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What does it mean for an NFL team to be "AI-first?" It's a question that football fans have been pondering ever since New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo revealed in May that the organization would be striving to "to think AI-first." It was hard to detect the influence of AI in the Jets' 23-10 win over the Titans in Week 1, but maybe that's just because the paltry competition didn't require unleashing the awesome power of Microsoft Copilot on the gridiron. They might be saving that for Week 2 against the Packers. The organization did, however, find a novel use for AI away from the field. On Aug. 23, a random Titans fan tweeted, "If the #TitanUp lose to the Jets week 1 I will walk from MetLife Stadium all the way to Nissan Stadium non stop." This is the kind of post that yippy social media managers dream about, because it creates the opportunity to use the official team account to clap back, perhaps even epically, and thus earn a lot of replies that say, "Yoooooo, admin snapped on this one [three fire emoji]" from guys who have forgotten the password to their Robinhood account. This morning, whoever runs the official Jets Twitter account made their move, and quote-tweeted the Titans fan's tweet with this:

On Monday morning, the rapper Macklemore posted a lengthy Instagram statement alleging that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and other NFL owners pitched a hissy-fit to get him dropped from the United States leg of Ed Sheeran's tour. Kraft, who has never shown much interest in music, allegedly called Ed Sheeran to tell him who was allowed to open his shows. According to Macklemore, "Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues." Macklemore was set to play Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which is owned Kraft and his family, on September 25 and 26. Now, Sheeran will play there without him. https://www.instagram.com/p/DdRdsy0m2HK/?hl=en&img_index=4

How strange it is to watch a whole Slam and feel as though we learned almost nothing about the true power hierarchy at the top of the men's tour. In Sunday afternoon's U.S. Open final, Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton, 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2. Check the box next to every single boring prediction: At least one tiebreak would be played; Shelton would struggle heroically to return serves; Zverev would play visibly nervy tennis in at least one juncture of the match and captivate viewers with his pre-serve ball-bouncing routines, but ultimately keep owning this matchup and lefties in general. We got all of that. The match was neither an especially compelling spectacle nor particularly predictive of the future. I would be somewhere from surprised to gobsmacked if either one of these players won a Slam next season. The central thing I'll remember about this match is that Zverev did not initially realize he had won it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VQEluGKDF4

Ryan Garcia, the often troubled and always magnetic Californian who to this point in his career seemed unsure if he’d rather be an influencer who fights or a fighter who influences, struck a blow for his fighter side on Saturday in Las Vegas. Garcia hit Conor Benn flush in the face with the mightiest right hand he’s capable of throwing early in the second round of their welterweight title bout, putting his outclassed British antagonist down shortly before putting him out. If Garcia’s not on top of the fight world already, he can at least see it from where he sits after his boffo performance.  As four-minute bouts go, this was a helluva fight. Benn’s father is Nigel Benn, a former world middleweight champion who was absolutely beloved in his native U.K. as his fight career peaked in the 1990s. Through those bloodlines and shrewd promotion, the younger Benn became wildly popular back home. Last year, he headlined two fight cards in front of sold-out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London with Chris Eubank Jr., whose father, Chris Eubank Sr., was the elder Benn’s main rival decades earlier. Eubank Jr. came out on top in the sons' first meeting, in April 2025, by a close but unanimous decision after 12 rounds. Their November 2025 rematch also went the distance, but Benn put Eubank Jr. down twice in the 12th round and the judges had him far ahead on all scorecards come the last bell.

There's been a lot of clamoring for answers as to what happened in the fourth quarter of Sunday's unusually messy divisional matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. And yet for much of the game, and even into the fourth quarter, there was very little in terms of unanswered questions. When Trey Smack kicked a field goal to stretch Green Bay's lead to eight with 13:17 remaining in the fourth, all the juice was on the Packers' side and the game was, honestly, a little boring. But the Vikings had jumped offside on the play, which made fourth-and-6 into fourth-and-1. Green Bay coach Matt LaFleur weighed his options and decided Fuck those points, opting to drive the nail into the coffin instead. Jordan Love got stuffed on the ensuing play, and the Packers never scored again. This is notable because the Vikings immediately went on a 22-point scoring run, and won by a final score of 39-22. Is it as simple as the Vikings finding a new gear in the fourth? The Packers and their analytics darling QB sputtering to a halt? Momentum plays? Those dastardly refs doing more of their ref chicanery against your favorite team, which is also their most mortal enemy?

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."