Curzio Malaparte was the shape-shifting Zelig of the catastrophe of Italian fascism, a political and social operator of such profound equivocation that in his writings he seems almost to convince even himself of his own sincerity. In Maurizio Serra’s comprehensive biography, first published in Italian in 2011 and now available in English from New York Review Books, we follow Malaparte’s skittering movements across a century to which he seems uniquely suited and yet, near daily, increasingly familiar to our own. 

Best known for his nightmarish 1944 novel of the Second World War, Kaputt, Malaparte—a novelist, journalist, playwright, diplomat, and filmmaker—wrote like a cross between Ernst Jünger and Thomas Pynchon, and lived like a daredevil prince. He was forever on the move, forever aggrieved, forever on the verge of world fame, even immortality, or, at the very least, slipping through whatever net was closing around him. He began his adult life as a fascist and became a communist in his later years (a conversion he seemed to think was more a shift of emphasis—his first book, 1931’s Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution, argued that it was Mussolini’s own youthful Marxism that had made him such an effective revolutionary), before embracing Catholicism on his deathbed in 1957. 

Malaparte was a consummate self-mythologizer, as well as razor-sharp critical mythographer of pre- and post-war Europe, and one struggles to reconcile his keen assessments of his contemporaries across the political and social spectrum with how sickeningly self-serving his every utterance obviously is. He was, above all, a man suited for a time marked by flux, when all the categories that now seem so concrete were still emerging, still in question, still subject to wild appropriations and radical revisions. Reading Malaparte is a vertiginous, often grotesque experience, but even through the nausea one cannot help admiring the artistry of someone who remained on his feet by never standing still.

It’s a strange blessing that the translation should be released in America now. It is an enormously valuable study of the fascist imagination, and of the extent to which it is a psychological movement as well as a political one. Reactionary movements of all stripes depend on figures like Malaparte (though they rarely possess his literary talent), who are willing to contort themselves into whatever shape the moment—or, more likely, the leader—requires of them, even to the point of utter distortion and degradation. Figures for whom “hypocrisy” is not simply too weak a charge, but a mistaken description, since that would require some semblance of a personal foundation to betray. On the other hand, reading in 2025 about Malaparte’s self-serving rise and humiliating fall among the worst of the 20th century’s political villains, we’re as likely to shrug as to gasp. Yeah, yeah, the violence, the shame, the betrayal; what else is new?

Born Kurt Erich Suckert in 1898 to a German father, a textile executive, and a Lombard mother, he was raised in haute-bourgeois comfort in Prato, Tuscany, before studying at La Sapienza University in Rome and taking up a career as a journalist. He fought bravely in the First World War as a mountain infantryman and joined Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in 1920, an allegiance that was as strategic as it was ideological. As Serra points out, “loyalty was for him a very relative concept.”

Hardly a street-fighter—he largely sidestepped the brawls between leftists and the Fascist syndicalists in the early interwar years, and he sat out the March on Rome entirely, something he would cheerfully lie about in Coup d’Etat—Malaparte nevertheless lent his pen as young party official and an increasingly well-known journalist in Florence to the most hardline and violent Fascist tendencies, always under the pseudo-revolutionary banner of “necessary extremism.” 

His investment in popular forms—newspapers and pamphlets at first, later novels, plays, and films—reflects not only his voracious, multifaceted talent, but also his shrewd ability to seize upon sources of influence that were already operative and milk them for all they were worth. This naked opportunism is a hallmark of fascist ascendency—Gramsci once pointed out that the Fascist party operated primarily by infiltration and subsequent destruction of opposing bourgeois organizations, arguing, “Fascism is not based on any class that was not already in power”—but it was Malaparte’s ironic weakness to have been a little too adept at such maneuvering, a little too cunning for the comfort of his fellow thieves. 

He seems to have had an uncomfortably singular way of going about interactions with fellow party members, allies in war, and other potentially fatal friends, which he frequently casts in his books as ironic truth-telling, but it could just as easily have been bad strategy for getting ahead, and while he did indeed manage to escape the worst his rivals had in mind for him, this may have been due in part to the fact that it’s often very difficult to tell if he is kidding. For instance, it would be easy to assume that his pen name, which he eventually took on as his legal name, was just such a half-joke, playing on the Italian meaning of the Corsican emperor’s family name, a knowing subversion of all the militarized portentousness that marked fascism from its beginnings. But, in fact, it was no subversion at all. As Serra tells it, Malaparte came across the name in a pamphlet that had become popular among the early fascists, who sought to claim the legendary emperor as an Italian. Sick of his enemies seizing upon anti-German sentiment to attack his original surname and eager to please the new dictator, who was fascinated by Napoleon, Kurt Suckert became Curzio Malaparte. As he wrote in a 1938 letter: “I took the name of Malaparte at the suggestion of Il Duce, who in 1926 told me: ‘A Fascist writer has to sign with an Italian name. Find yourself a pseudonym.’”

His masterpiece was 1944’s Kaputt, a fictionalized account of the Eastern Front that has a strong claim to the mantle of best novel to have emerged from the Second World War. It is a harrowing descent into the hell that spread over Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere, in which Malaparte not only preemptively explodes the myth of a clean Wehrmacht (the postwar rehabilitation of the units who fought Hitler’s war arguing that because they were not counted among the inner sanctum of the SS they had not committed atrocities—they had) but tosses out with it the reassuring assumption that the prewar order itself was in some way a victim of the midcentury disaster. As every page of Kaputt makes agonizingly clear, the regimes of torture, assassination, theft, and manipulation that tore Europe apart were not the destruction of an earlier, uneasy yet civil compromise between liberal and aristocratic elites, but was rather that society’s apotheosis. 

Each chapter of Kaputt is presented within a kind of frame narrative, in which Malaparte (author, narrator, and character all at once, and each only partially) discusses the terror he has witnessed while walking or dining with a well-heeled companion: the urbane, naïve Prince Eugene of Sweden, the menacing philistine Hans Frank, German Governor-General of Poland, the half-dashing Count Augustine de Foxa, Spanish Minister in Helsinki, and so on. In the gardens of Stockholm or at a high-class dinner party, the skeptical, sardonic, yet for all that the more humane Malaparte by turns shocks and evades his conversation partners, aware all the time that even as he is smarter, more experienced, and in every other way superior to them, he is living in dangerous times, and he is at their mercy. This semi-avowed self-aggrandizement (which, to be clear, seems not to be for effect, but really how Malaparte sees himself) would be utterly repulsive were it not for how irresistibly Malaparte tells his multilayered story. For while the wine is served (and overserved), or the snow falls gently in a quiet city, we are drawn ever deeper into a mind full of rotting animal carcasses, machine gun fire flying over the bed in which one sleeps, the corpses of 13,000 Jews lining the streets of the Romanian city of Jassy. (Malaparte was indeed present for this, one of the worst pogroms carried out during the war.) And each chapter, as if twisting the historical knife, draws us through the contrast between the stories themselves and where they are being told, the juxtaposition becoming more and more a parallel, until we see, with heartbreaking clarity, civilization and barbarism as one another’s mirror images. For all his anguish (the novel ends with our hero weeping in the streets of a liberated Naples), Malaparte was well suited to this inverted world, and had long practice with maneuvering through ruins.

And yet, he could not get by on maneuvering alone: As in any criminal gang, fascists tend to require dirty hands. Years earlier, according to Serra, Malaparte likely acted as an accessory after the fact to the infamous murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who in 1924 had publicly denounced Fascism, accusing Mussolini to his face on the floor of the parliament of having committed fraud in the elections that brought the NFP into government. Matteotti, most likely on Mussolini’s orders, was beaten and stabbed to death by a small cadre of thugs, his body left to rot on the street in Rome. 

It’s a characteristic irony of Malaparte’s life and work that he would later become such an exacting critic of fascism’s tendency toward just this kind of petty, murderous sleaze, to which he was, in his telling, always an increasingly disillusioned observer, if not already a world-weary witness. But the truth of the matter is that Malaparte always exhibited an attraction not only to violence, but to sordid violence, to dank alleyways and desolate forest clearings, apparently under the impression that to be on the tip of the spear of history, one must go where few others are willing to travel. Such a fascination is not, strictly speaking, out of step with the fascist imagination, but whereas his comrades’ propaganda promised cleanliness and hygiene in response to the imagined contamination of foreign influence, Malaparte saw no such purity in the offing. Instead, fascism provided an opportunity to dive headfirst into the filth, spattering whoever was standing nearby. 

And yet even this he could find a way to spruce up, when it suited him. In his Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, a literary score-settling with the French intellectuals who scorned Malaparte after the war, he tells of watching a military parade on the Champs-Elysées: “Condemn me if you will,” he invites us in mock-heroic tones, “but I am a man, and I love war. I’m not such a hypocrite as to say ‘I don’t love war.’ I love it, like every well-born, healthy, courageous, strong man loves war, like every man who is not content with men, or with their misdeeds.”

It’s no credit to their acumen, then, that over the course of the Thirties even the fascists began to smell a rat. Early rapport with Mussolini and tutelage under other important party officials eventually buckled under the weight of Malaparte’s duplicity; Il Duce didn’t exactly take kindly to being reminded of his socialist youth, while other dispatches praising the Soviet Union’s early successes threatened to tilt party consensus around Malaparte from bemusement to suspicion. Beginning in 1933, he would spend a number of years in and out of various forms of incarceration and internal exile, mostly on the island of Lapari, with many shorter stays in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. (During a later imprisonment, which lasted from 1938-41, he would design and begin construction on a villa on Punta Massullo, on the eastern coast of Capri, the astounding Casa Malaparte. Begun in collaboration with renowned modernist Adalberto Libera, the house was completed by Malaparte himself, assisted by a local stonemason. Now considered a masterpiece of 20th-century Italian architecture, it is perhaps best known as the beautifully alien setting for the final act of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.) 

A fall from grace seems inevitable for a character like Malaparte, but what triggered a series of such dramatic and, one imagines, unpleasant incarcerations? Malaparte would say that he had voiced his opposition to Mussolini’s persecution of non-Catholics and was duly punished. He would say that his Coup d’Etat so enraged the party that they sought his downfall (adding, presumably for good measure, that Hitler himself had demanded his arrest for a critical chapter on the Fuhrer, charmingly titled “Hitler: A Woman”). He would say that he demanded the cutting of all ties from Nazi Germany. Indeed, he would spend the 20-plus postwar years of his life insisting that it had been his staunch anti-fascism that had led to his political undoing. In reality, he had publicly slandered his former mentor, a famed pilot named Italo Balbo, when the national hero failed to praise an essay Malaparte had written for him. He had also made liberal use of public funds for his own purposes (hardly an uncommon practice in a kleptocractic regime like Mussolini’s, but fascists never seem to mind the charge of hypocrisy). Serra, summing up this decade of ill favor, writes: “But one thing is certain: anti-Fascism, which he invoked after 1943 as the main reason for his arrest, had nothing—or very nearly nothing—to do with it.”

Serra’s biography is particularly good for this kind of debunking. An astonishingly accomplished researcher, Serra crawls through mountains of evidence to reconstruct the events of Malaparte’s life, taking care not only to refute Malaparte’s own accounts, but to try to understand just how the lies emerged as they did, pointing sometimes to ambiguous evidence seized upon and misconstrued, but always emphasizing the root cause: the man was simply a pathological liar. “Some nerve!” Serra writes after one of Malaparte’s particularly egregious apologias. “Everything in this paragraph is false.”

What’s less clear, after 400-plus pages of such demystifying, is what is true, and, again, whether it matters. Despite, or indeed, because of this commitment to documentary evidence, Malaparte becomes a kind of specter in Serra’s telling, which undoubtedly to many who knew him, perhaps even to himself, he was. It made him a perfect fascist: a middle-class, amoral opportunist, free of most obligation or scruple, happy to capitalize on resentments for the sake of power and, more often, mere adventure. His utter lack of conscience also seemed to grant him access to a kind shadow realm from which he could witness the greatest depths of human depravity and remain, if not untouched, then at least intact. His art is one of elusiveness, of lack of candor, of shame and shameless defiance, of the power of a good alibi in the face of any horror. 

Is the fact that it is undeniably great art, in any sense, redemptive? Taken as an isolated case, decades on and worlds apart, who cares? Surely we have exhausted our appetite for passing summary judgment on the “problematic” artists of the past. But that doesn’t exactly dispel the question. We are, after all, in a new era of reaction, the threat of tyranny looming over us with renewed terror, and we see every day the proliferation of Malaparte-types: unscrupulous, self-serving dissemblers, who will sacrifice any vestige of principle for a day spent in power’s cold sun. But like how today’s oligarchs don’t even have the decency to build beautiful mansions we might one day turn into public museums, our cynical operators are so satisfied with their meddling that they don’t even write novels. We live, increasingly, in a world of hollow men who, unlike Malaparte, don’t even cast a lingering shadow.

It has been more than 60 years since the first Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue hit newsstands, a moment in history that bound the business of sports journalism to the business of making sports fans horny.

What started as a way for bored SI editors to amuse themselves during the slow period of the sports calendar soon grew into an annual event capable of subsidizing much of the rest of the magazine. When sports bloggers eventually rose to power in the 2000s and early 2010s, they internalized the lessons of the swimsuit issue, and ate into SI’s subscription and advertising revenue. In their heyday, these bloggers’ randy posts about WAGs, cheerleaders, and random college students were given prominent placement on popular sports sites.

Almost two decades later, the vestiges of horny sports blogs are mostly contained on deserted websites. Remember Busted Coverage? All that’s left of its dedicated “girls” tab is an empty page, save for the word “GIRLS” splashed across the middle. Even OutKick (which employs Busted Coverage’s founder) and Barstool Sports are at a hot and bothered crossroads, as seen by the decrease in updates to the infamous “Barstool Smokeshow” vertical.

But there is at least one media executive set on bringing horny sports blogging back to the place where it all started: Former Sports Illustrated executive Chris Pirrone and his business partner Matthew Graham are now running a vertical under the SI umbrella called The Athlete Lifestyle, which manages to make the prior era of WAG blogs look like Proust’s adoring love letters by comparison. Pirrone—whose previous SI stint was viewed with “complete disdain,” a former staffer told me—has wriggled his way into the mix as an “independent publisher” operating within SI’s increasingly confusing editorial structure. 

The Athlete Lifestyle is a true throwback. Take this post from Nov. 18, with the headline “Cowboys cheerleader Kylie Dickson flexes flawless kissy selfie before Texans game.” The first sentence: “If the Dallas Cowboys are ‘America’s Team’, then well, the Cowboys cheerleaders are ‘America’s Sweethearts.’” A little further down the page is an embedded Instagram photo of two cheerleaders who are indeed making kissy faces, followed by: “Wowza. It certainly is a happy game day even for non-Cowboys fans.”

Pirrone’s investment in The Athlete Lifestyle wasn’t on my radar until a hyperlink in The Cut led me to a blog about Travis Kelce missing part of his girlfriend Taylor Swift’s birthday party. I was struck by the vertical’s bizarrely phrased headlines, which repeated the same descriptors—“turns heads,” “flawless,” and “leggy,” among others—and fixated on the outfits and poses of a select group of women: the aforementioned Taylor Swift, Livvy Dunne, Hailee Steinfeld, Jordon Hudson (Bill Belichick’s much younger girlfriend), Vanessa Bryant and her daughter Natalia Bryant, the daughters of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, Brittany Mahomes, and a handful of big-name WNBA players, well-known TV personalities, and social media influencers. 

Then I noticed that literally thousands of The Athlete Lifestyle posts, many of the horny variety, came from the same blogger: someone listed as Matt Ryan. When I first came across Mr. Ryan, and for months afterward, his profile page didn’t include a photo, a bio, or contact information. I figured this was not the Super Bowl-losing quarterback.

I was dumbfounded not just by Ryan’s style and subject matter, but by his output. I counted an average of nearly 10 posts per day appearing under his byline from November 2024 through March of this year. It does not appear that he has taken a single day off, including weekends, since Aug. 20, 2024. Who is Matt Ryan? How is he so prolific? Why is SI.com publishing so many of his cheesecake blogs? I wanted to find the human behind the byline, if there was one. 

What I eventually uncovered was odd, to say the least, and depressing. The Athlete Lifestyle is part of a tangled mess of a sports media ecosystem, where “independent publishers” hop from one content mill to another, enticing aspiring sportswriters and linking up with other self-described digital entrepreneurs to pump out “content” under dubious bylines and pretenses.

The Athlete Lifestyle’s entire existence is owed to SI’s confusing digital divide. On one side of SI.com is a staff of full-time, unionized reporters and editors; they also produce a magazine you might have read. In recent years, they’ve been pleading for job stability and to not be lumped in with embarrassing scandals that aren’t their fault. 

Current and former members of SI’s masthead are familiar with Pirrone because of his tumultuous tenure as the senior vice president and general manager of Sports Illustrated Media Group from June 2022 until January 2024. He announced ruinous layoffs in February 2023. Amidst the cutbacks, Pirrone's big editorial vision was to flood the zone with more content. In November 2023, Futurism reported that third-party product reviews published on SI.com were written by fake, AI-generated authors. SI’s publisher at the time, The Arena Group, issued a combative non-denial afterward. Then came a publishing rights tug-of-war that almost sunk SI for good. In January 2024, The Arena Group basically let go of everyone, Pirrone included. 

It wasn’t until March 2024, when Minute Media acquired SI’s publishing rights, that things began to improve. A June 2024 Axios story credited Minute Media for rehiring much of the laid-off staff. Sports Illustrated’s editor-in-chief, Steve Cannella, has raved about Minute Media's support. In a December 2024 interview, senior writer Chris Mannix said Minute Media helped move SI away from a "churn" model.

Those are fair sentiments, at least among SI’s full-time journalists. But the “churn” model is alive and well on the other side of the digital divide, where Pirrone has quietly nestled into a comfortable content mill free of pesky, unionized journalists. It’s called On SI, a network of blogs about sports teams and niche interests (collectibles, sneakers, horny ogling) published under the SI.com domain. 

On SI contributors are typically paid per article view as part of a revenue-sharing system instituted by “independent publishers,” who run the sports team/niche interest blogs in partnership with Sports Illustrated. The paid-per-clicks model is widespread and can be found at other sports sites like Fansided, Athlon Sports, and Yardbarker. To give you a sense of the potential money-making opportunities here: A recent Athlon Sports listing for a Cleveland Guardians freelance blogger offered between $2.50 and $5 per 1,000 pageviews. The specific payout rates depend on the generosity and SEO savvy of the “independent publisher.” 

During Pirrone’s time as an SI executive, he was also in charge of the On SI network, previously referred to as FanNation; Minute Media rebranded it to On SI in August 2024. It’s unclear how long Pirrone has been buying up On SI blogs as an “independent publisher,” but I do know he owns more than just The Athlete Lifestyle, and he’s running them via his business called “CPMs,” a double entendre for “cost per mille” and “Chris Pirrone Media Solutions.” 

Pirrone, who incidentally bought The Big Lead from Minute Media last year, and Graham were clearly able to convince Minute Media that The Athlete Lifestyle was a good addition to the On SI portfolio. It launched in July 2024, with Graham penning a mission statement about covering "all the eye candy around the game." 

At any given time, there are a half-dozen semi-regular contributors to The Athlete Lifestyle, and some of their posts are pretty gross. Others are about run-of-the-mill trade rumors and less sexy gossip about male athletes. The Athlete Lifestyle’s absolute workhorse of a horny blogger, Matt Ryan, goes many steps beyond that. A sampling of his headlines:

• “Livvy Dunne's Christmas nightie gets her on Santa's naughty list”
• “ESPN’s Molly Qerim wags tongue teasing low-cut full-length dress”
• “Megan Thee Stallion grinding Angel Reese seductively wins Halloween parties”
• “Caitlin Clark hugs Iowa bff Kate Martin comically inappropriately (VIDEO)” 
• “Josh Allen’s fiancée Hailee Steinfeld flexes toned legs disrobing skirt with holes”
• “Simone Biles reveals her shocking pants size, ‘struggle’ to find fit”
• “Sunisa Lee teases very grown up alluring bikini post”
• “Brittany Mahomes puts Patrick on dad duty being official breast-milk holder”
• “WNBA Toronto Tempo owner Serena Williams rocks biz heels, miniskirt fire fit with tie”

Matt Ryan’s posts are written in such a way that it’s kind of impossible to not think something weird is going on. For instance, a post with the headline “Bill Belichick’s gf Jordon Hudson makes lipstick mistake showing off secret skill" includes this indecipherable passage:

Bill Belichick’s girlfriend Jordon Hudson certainly has a big sense of humor, and now we know another talent at the same time.

The 24-year-old Hudson clearly likes to have fun with the 72-year-old Belichick like their hilarious Halloween costumes, and their epic fall photos in a corn maze, as well as her playing around like she’s part of his new North Carolina Tar Heels staff.

She’s also getting into the holiday spirit with her "naughty" fit with the coach.

What we didn’t know about Hudson was she could play a musical instrument and does so for a band performing in a concert. She revealed that while also shaming herself for wearing lipstick while practicing. 

Matt Ryan also doesn’t have an easily searchable internet presence, as is the norm for people with regular bylines. Muck Rack, a PR service that scrapes the internet for journalism bylines and arranges them on dedicated author pages, has been tossing Ryan's Athlete Lifestyle stories onto the author page of a former Burlington Free Press reporter by the same name. I tracked that Matt Ryan down: He’s a teacher in Maine, and many years removed from the journalism world. He told me he’s not the mystery Matt Ryan.

My suspicions grew when I pieced together that Pirrone and Graham have been outsourcing an unknown portion of the writing and editing on The Athlete Lifestyle to a separate LLC. That LLC, Kings Digital Media, is listed as a place of work on a handful of LinkedIn profiles whose job responsibilities include writing and editing for On SI and/or The Athlete Lifestyle. Clicking into the Kings Digital Media LinkedIn page takes you to a Sri Lankan digital marketing company, which advertises its SEO services with a presumably AI-generated image of a lion wearing a suit and holding a gun. Naturally, I came to wonder if Matt Ryan is an amalgamation of Sri Lankan SEO specialists.

Wrong! Pirrone’s LinkedIn eventually provided an important clue. Last fall, he signal-boosted another independent publisher named Eli Lippman, who was “seeking sports and entertainment content creators to work across a number of tier 1 publishers.” Long story short: Lippman is the CEO of a different, much-harder-to-find Kings Digital Media—a non-Sri Lankan content mill that teamed up with On SI, Newsweek, Spin, and who knows which other media platforms. (LinkedIn seems to have accidentally hyperlinked the Sri Lankan company to the aforementioned writers’ and editors’ pages.)

In practice, this means Pirrone and Graham worked out a deal with Sports Illustrated to run The Athlete Lifestyle and make money off horny SEO posts; they’re also outsourcing some of the work to Lippman, a content-mill middleman and fellow “independent publisher” steering his Kings Digital Media contractors to various “tier 1 publishers” like SI.com. I wasn’t sure, and still am not sure, if Matt Ryan is contracted by Graham and Pirrone or Lippman. (Lippman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Who Matt Ryan actually works for is a less interesting question than how he keeps up his staggering publishing pace. Surprisingly, I picked up on signs that Ryan is not an AI creation. AI writing is boring, but grammatically correct and low on spelling errors. Just to be sure, I plugged Ryan’s posts into Pangram, an AI detection service that’s been used and cited by Wired, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and NewsGuard, which assigns news sites a rating based on their reliability and trustworthiness. None of Ryan’s posts came back as “likely AI.” 

I contacted Pirrone and Graham, as well as Minute Media. At first, Graham responded on behalf of himself and Pirrone. I asked what the editorial purpose behind The Athlete Lifestyle is, to which he replied that the vertical is intended to cover “the daily happenings of athletes and those close to them through the lens of fashion, culture, music, etc.” Graham dodged my questions about The Athlete Lifestyle’s payment structure, how many of their contributors are contracted by Kings Digital Media, as well as the names of the other On SI verticals overseen by Pirrone. 

I also asked if Matt Ryan was a real guy. Graham wrote back that Matt Ryan’s lack of contact information and bio was an “oversight,” and that they’ve actually worked together before. He sent along the LinkedIn profile of a man named Matthew Ryan, a former senior-level executive producer and digital strategist. Ryan’s bio says that he’s a “digital monetization expert.”

I followed up: Is it Graham’s and Pirrone’s position that Matt Ryan, and only Matt Ryan, has been posting under his byline? And separately, have any contributors to the On SI verticals that Graham and Pirrone oversee have been flagged for or accused of using AI?

Graham said he could assure me “there is no one else writing under Matt’s byline and that our regular internal AI checks have raised no flags about his content.” Interestingly, Graham did not directly respond to my question about whether any of their other On SI contributors were found to have used AI.

I asked that question not because of Matt Ryan, but another contributor to The Athlete Lifestyle whose writing raised alarm bells during my reporting. Kilty Cleary, a friend of Pirrone’s, wrote for The Athlete Lifestyle during the latter half of 2024. His posts aren’t horny, which is a pleasant surprise, but they read in the unmistakable cadence of a ChatGPT or Claude prompt response. Like this blog about a pair of vintage Deion Sanders shoes released by Nike: “Whether you’re tuning in to watch Colorado’s high-flying offense or lining up to snag the Diamond Turf Retros in February, one thing’s for sure: Deion Sanders knows how to keep the spotlight exactly where it belongs—on him. And let’s be honest, would we want it any other way? Prime Time is alive and well, both on and off the field.”

When I plugged in Cleary’s five most recent The Athlete Lifestyle posts into Pangram, all came back as 99.99 percent likely to have been written by AI. So, too, are his five most recent posts for the Buffalo Bills’ On SI blog, one of the other SI properties that I figured out is run by Pirrone. I only know as much because Pirrone said so on Twitter, where he also reposted a Cleary story that came up as 99.99 percent likely to be written by AI, according to Pangram.

Pangram separately found that Cleary's three most recent posts for the Los Angeles Chargers’ On SI site are 99.99 percent likely to have been written by AI, as is his most recent post for the Carolina Panthers' On SI site—which is hilariously complimentary of David Tepper, arguably the most hated owner in pro sports. Other, older On SI posts of Cleary’s have a noticeably different writing style; I plugged a few into Pangram, and it did not detect any AI writing.

I brought Pangram’s analysis of Cleary’s posts to Minute Media. Its senior director of strategic communications, Paige Graham, wrote back: “We take the use of AI very seriously. We remove content that we find does not meet our standards routinely and recently did another round of analysis which, as you would expect, could result in the removal of both content and corresponding reporters should those findings not meet Minute Media guidelines.” 

Graham confirmed that Pirrone is not an employee of SI or Minute Media, but didn’t clarify which other On SI brands he oversees. On the subject of Matt Ryan, she conceded that his “daily story numbers are high,” but said that’s due to his “short, quick-turn pieces.” She added: “We can assure you that Minute Media does routine quality control checks on content, including for the use of AI, and Matt has come back clean in those checks.”

Minute Media’s AI assurances were given in mid-March. A haphazard selection of Cleary’s posts have since been deleted, with no editor’s notes or disclosures added to them. Most of Cleary’s posts are still up, as are many of his On SI profile pages. Matt Ryan’s faceless, bio-less profile page was recently updated to reflect his existence as a human being. Beyond that, I have no idea what to make of his prolific output, except that the best-case scenario here—he alone is publishing roughly 10 pieces a day, seven days per week, for eight straight months and counting—isn’t a great reflection of the paid-per-clicks model or, for that matter, the digital media space. 

Kilty Cleary did not respond to requests for comment. Matt Ryan did not respond to a request for comment sent to his LinkedIn profile, nor did I hear back from an email address associated with his name that I found through public records. I did, however, hear from Pirrone when I reached out one more time in the days leading up to publication of this article. Pirrone told me that he, not Matthew Graham, is the publisher of The Athlete Lifestyle vertical, and Graham is The Athlete Lifestyle’s editor. Graham’s LinkedIn still lists him as “publisher” of The Athlete Lifestyle, which he oversees “along with partner Chris Pirrone”; I do not know what to make of that discrepancy. Given a chance to respond to a former staffer’s opinion that his tenure as an SI exec was viewed with “complete disdain,” Pirrone wrote, “I'm sorry that a former staffer feels this way. My goal is to always do what’s best for my colleagues and the organization.” He said he couldn’t comment on individual content creators, presumably referring to my questions about Cleary.

Prior to publication, I also sent Paige Graham some final questions about Cleary, and the company’s AI ethics policies. Graham asked to chat on the phone, and after exchanging pleasantries, she unexpectedly connected me with SI’s editor-in-chief, Steve Cannella, who began by letting me know that SI and Minute Media can’t comment on any individuals or personnel decisions. I told Cannella I was puzzled by why he was on the call and asked if he’s involved with On SI in any capacity.

"I do not directly oversee any of those On SI sites. So I guess the answer is no,” Cannella said. “On SI writers are not Sports Illustrated staffers. They do not report to me. But the On SI family of sites obviously has an intrinsic connection to the brand. So for that reason, we pay deep attention, and we are in contact with those publishers. We expect them to adhere to our AI code of ethics, things like that."

I told Cannella that if he didn’t have any oversight of On SI—and if he wasn’t in a position to comment on Cleary—then I was curious what he did want to talk about. Cannella asked to go off the record, so I have nothing else to report about our conversation. Paige Graham later sent me Minute Media’s “Editorial AI Code of Ethics” guide.

Cannella and Minute Media aside, I was interested in what the SI Union might have to say about Matt Ryan’s barrage of bylines, as well as Cleary’s possible use of AI—two downstream effects of an increasingly bleak sports media ecosystem. They sent over the following statement: “The SI Union fights for and upholds rigorous editorial standards... There should be a clear differentiation between [our] platforms and the On SI network, which we do not work for or have input into. Journalism with SI’s name on it should always meet the standards our audience has come to expect from us and be produced by humans, not AI.”

Despite their understandable protestations, it’s impossible for SI’s unionized journalists to fully untether from the blunders and embarrassing content produced by some of the On SI blogs. As unfair as that may be, it’s the inevitable consequence of Minute Media’s embrace of distracting and shameless content mills. If anything, Minute Media has further blurred the lines between SI’s various platforms. After all, it was Minute Media’s decision to rename FanNation as On SI, which has made the less reputable sports-blog network sound virtually indistinguishable from SI proper.

For all of the praise Minute Media has received over the last year, the inauspicious reality is that the company seems to consider “independent publishers” like Chris Pirrone to be worthy business partners. As long as that continues, you can expect thousands more stories from “digital monetization experts” whose deeply confounding syntax would make Shams Charania blush. And, apparently, many more horny posts with headlines like “Gracie Hunt’s mom Tavia slays Chiefs Christmas party fit sitting on Santa’s lap.”

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

What does a successful Democratic opposition—or a successful Democratic presidency—look like? Patrick Healy, the deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, convened a roundtable of experts to discuss what he thought was that question. "I caught some heat this winter from Democrats when I raised the idea that the party is in deeper trouble with voters than its leaders are admitting," Healy wrote. 

Healy is dedicated to the panel format. He spent election season working on a sort of anti-journalism project for the Times, in which the Opinion section, collaborating with professional political consultants, gathered focus groups of what it took to be regular Americans and encouraged them to express their ignorance, confusion, and secondhand beliefs, so that the newspaper could publish them as if they were facts. For instance: 

"They can't read the Bible in schools, but you can have transgenders come to the schools and read transgender books to our kids."—Prince, 41, North Carolina, Black, Dem., food runner. 

"Vance as vice president would own up to his faults. He's not like the average politician."—Ayshah, 21, Iowa, South Asian, student, didn't vote in 2020.

"I don't do politics. But when it comes down to it, I'd rather have a businessman have a say in running the dollars of the country if it's going to help us bring costs down."—David, 56, white, sales representative, 2020 Trump voter.

This time around, instead of outsiders, Healy was talking to insiders, or at least people who had once been insiders. To talk about what he suggested was the "existential trouble" of the Democratic Party in 2025, he turned to a collection of people who'd been involved in a previous "big reset" by the party: "The rise and victory of Bill Clinton in 1992." Here was the rundown of the panelists offered by the Times:

Al From is the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist organization. William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton. Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and Democratic National Committee member, was an adviser to President Clinton. Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank.

And here are some of the things these veterans of the American political process had to say about the most pressing issues for the opposition party today: 

"[M]y view is that it's just wrong to ask the three-fifths of the country that doesn't have a college degree to pay for the tuition of those who do."—Al From

"I think a lot of ordinary Americans are asking themselves: Do the Democrats know how to draw lines anymore, or are they just pushed into extremes? You saw one of those issues figure pretty centrally in the 2024 election, when Republicans said Kamala Harris is for 'they/them' and Donald Trump is for you."—William Galston

"The country was being overrun and the interest groups—who did not have the backing of their members—were saying something that was easily translatable into open borders. So Democrats have to get right on immigration."—Elaine Kamarck 

The panel of credentialed political professionals, that is, expressed itself in exactly the same sort of vacant shibboleths as the panels of low-information marginal voters. An active member of the Democratic National Committee stated, as fact, that the "country was being overrun" by immigrants. A senior leader of a think tank said trans rights were a problem because he'd seen so many TV commercials from the Trump campaign attacking trans rights. 

One clear flaw with the exercise was that—to analyze a party whose most obvious political mistake in 2024 was trying to stick with an 81-year-old incumbent president too decrepit to advocate for his own record in public—the Times had gathered a group of people who were all born before the dawn of commercial jet aviation, to reminisce about how the Democrats had won an election more than three decades ago. Their answers were suitably fossilized. Going into 1992, From told Healy, "Democrats stood for weakness at home and in the world, big government and special interest groups, special pleadings." Then Bill Clinton, running on the slogan that he would "end welfare as we know it," overcame what Kamarck called the problem of "hypersensitivity" among members of his party, and showed the American public he was willing to reject, as Marshall put it, "the politics of entitlement." 

That story has an undeniable emotional appeal to a certain segment of the Democratic Party and the political press, and not just its oldest members. The same day the Times presented its roundtable of elders, Politico published an account of what the newly installed 48-year-old junior senator from Michigan, the former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin, has chosen as her message to the party: 

In the first of a series of speeches about the Democratic Party's path out of the wilderness, the Michigan senator said she will span everything from strategy to tactics and tone, acknowledging public perception of the party as "weak and woke" needs to change. She is urging Democrats to "fucking retake the flag" with appeals to voters' sense of patriotism, to adopt "the goddamn Alpha energy" of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell and to embrace an "airing out" of potential 2028 presidential candidates in a broadly contested primary.

In this model or mythology of things, the first enemy the Democratic Party always must subdue is the Democratic Party. The American public naturally prefers Republicans, because Republicans are strong and decisive and sensibly mainstream, while Democrats are stuck pandering to an assortment of unappealing, if not offensive, special constituencies and propping up a regime of meddlesome, wasteful government bureaucrats. 

This was the story of how the sunny and virile Ronald Reagan chased the morose and wishy-washy Jimmy Carter out of the White House, which was in turn the story of how Richard Nixon roused the Silent Majority against the dirty, America-hating hippies. It took a charismatic and ruthlessly value-shifting Bill Clinton to change that story by telling his own version of it, speaking out against big government and Sister Souljah, reassuring regular Americans that he was on their side—a reassurance that needs to be renewed every four years, to hold off the threat of another Reagan landslide. 

But Ronald Reagan has been dead for more than 20 years. Republicans have won the popular vote only twice in the nine presidential elections since he left office, and have only won an outright majority once. The party of Donald Trump is not trying to crush its opponents at the polls; it's just trying to crush its opponents. 

What were the Clinton-era strategists arguing for, when they declared that the Democrats needed to change on the issues? On student loans, the Trump position is that instead of expanding forgiveness, the government will start garnishing wages and seizing tax refunds from people who aren't able to pay. On trans rights, the Trump position is that trans people should be forced out of the military, denied care, and outed on their passports. On immigration, Trump is deporting U.S. citizen children who have cancer. 

There is neither virtue nor tactical advantage in chasing after Trump, in search of some normal and popular territory he supposedly occupies. While the Clinton veteran at the Brookings institution is admonishing Times readers that the Democrats need to acknowledge the power of the "Kamala Harris is for they/them" attack, Bill Kristol is tweeting "Stand with trans Americans." While the Democratic National Committee member is reminiscing about how "in eight years we cut 426,000 jobs from the federal government," services that keep hundreds of thousands of people alive, or millions, are collapsing because of Elon Musk's extralegal mass purge of the federal workforce. 

And while Politico reported that Slotkin was mounting an argument that "Democrats should stop using the term 'oligarchy,' a phrase she said doesn't resonate beyond coastal institutions," Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been pulling crowds of tens of thousands around the interior West on their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour. Maybe, with all due respect to the legacy of Clintonian accommodation, the term that matters is "fighting"?

But how much respect does the Clinton legacy really deserve, anyway? The Trump mythology wasn't the only mythology the old Clinton advisors were mistaking for fact. They were also caught up in the legends about their own accomplishments, a story in which what mattered about Bill Clinton was that by breaking with standard Democratic liberalism, he broke a 12-year Republican stranglehold on the White House. 

From another angle, though, the story of Clinton and of Clintonism is that he beat an unpopular George H.W. Bush for the presidency while only getting 43 percent of the vote, in a race in which 18.9 percent of voters decided they preferred a third-party candidate. He failed spectacularly to pass his promised signature healthcare reform initiative, immediately saw his party lose the House and Senate to a hard-right Republican surge in the midterms, got himself impeached, and left the White House in the hands of another Bush for eight more years. 

Galston tried to acknowledge that Clinton has produced something less than an FDR-style realignment in American politics. "We gained, at best, an incomplete victory," he said. "After Bill Clinton, it became clear that the party had accepted only some of the change that he stood for." Even that was much too flattering. What did the Clintonian rebuke to the Democratic Party's old preferences produce? His embrace of welfare reform—signing a bill produced by the Republican Congress—did nothing to stop the American right from working itself into a frenzy about Obama phones. His promise to reinvent government added more contractors and middlemen to the provision of public services, but the crusade for privatization, deregulation, and reduced government capacity, unsatisfied, kept going all the way to DOGE. 

Marshall added "national service" and "public school choice" to the list; DOGE is currently trying to gut AmeriCorps, and Republican legislators are looting state budgets to spend public money on private schools. Thirty-three years ago, when the panelists made their reputations, it seemed possible that the gap between the parties could be closed with a bit of canny brand management. To believe the old Clinton approach would work now is to believe that the Trump movement is nothing more than some sort of extended Willie Horton commercial, and that you could still co-opt it, if you could just figure out the right number of people to kill.