to when to eat and sleep—had been set in a concrete schedule. Jordan had also gone without certain rituals, like proms, sleepovers, and parties; she didn’t have much of a social life at all. Instead, friendships came ready-made, because teammates spend much of their time together. They’d joke with one another: “You’re my friend because you have to be my friend,” Jordan said. “When I got out into the real world, it’s like, what social groups do I fit into.”

Perhaps surprisingly, exercise and physical health can be a challenge for some former athletes after college. “There’s an assumption that athletes by nature of being athletes know how to be active,” Erin Reifsteck, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, told me by email. But training for a sport isn’t the same thing as exercise for health. “The culture of sport often reinforces certain values and norms, like sacrificing your body for the sake of athletic performance,” Reifsteck said. “Physical activity in this context can be viewed as very intense and even painful, which is maybe not the most ideal perception.” In one study, former Division I athletes exercised less, weighed more, and were more likely to have osteoarthritis (potentially stemming from long-ago injuries) compared with people who had competed in club, intramural, or recreational sports in college.

[Read: Finding new meaning after an Olympic career]

One key to helping athletes adjust to retirement might be supporting them better during college: a formative period for any young person, and one when sporting demands might kick into overdrive. “There’s just not enough support at the college level to prepare athletes for life after sport,” Wendling said. In the Pac-12—a major athletic conference in college sports—athletes spend more than 50 hours a week in sport-related activities, Eddie Comeaux, the executive director of the Center for Athletes’ Rights and Equity at UC Riverside, told me.

On top of that, they deal with “the mental fatigue, the physical exhaustion, the nagging injuries,” Comeaux said. “When you think about the demands of their coaches, the demands of their sport, the extensive travel during the season, it’s less likely that athletes will spend time in the classroom.” A 2019 NCAA study of 22,000 student athletes showed that Division I basketball and baseball players spend an average of more than two days per week away from campus during their competitive season. The same study also showed that recently, athletes in many sports have spent less time socializing or relaxing during the athletic season—from 20 hours a week in 2010 to just 15 hours in 2019.

Many college athletes might not have time to do the things both inside and outside the lecture hall that prepare students for life after graduation: applying for internships, joining non-sports clubs, studying abroad. In the NCAA study, when the student athletes were asked what they wished coaches and athletic administrators would talk more about, the most common response—from 41 percent of male athletes and 61 percent of female athletes—was preparing for a non-sporting career after college. In one of Wendling’s studies, funded by an NCAA grant, 55 percent of the more than 500 former college athletes interviewed felt confused about what to do after college or had not yet established plans for their next career.

Young athletes are typically conditioned to have a singular focus on their sport from an early age, with the tacit belief that this is the only route to success. But a little more personal freedom might not be antithetical to maximizing athletic performance. Wendling is researching how having career commitments outside a sport can increase athletes’ well-being. Her hypothesis is that this would also improve athletic performance. Whether or not that proves correct, perhaps a better quality of life would be its own reward for a young athlete in the twilight of their career.

If one thing unites all Americans, it’s the conviction that paying taxes is a pain. Even those like myself who don’t mind contributing their fair share to keep seniors off the street hate having to fill out all of the paperwork, especially if our taxes are complicated. The Tax Foundation estimates that filling out tax forms eats up 6.5 billion hours of work a year, for an economic cost of something like $313 billion. There’s a better way—but for depressing reasons, the United States probably won’t take it.

I recently traveled to the Faroe Islands, a small, semi-autonomous part of Denmark out in the North Atlantic, for a joint reporting project for The American Prospect and the People’s Policy Project. The idea was to investigate the country’s tax authority, which is called TAKS. I’d heard it is the cleanest and most efficient in the world.

Even with those expectations, what I found impressed me. The Faroes haven’t just set up a centralized system that automatically collects tax revenue and disburses welfare payments; they also continuously monitor all of your labor income and adjust your withholding as necessary if you lose a job or get a new one. Ordinary businesses and employees never have to even think about TAKS—no tax return is required.

[From the April 2019 issue: Americans don’t cheat on their taxes]

What’s more, the system almost automatically produces the best possible economic statistics—virtually an identical and contemporaneous picture of the whole economy, down to the last krone—instead of relying on the kinds of laborious and inaccurate surveys used in the U.S. That automation, in turn, has allowed TAKS to cut its budget and staffing while increasing audits on large, rich companies. As an American, I was pretty humiliated to see our clock getting not just cleaned but polished to a mirror finish by a tiny archipelago of just 54,000 people.

It was also humiliating to acknowledge that the U.S. is unlikely to learn anything from the Faroes, let alone copy-paste their TAKS system. Any such effort would have to overcome barriers of corruption and ideological bias.

Before I get to that, let me swat down a common reaction that pops up whenever people compare America with the Nordic countries. Those countries are small and supposedly homogeneous, the argument goes, so we can’t really compare them with a huge country like the U.S. That size point, however, actually runs in the opposite direction: It is easier, not harder, for a big, wealthy country to set up a streamlined bureaucracy, because of efficiencies of scale. A bigger tax database requires less money per person than a smaller one, and America has the world’s greatest supply of computer scientists. There’s no technical reason we can’t borrow the Faroese tax system.

On the diversity point, racial bias can indeed impede the kind of class solidarity and labor movements that backstop Nordic institutions. But that just means we must battle racism, not that we have to give up on economic equality and efficient government. Besides, racial animus is not even close to the biggest barrier to tax reform. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats raised the top marginal tax rate to 94 percent in a country that was dramatically more racist than it is today.

Vested interests and ideology are the real obstacles to fixing the IRS. Numerous attempts to streamline the American tax system have run into a wall of money from the tax-prep industry. As Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel reported for ProPublica in 2019, for more than two decades, these companies, led by Intuit and H&R Block, have aggressively mobilized to stave off attempts to create a government system for free tax filing online. They swatted down an attempt from the George W. Bush administration to move in this direction and also blocked the Obama administration from pushing the idea.

In California, a Stanford professor named Joseph Bankman (amusingly, the father of the disgraced crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried) set up a “ReadyReturn” system that would have automated most state filing; according to him, he spent $30,000 out of his own pocket lobbying to make it permanent. Intuit spent far more lobbying state legislators and blocked the system by one vote.

The end result of these lobbying battles was a supposed compromise where private firms would offer free tax filing for anyone making less than $73,000 and the IRS would, in return, not set up its own system. But by employing a lot of deceptive language and advertising trickery, the companies ensured that almost nobody took advantage of the free service.

[Read: The time tax]

Intuit added code to their website to hide their free product from Google searches, instead pushing consumers toward a “Free Edition” product that had lots of traps requiring payment. This worked like a charm—less than 3 percent of tax returns were submitted through the free-file service as of 2019. (That year, the IRS disallowed the search blocking and some other tricks; it also rescinded its promise to never build a competing free-file system.)

Worse, one of the most profitable demographics for Intuit and its ilk is Earned Income Tax Credit recipients who may lack the education or time to file their own taxes. Tax-prep fees eat up roughly 13 to 22 percent of the benefit dollars intended to help the working poor.

In a staggering example of economic parasitism, these companies trick people into paying for a service that a civilized government should provide for free, and then take that money and block any proposals to set up a free service.

That brings me to ideology. Almost as remarkable as TAKS itself is the fact that the Faroese tax code has no income-tax deductions of any kind. This greatly enables the automation of the system, because all of the calculations are much simpler.

This is frankly impossible to imagine in the U.S., even if we were to replace the numerous tax-code handouts (165 of them at the Treasury Department’s last count, although that also includes business benefits) with direct payments. It would require a bone-deep acceptance of taxation that is directly at odds with centuries of American history. We are raised on “the idea that wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation,” as the economist Yanis Varoufakis writes. Tax deductions encourage the recipients of government largesse to believe that they are rugged individualists clawing more of their own money back.

By the same token, hatred of taxation is a central pillar of the American conservative movement. Intuit has a major ally in the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who has lobbied for years to make filing taxes as annoying and burdensome as possible in order to build support for cutting rates.

On a more positive note, both H&R Block and Intuit recently pulled out of the free-file program, breaking the compromise and freeing the IRS to act. And fortuitously, the IRS has received an infusion of $80 billion to upgrade and modernize its systems. Some kind of government-run free-filing system or partial tax automation may arise in the coming years. But realistically, Americans aren’t going to follow the example of the Faroes and make taxes something the majority of people never even have to think about.

This was a bad, bad week for holiday travelers in the United States. First there was the raging storm that caught many people in perilous situations far from home: Here are some of their stories. Then Southwest went into an almighty days-long meltdown that left hundreds of thousands of passengers delayed or stranded. Insiders blame it on outdated tech.