NowLoop

The Video Assistant Referee is supposed to get everything right. This is an incredibly high standard to hold any sort of officiating, but this is VAR's main selling point and raison d'être. All of the delays, ticky-tack calls, and general disruption to the flow of a soccer match are supposed to be worth it; after all, who doesn't want the correct call made when an incorrect call could decide a match, a season, a legacy? But of course, VAR is not perfect, and it will never be perfect, even when called to rule on supposedly cut-and-dry offside decisions. As soon as any sort of subjectivity is thrown into the mix, VAR is no better than a normal ref, and oftentimes worse. With that in mind, I submit into evidence Erling Haaland's 60th minute goal during Sunday's Manchester derby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKfkzSKDkHM At first glance, this is exactly the type of goal decision that VAR should excel at sorting through. Haaland's back-post finish was ruled out on the field by the sideline referee for an offside, as he judged that Haaland was ahead of both the ball and the last defender when Josko Gvardiol struck the ball across. Since it was, even in live action, a very close decision, a VAR review was all but assured, and said review found that Haaland was actually onside at the time of Gvardiol's pass. The camera angle showed on replays didn't make that clear, but the lines as deployed by the VAR, which are more accurate than the TV cameras, did help decide that the Norwegian was just onside. Great, goal given.

Elon Musk loves them. Donald Trump thinks they’re “the best hope for Germany” and that they’ll “MGGA” (Make Germany Great Again). They’re an existential threat for fact-based reasoning, democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism. And they're in position to become the first far-right party to lead a German state since 1945. Over 77 percent of the eligible population of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls on Sept. 6 in order to vote for their new state government. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was able to cruise to victory with a plurality 43.8 percent of the vote, slightly outperforming their polling. While the composition of the government has yet to be ironed out, it’s an unprecedented win for a party whose entire platform is based on hating immigrants and non-white Germans. For anti-right activists in Saxony-Anhalt, the weeks and days leading up to the election had been marked by a mix of anxiety, defiance, and energy, as organizations set up pro-democracy rallies and events throughout the state. Bettina Wiengarn is a board member and spokesperson of the Zerbster Bündnis für Demokratie, a local association based in Zerbst, a small town in eastern Saxony-Anhalt. She and others had gathered to watch the results roll in.

You can always count on our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Elijah Acquah, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.  Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

If you've read Nicholas Russell, here or elsewhere, you've gathered that he is thoughtful, erudite, and extremely curious. In addition to approximately one million reviews and essays here at Defector, he's published more than a dozen interviews, and they've ranged all over: politics podcasters, a film critic, an indie musician, a veteran foreign correspondent, a cruciverbalist, an English professor and Toni Morrison scholar, and the retired WNBA journeywoman Carolyn Swords. By now, you have probably also picked up on the fact that he is uncommonly driven. Reporting is hard. Interviewing, or at least doing it well, is hard. Freelancing is hard as hell. Russell churns out excellent freelance work while holding down a day job as a bookseller, in addition to writing short fiction. Now he is also a published novelist. Here's something else you might've noticed from reading Russell's stuff: He is a bit of a horror sicko. His novel, Observer, which will pop up soon in the horror section of your coolest local bookstore, is what you get from a thoughtful, erudite, extremely curious, and uncommonly driven horror sicko. Set largely in the remote Nevada desert, Observer charts in overlapping timelines human encounters with some deeply weird phenomena and menacing non-human lifeforms. In the 1990s, an emotionally remote and difficult scientist named Corinne arrives at an astronomical observatory in the outpost town of McNairy and witnesses up close the shocking and calamitous destruction of the facility and its various projects. In the present, Corinne has disappeared and is presumed dead, and her estranged adult daughter, Renata, takes possession of a chaotic trove of Corinne's possessions. Renata begins from that mess to work toward an understanding of this enigmatic void of a parental figure. And both Corinne and Renata endeavor to make heads or tails of the writings of Francis Brown, an early 20th-century prospector whose journal entries describe the discovery, in the depths of an unexplored desert cave, of something impossible. Observer is a couple of different kinds of mystery: Its characters are groping around for comprehension, both of the disaster and wreckage above McNairy and of one another, but Russell is disciplined in his doling out of information, resisting the temptation to swoop down with huge blundering author hands and scratch clues into tree-trunks and so forth. Remoteness, that specific gritty and standoffish remoteness of desert habitations, is so essential to Observer's narrative that it might as well be a named character; if it's hard and thorny to reconstruct a complete understanding of some of the most spectacular and studied disasters of modern history, imagine trying it in a forgotten and decaying Southwestern town where everyone, human or otherwise, wants to be left the hell alone. It's a real strength of the novel. You can go in some pretty surprising directions if you set your story in a place where eons might plausibly pass without this or that creek, canyon, or cave getting a very close human inspection.

Nothing beats watching a billionaire eat filth in public, unless the chefs and waiters at Maison De Merde are all billionaires too. And so it is that Steve Ballmer's semi-abject capitulation to reality, and to the penalty he was handed in the face of overwhelming evidence of salary cap contravention in the guise of botanical fraud, arrives without either the proper level of humiliation or the burn-down-the-village revenge that would have satisfied us all infinitely more. The fun was in the extremes. The middle road stinks. No one pines for the inevitable. Yet, there it was, conveniently dumped on an NFL Sunday night where only those people who were sick of Giants-Cowboys but couldn't yet fall asleep were paying attention. Ballmer took the knee with just a hint of middle finger behind the back, proclaiming that least defensible of legal positions, "I'm clean but I'll do the time anyway."

College football fans who tuned into ESPN's College GameDay this Saturday were forced to encounter the alarming visage of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. To make matter worse, he monopolized nearly 10 minutes of air time in order to stump for the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bill that is like a lot of things Ted Cruz stumps for, in that it is explicitly designed to make workers' lives worse. Proponents of the PCSA rely on a familiar set of talking points when hyping up their pet bill, which could be voted on by the Senate this month. They are quick to point out that college sports are in "chaos," and they have plenty of material to support their case. They can point to the ludicrous number of player transfers that happen every offseason, constant conference realignment, ballooning NIL budgets, an endless flow of lawsuits, Lane Kiffin trying to bring ex-NFL players onto his team, and the NCAA barely being able to prevent a quarterback who bet on his own team's games from staying in the sport. Take a quick glance at the current headlines about college sports, and it's hard to argue that there is not indeed some level of chaos present. None of this chaos arrived by itself, of course. Any sense that college sports are suffering from a lack of control is down to the fact that the NCAA refuses to accept its own obsolescence. After decades of successfully cheating college athletes out of enjoying any share of the billion-dollar industry they make, the organization has been doing nothing but getting its ass kicked in court. Every problem that the PCSA claims to be a solution for is downstream of the fact that ever since O'Bannon v. NCAA, Charlie Baker's boys haven't been able to find a judge anywhere in the country who will agree that the restrictions they've long placed on players' eligibility and earning power are anywhere close to legal. That's how you end up with the NCAA agreeing to pay $2.7 billion to the athletes it defrauded, with Kiffin going shopping for players in the NFL bargain bin, and with Brendan Sorsby only being prevented from returning to the field by his school's late-arriving sense of shame.

How best to react to the latest news on the Los Angeles Rams? Easy: with complete abandon and logical recklessness. That's how the veterans do it. Said latest news: that massive offseason acquisition Myles Garrett has fouled his knee, failed to will it healthy again, and now will have surgery that will take out all of September and a chunk of October as well. Garrett was the big swing of the summer, but the fact that it was the Rams that took it is no surprise. General manager Les Snead and head coach Sean McVay love acquisitional bat speed more than nearly any team not named Real Madrid or Barcelona, and between Garrett and veteran ace in the hole Aaron Donald, they surely constructed the most unsettling defensive front since their own Fearsome Foursome six decades ago. In fact, they also apparently took another shot at cornering the pass-rush market by making a strenuous run at Las Vegas Raiders designated menace Maxx Crosby, one which failed in significant part because Crosby decided in the wake of his abortive trade to Baltimore that he wanted against all odds to remain a Raider, a choice we presume he will rue for the next six decades or so.

West Sacramento Athletics manager Mark Kotsay knew the drill from months of exercising it. Another game was on fire, and he needed someone who could at least let it burn itself out, so he went to Carlos Cortes in the bottom of the eighth inning, the bases loaded with Mariners and four runs already in. And Cortes did his duty Saturday, inducing Victor Robles to fly out modestly to right field to end the inning. Seattle still led, 16-1, but Cortes did the required work. Then he went out again for the ninth because it was still 16-1 and the A's didn't really need him to be the left fielder any more. And, predictably, he got kicked around the lot because that's what left fielders asked to pitch tend to do. He walked Cal Raleigh. Then he walked Julio Rodriguez. Then he walked Brock Rodden. Then he gave up a two-run single to Cole Young and a sacrifice fly to Michael Arroyo. Eventually he did get out of the inning, though, because Carlos Cortes does the required work, even if it takes a bit. This was his ninth appearance as a pitcher this year, which truly is remarkable given that he is indeed an outfielder by trade. But the A's get beaten by a lot a lot. In his nine appearances, Cortes has entered games in which they trailed at the time by an aggregate score of 129-20, so he gets an extraordinary amount of mop duty. He is The Other Ohtani, or at least that's how he should be marketed.

It was supposed to be a day to remember Chris Johnson, and it still can be. The NFL's all-time single-season yards leader was scheduled to be honored today by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he starred from 2008–13, at halftime of their game against the New York Jets, for whom he played in 2014. But the Titans announced Friday that Johnson won't be able to travel to Nashville to be inducted into the team's Ring of Honor, and the ceremony will be postponed to a later date. I hope it does happen later. Johnson's appearance was canceled due to "unforeseen circumstances," and it's hard not to assume that's health-related. Johnson, 40, revealed in June on Good Morning America that he's been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disorder that is invariably fatal. It is cruel and it works quickly: The average time between onset and death is between two and four years. Johnson said he first noticed weakness in one hand in March 2025, and by the time of his GMA interview just 15 months later, he required a computerized speech-generating device that he controls with his eye movements. A few days ago, Johnson published "A Letter to My Kids" in The Players' Tribune; it felt like a goodbye. "How can a man just be perfectly healthy one day," he wrote, "running around with his kids in the yard, and then the next, your hand starts getting weak, and it just travels throughout your whole body until you can’t talk anymore?"

The truest thing about college football is that there is no such thing as being too small, too petty, or too whiny about being too small or petty. We're not being frivolously critical here, despite how good doing that makes us feel; blaming people in the industry for acting out is like blaming a fish for being wet. These are simply the conditions that prevail. You simply have to learn to forget everything you ever learned about the values the sport allegedly respects, and take the mess it churns every week for the entertainment value. Which is why the resumption of the Kansas-Missouri football rivalry has gone so well for everyone involved, including those of us with no meat on the grill. Missouri won Friday’s game, 38-21, but it's the 8 at the end that stuck out, because that was Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz directing his team to score a needless late touchdown and in doing so sticking one last finger in the Jayhawks' eye for bringing up the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the 1850s in a pregame hype video called, in a triumph of subtlety, "Heroes and Villains": https://twitter.com/KU_Football/status/2098169671824404786