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Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, who is worth over $100 billion, resigned as CEO on Thursday morning, following an emergency board meeting prompted by several reports that he'd been having various affairs, most notably with someone U.S. officials believe was spying on behalf of the Chinese government. Nvidia has an unorthodox corporate structure, built around Huang, which largely eschews traditional executive roles in favor of a large council of vice presidents who report directly to Huang, which makes the matter of his succession trickier to game out than it would be in other cases of a CEO doing sex stuff. He'll be succeeded on an interim basis by Colette Kress, formerly the CFO, whom Wired characterizes as one of the few people with a high-level grasp of the company's finances and ties to Wall Street. A quick recap of how we got here: Nvidia is the single most important hardware technology company in the world, a chip designer that boosted its market cap to more than $4 trillion by making the must-have picks and shovels of the ongoing AI boom. As such, Nvidia is something like a shadow arm of the U.S. government, the latter of which is engaged in the stupidest-ever version of the space race with China over who can build the machine god first. Nvidia wants to sell its best stuff to Chinese companies because it doesn't really care who wins, as long as it makes money for investors, but the Trump administration won't allow it. Meanwhile, the tip-top Chinese AI companies have found ways to smuggle in the best Nvidia chips via third parties mostly based in Southeast Asia.

The SS United States finally sank in the Gulf of Mexico at around 10 p.m. ET Wedneday night. Not since the Minnow had a doomed vessel’s last tour run so far over schedule and still kept viewers engaged. Those who stuck with the 10-hour livestream were rewarded with an amazingly touching denouement.  The ship had its day. The SS United States hit the seas in 1952, and at 990 feet long was about 100 feet longer than the Titanic, yet was able to hit speeds of more than 38 knots, still faster than any transatlantic ocean liner ever. But it was deemed obsolete and taken out of service way back in 1969, and spent the last 30 years docked in Philadelphia. Attempts to keep the SS US above water as a hotel or museum failed, and some folks in Okaloosa County, Florida, decided the liner was most valuable at the bottom of sea. The county floated a $10 million plan to turn the ship into an artificial reef and thereby enhance the Redneck Riviera’s reputation as a fishing and scuba diving destination. This entailed sinking the SS US about 22 miles off Fort Walton Beach during the very same week that the Edmund Fitzgerald hit bottom 51 years earlier. 

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Talk to any college football fan, and they’re unlikely to volunteer praise for their sport’s referees. You’ve seen how many times NFL refs miss an obvious foul, call a ticky-tack holding penalty that took place 50 miles away from the ball, or overturn a sick catch because they noticed the ball quiver slightly after a wideout hit the ground. Imagine how inept college officials must be by comparison. Conferences would probably be better off asking parents to do the job. That said, there is one area where college football has an edge over The Shield on field governance, and here it is:

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life might seem like a bland title for a biography, until it dawns on you exactly how much living the man did. He eloped with his aunt at 19, then humiliated her by writing a novel about it translated into more than 30 languages; divorced her for her much younger niece, his first cousin; and, after a scandalous 50-year marriage beset by separations, walked out one last time for the Spanish socialite and tabloid favorite Isabel Preysler, ex-wife of Julio Iglesias and mother of Enrique. Arguably the world’s most famous Peruvian after Paddington, Vargas Llosa would have been president if not for the dark-horse populist Alberto Fujimori—father of the current president—who handily defeated Vargas Llosa’s platform of neoliberal shock economics in 1990. And in 2010, at age 74, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, joining the pantheon alongside his lifelong frenemy Gabriel García Márquez, whom he famously punched in the face at a film premiere, for reasons that remain unclear.  Thus, the page count of the new biography—the first since his death in 2025 and almost certainly the last word on the subject—clocking in at 812. Gerald Martin, a British critic who also wrote the definitive book on García Márquez, spent 25 years interviewing Vargas Llosa and those who knew him. The result is a monumental achievement: a synthesis of his subject's personal and political life with a surgical yet shockingly breezy analysis of the writing itself. And while it’s not always right to conflate fictional characters with their creator, Vargas Llosa is a special case, Martin argues: a novelist who peppered his work with confessions.

House Republicans elected Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio this week as their new minority leader. He won 106-73 on a secret ballot. Those who follow politics will know his name as a staunch Donald Trump ally who served as chairman of the Freedom Caucus, voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and ignored a subpoena from the House panel that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection. Jordan previously ran for the role of Speaker of the House in 2023 but failed three times to get a majority of the votes needed. This too was voted on by secret ballot. At the time, those who did speak about their "no" votes told NPR they voted against Jordan because of bullying and threats being made to them and their families by either Jordan or Jordan supporters. But at that time, Jordan also was continuing to face questions about his connection to Ohio State's sexual abuse scandal. In 2018, former wrestlers for the university came forward, saying they had been sexually abused by a team doctor under the guise of him providing them with medical treatment, usually during a physical exam. The wrestlers forced an independent investigation, and the ensuing published report said that Dr. Richard Strauss sexually abused "at least 177 male student-patients" at Ohio State, many of them while he worked in the athletics department from the late 1970s until 1998. Strauss died by suicide in 2005.

For the second goal of the Oilers' 3-2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers, the NHL's best offense converted yet another power play. Zero points for guessing the man who picked up the primary assist: Connor McDavid now has a 15-dish lead over the next-highest guy on the league's assist leaderboard, as well as a 12-point lead in overall points. The next two guys on the latter list, by the way, are both Oilers, too. With the score 1-0 in the second period, and Oliver Bonk serving a two-minute penalty for bonking (OK, fine, interference), McDavid captured the defense's attention by skating with the puck far out on the left in the attacking zone. In doing so, he was able to give his teammate Zach Hyman a little bit of personal space right in front of the crease. This is the part that he made look easy: He fired a quick centering pass through two alert Flyers and got the puck to an awkward spot right at goalie Dan Vladar's knees. Hyman just had to poke his stick around in there to encourage the biscuit over the line. https://youtu.be/9_LgxMi5n2g?si=-qhFnTip8P034rfo&t=248

When asked why he kept trying to climb Mt. Everest, the climber George Mallory famously replied, "Because it's there." When asked about his creative process, SimCity creator Will Wright said, "I don't know. I thought it would be cool." I've always been struck by the inscrutability of inspiration, by the notion that we can't always explain why we do the things we do. This week's episode of Only If You Get Caught gets into this psychic terrain by way of examining the question of why so many people cheat at marathons. The premise of the show is that cheating can most often be understood as a rational calculation. Someone chooses to break the rules because they ultimately decide that the benefit of getting away with it outweighs the downside of getting caught. But cutting the course on a marathon doesn't fit into this heuristic. Most marathon cheaters don't really cheat for anything, at least not anything that matches up to the shame and derision that comes with being exposed as a cheater. This dynamic is especially true these days, when cheaters both are easier to catch and have less to gain. In late September, an influencer was caught hitching a ride on a bike at the Berlin Marathon en route to posting the unremarkable time of 4:53:46. Taken as a whole, marathon cheating suggests that there's an unscratchable itch, a desire to break the rules for the simple sake of doing it. To break it all down, I drafted in our old friend Dennis Young, whom you may know from his time with us at the old site or for his current work editing Front Office Sports. Dennis is great, and we had a fun time getting into it.

In the fall of 2018, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn released the first episode of Call Her Daddy by introducing themselves. “To be honest, I’m probably here just to ride Alex’s coattails,” Franklyn said. Cooper, more confident on mic in sound and delivery, declares herself a “stay-at-home, try-hard vlogger by day and an Insta-hoe by night.” The show, which at the time focused on their sex lives, drug habits, and bad decisions, exploded in popularity. They signed a three-year deal with Barstool Sports that year. Call Her Daddy was so popular that the duo tried to renegotiate that contract in 2020, and their friendship quickly deteriorated and became a mess of tabloid headlines and legal threats. Franklyn claimed that Cooper went behind her back and betrayed her. Cooper claimed that Franklyn was uncooperative in negotiations and deployed her boyfriend Peter Nelson (who was an HBO Sports executive at the time) to make things more difficult. The podcast’s IP remained controlled by Barstool, and Cooper took the reins fully in May of 2020. If you look at the Call Her Daddy YouTube page, that is the beginning of history. The episodes with Franklyn, the first two years of content, are gone. Cooper has moved on. In 2021, she left Barstool and signed a $60 million contract with Spotify. In 2024, she signed a $125 million contract with Sirius XM. Call Her Daddy has evolved from a sex chat romp to one of the biggest podcasts in the world. Cooper has interviewed Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, and dozens of other major celebrities. The podcast, along with her persona, is softer, less raunchy, and more grown-up. 

This week marked Dianna Russini's return to public life. The former highly compensated NFL reporter, who blew up her career by canoodling in public with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, began her return from disgrace the way a lot of notable people who can afford capable PR firms do: with a soft-focus profile in People. The next phase of her comeback, Wednesday's premiere of her new weekly football show on BetUS TV, was not so competently executed. The People article is about what you'd expect. Russini talks about how "heartbreaking" the the last six months have been, and how having to resign from The Athletic after going interlaced-fingers mode with Vrabel at an adults-only resort was a "nightmare." Russini also seems to be maintaining her position that there was nothing inappropriate about her relationship with Vrabel, which included rendezvous in a bar, a casino, and on a boat. She complained to People about all the "lies" that "became so out of control.” The profile finished up with Russini trying to reposition herself as an inspiration to women. “I really hope that I can be someone other women see: you can pick yourself up, get back in there and not be afraid,” she said. With that out of the way, it was time for the main event. The Russini Report, a weekly one-hour web show about the NFL, debuted on Wednesday. The show is hosted by BetUS, which is a sketchy offshore sportsbook that is headquartered in Costa Rica and regulated by the government of Curaçao. I also feel compelled to tell you that the show that preceded The Russini Report on the BetUS platform featured these three gentleman, who I'm assuming all know each other from a support group for uncanny individuals:

While there are many fantastic Japanese role-playing game (JRPG, for short) series out there, and with apologies to Dragon Quest and Persona, Final Fantasy is the biggest and most important of them all. Every numbered entry in the main series is an event, and since almost every game is its own story (to date, there have been two main games to get direct sequels: X got X-2, and XIII inexplicably got two sequels), there are swaths of new gamers dipping in every time a new game releases. Despite that, it's safe to say that Final Fantasy has somewhat lost its way, or at least what was once its identity. What started as a turn-based RPG has evolved, first into a more active-style combat system and then more recently into something bordering on an action game. This makes sense for Square Enix, the series's developer, as turn-based combat has mostly, though not entirely, slipped from an important game genre into something more niche. Chasing the action trend that took over turn-based RPG's spot with the Soulsborne games made financial sense, and it kept Final Fantasy from growing stale. That said, there's still a hunger for turn-based RPGs, and especially turn-based Final Fantasy games; the last mainline game to be strictly turn-based was 2001's X. With that in mind, we arrive at Final Fantasy Resonance, the recently released (and relatively successful) spin-off that is a sort of remake/re-using of assets of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile gacha game. Resonance is not asking the player to part with any money besides the initial price tag, and instead is a fully fleshed-out 30-to-40-hour turn-based RPG adventure through time, space, and Final Fantasy history.