The New York Jets have been pretty uniformly terrible on the field under the ownership of Woody Johnson, but the organization has lately been recognized as an innovative and industry-leading presence in integrating video game rankings and loutish patrician antics into its front-office processes. That hybrid approach has admittedly not yet borne fruit in terms of top-line indicators like wins, or…

As a rule, a college graduation is a miserable affair. If you’re an outgoing senior, you have wait around for hours on end in the sweltering heat, all while hungover and wearing a full-length black gown. If you’re a parent, you have to sit in a folding chair in the middle of a lawn for the same amount of time, seething about how you had to park your car so far away from everything. Everyone in…

Late last week, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners of its 2026 Short Story Prize. The quintet will move on to a final round of judging ahead of the grand prize announcement on June 30, though we can probably count out Caribbean regional winner Jamir Nazir. It seems Nazir's "The Serpent In The Grove," published last Tuesday in _Granta_ , was written by a large-language…

If you asked philosophers what the most mysterious thing about the mind is, most of them would say: consciousness. It's just a _really weird_ thing. An exhaustive physical description of a brain state doesn't obviously tell us anything about why that state would be associated with the experience of tasting strawberry rather than the experience of sneezing. What is it about _that_ physical state…

Is this AI psychosis?

You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names,…

Writing, particularly creative or journalistic writing, is an infamously difficult, unsteady, and unfair way to try to make a living. This is in part because of the number of people who want to do it. For every actual paying job, there are like a hundred thousand would-be writers, if not far more than that. Plenty of world-historically excellent writers have gone their whole adult lives without…

Some people like high-consequence periods of the sports calendar, and I respect that worldview, although I no longer really share it. Consequences are high enough in everyday life at the moment, to say the very least, which makes a period of low-stakes late- and early-season games something of a relief. It also makes it possible for us to get a little more creative with booking this podcast. When…

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now.

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

I have bad news for anyone who was really into consuming or making videos of Charlie Kirk arresting Jeffrey Epstein, or SpongeBob SquarePants fighting Barack Obama in the format of a side-scrolling fighting game: OpenAI has suddenly and unceremoniously pulled the plug on Sora, its text-to-video generator app, after just four months and before a billion-dollar partnership with Disney ever really…

Chip-maker Nvidia became a multi-trillion-dollar company the classic way: by selling shovels in the middle of a gold rush. As the generative AI bubble swelled and distended, Nvidia was there to sell the GPUs needed to feed it. Today it owns more than 80 percent of the market for chips involved in AI. This has been great for its shareholders, and less than great for anyone looking to purchase…

I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new startup that would soon fizzle into obscurity. Mostly I was confused by their gargantuan ad budget. I was not alone. But the ads…

My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into LinkedIn and started networking.

Going only by the strength of my notifications, the world was whipsawing back and forth…

"The future of media is AI!" That's what Devin The Mixed-Reality Dugong has been telling me every single day, ever since he stopped talking about the metaverse. I'm certainly in no position to argue with him. In Devin's role as Chief AI/Metaverse/Surveillance Officer for Defector, he has pioneered such thinkovative ideas as the algorithmically generated sandwich, the metaverse T-shirt, and the…