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A rift is growing in a sport that, depending on whom you ask, is either a bone-crushing, tendon-ripping martial art or just a bunch of people in weird costumes rolling around on the floor. Jiu-jitsu cuts across divides of class, race and creed: Mark Zuckerberg does it, but so do doctors, HVAC technicians and street kids in favelas in Rio de Janeiro. My own training partners over the past six years have included an F.B.I. agent, a glass blower and a doorman at a brothel. For us, the gym is a romper room, a place to exercise our brains, work up a sweat and forget the world. This used to be easy, because no one took jiu-jitsu seriously. Storied matches unfolded before audiences smaller than those at a high school play.

Lately, though, a new faction has appeared: modern-day gladiators, flat-earthers and vaccine skeptics, guys who thrill at the mantra “I am a shark, the ground is my ocean, and most people don’t even know how to swim.” They agree with Andrew Tate that “men’s life is war,” but because they can’t or won’t take up arms in a real conflict, they take their warrior ethos into the training room.

Their hero is Gordon Ryan, maybe the best athlete the sport has ever seen, who marries supreme control on the mats with alarming levels of vulnerable narcissism and hard-right politics. In his prolific internet posting, obnoxiousness is the point: Not only has he taunted his rivals, he has also encouraged one of them to commit suicide; he has belittled the homeless and, on YouTube, has driven his truck to the Southern border with a rifle to joke about “picking off illegals.”

Standing opposite him is Craig Jones, the self-proclaimed “world’s second-greatest grappler,” a quick-witted Australian known for prancing around in tiny bathing suits and tie-dyed T-shirts with the motto “Keep Jiu-Jitsu Gay” on the front. Though the two are former teammates, Jones split from Ryan’s squad acrimoniously in 2021, and social media bickering quickly ensued. Jones’s taunts included challenging Ryan to an I.Q. test, insinuating that he can’t read and having witches curse him in Romania. Ryan couldn’t resist firing back, generally in long tirades full of grousing. Ryan has thrice bested Jones in competition; online, you could argue he hasn’t won a confrontation yet.

Jones summed up his philosophy regarding rival athletes on his own podcast: “Their full-time job is jiu-jitsu; that’s their passion in life. My passion in life is [expletive] with people on the internet.” He has used social media to skewer the self-regard of almost everyone who has crossed him and in the process has brought the sport back down to earth. Denouncing the “weird cultlike figures and leaders in the sport,” he urges fans to “stop listening to your Navy SEAL podcast, get out of the ice bath” and enjoy their “adult karate.”

Both athletes face a problem: As a pure sport, jiu-jitsu will always struggle for attention. For most viewers, the matches are too complicated and too boring; I’m currently watching a four-hour instructional video on “scientific gripping,” to give some sense of the tediousness of its small movements. Ryan’s approach, apart from technical prowess, has been to go all-in on reactionary white-male grievance. This won him almost a million Instagram followers and an invitation to Donald Trump’s inauguration, but it has also made him the butt of Jones’s mischief. Jones has gibed about Ryan’s alleged sexual preferences and raffled off Ryan’s former car after clandestinely buying it. When Ryan posted about a stomach ailment with a photo of himself looking haggard, Jones used it to plug his sponsor, the hormone-therapy company Evertitan.

Jones’s provocations flip the scripted approach of, say, the W.W.E., with real-life drama bringing eyes to bona fide competition. His humor isn’t for everyone — he once went viral for introducing U.S. audiences to “nose beers,” the Australian slang for cocaine. But while his clowning may not be wholesome, it’s a much-needed corrective to the “epidemic of alpha males” he sees threatening to take over jiu-jitsu.

It once felt virtuous to be the kind of person who said, “I don’t care about drama on the internet.” Later, it looked like a leftover luxury from when old mass media still reigned. Nowadays, it’s a kind of dereliction. The internet is where our moral battles are fought — in politics, in sexual ethics, in visions of the good life. And it’s time to admit that with this shift comes the end of subtlety, deliberation and notions of civility. Only a better troll can beat a troll.

In recent years, many have accepted that being informed means paying attention to political influencers like Hasan Piker on the left and Candace Owens on the right. But is that reason enough to care about the chronically online figureheads of a sport whose main demographic, to quote another Jones zinger, is “recently divorced guys trying to get back in shape”? Yes, I’d say: Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts are among the many subcultures that increasingly regulate the vibes flowing into politics, rather than the other way around. And if Gordon Ryan is going to push George Floyd conspiracy theories and inveigh against immigrants, it’s important to have a Craig Jones working the social media levers from the other end.

Labor rights, gender equality, the nefarious effects of monopolies — these affect sports as they do society, and Jones’s trolling addresses all of them. For years, promoters used “visibility” as an excuse to underpay athletes. These same people paid women far less, claiming without proof that they didn’t attract viewers. To show them up, Jones started his own tournament, the Craig Jones Invitational, with $2 million in prize money, dream matchups for hard-core fans and the first “intergender world championship,” pitting Jones against Gabi Garcia, jiu-jitsu’s most decorated female competitor. Not only did his athletes get compensated, but other organizations were compelled to do better.

C.J.I. is now on its way to becoming the most successful franchise in jiu-jitsu. (The U.F.C. has a knockoff with better numbers, but some suspect that it artificially inflates views.) In the meantime, Jones has stepped away from the mats to promote his work with the Guardian Project, which runs gyms for poor children across five continents. Taking on the role of a “low-I.Q. Anthony Bourdain,” he has vlogged from more than a dozen countries, including the Philippines, Ethiopia and Peru. One day, he’s dressed as Santa in fur-trimmed booty shorts giving gifts to kids in Balinese slums; the next, he’s getting shot at in Ukraine, where he has given charity seminars to raise money for soldiers. Some wear their politics on their sleeve; Jones has his on his thigh, where he got an MS-13 tattoo as a “travel hack” for an “all-expenses-paid trip to El Salvador” in mockery of Trump’s deportation policies.

Jones’s health has suffered from years on the road, steroids and valiant ingestion of drugs, and after the second edition of C.J.I., he threatened to disappear for a while. The limelight must have been getting grim, and the stresses of promoting began to show. Jones quit his former team, posting fan art of himself as a deadbeat dad running out on his family. A brief social media silence followed, and fans feared that the fun might be over. But he soon popped back up in Culiacán, the home base of the Sinaloa cartel, posing as the fictional narcotraficante “El Gringo Blanco Loco” and training with the local kids. A fan said she had followed him for his “business journey” but now wanted “to do copious amounts of blow and take shots of taka vodka in the back seat of a stranger’s car in Vietnam.” This probably won’t land Jones on a Wheaties box, but in jiu-jitsu, you take the heroes you can get. Rarely have devotees of a sport been so grateful to someone who has worked so hard to make an absolute joke of it.

Source photographs for illustration above: Screenshot from YouTube; Gregory Payan/Associated Press; Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC, via Getty Images; iStockphoto/Getty Images.

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Among the wisest things I’ve ever seen written about AI is “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The same can be said for journalism. I want AI to do the chores so I can do the journalism. Time I’m not manually pulling apart PDFs is time I can spend talking to people.

Last week, Google launched their much anticipated Gemini 3 model, and much is being said and written about it. One very interesting thing they did was launch a Visual Studio Code version of their own called Antigravity. It’s a development environment with an “agentic coding surface” added as one of the primary interfaces to it.

I’ll be honest, when I first read about it, I was pretty meh. So it’s Claude Code (which you can plug into Visual Studio Code!) or Open AI’s Codex, but for Google this time. Okay. Fine. But I started seeing some overreaction to it online, and it made me curious.

I’m ready to say we may be looking at a truly impactful data journalism tool here. I don’t want to fall into the same trap and overreact by saying it’s as big as the spreadsheet or the search engine, but I’m also not saying it isn’t.

In short, it has astonishing potential as a data journalism tool.

What has me so excited? My employer’s salary “database” which is a 1,957 page PDF. A PDF formatted in such a way as to make parsing it a practical impossibility. And before you ask: state law says if they “publish” data in this form, then they don’t have to give it to you in a different form. Many of us have asked.

What makes it so hard are people who get paid out of multiple budget pots. Take, for example, me. I have one job according to the university: professor of practice. I get paid out of one account. My entry in the pdf is one line. Easy. Colleagues of mine might have multiple jobs. Some administrators in my college are half administrators (pot one), half professors (pot two). But they also have endowed positions, so they get paid from a third pot. In the PDF, they’re on four lines. Pots one, two and three and a fourth that is the total. But only the first line gets all of the data. The rest? Blank.

Notice also that names and where they get paid from blur together. Notice how the length of the alternate funds also overlap the name and position columns. There is no reason this data needs to look like this, but the university considers this as being responsive to a public records request. Want to analyze this data? Want to compare it across time? Compare administrators to faculty? Good luck.

That is, until Gemini 3 and Antigravity came along.

After an afternoon of messing around with Antigravity to fiddle with the design of this website, I decided to just try something. I had been messing with DeepseekOCR, an open weights model that you can run on your own hardware that is very good at finding tables in PDFs and converting those to markdown tables. I was very impressed. But I wondered how well Antigravity/Gemini 3 would do with this pdf.

Answer: Gobsmacked. Gob. Smacked.

I put the PDF and a screenshot of the first page in a folder, connected that folder to Antigravity, and wrote this half-assed prompt from the couch.

I am attempting to extract structured data from a frustratingly formatted PDF. What I need at the end is a csv file that has the data contained in the screenshot. I can handle the intricacies of the data after I get the structured version. Can you take a look at the screenshot first to see if you can extract the tabular structure?

I didn’t even ask it to do the whole PDF. I just wanted the screenshot of the first page. That’s it. What it did was devise an implementation plan, wrote a walkthrough of what it did as it was doing it, then wrote a Python script using pdfplumber that extracted the data out of all 1,957 pages, and then wrote a cleaner script to fix some formatting weirdness. It took my prompt, worked for about 10 minutes and spit out a csv file that was orders of magnitude better than anything I had managed myself in years of on-and-off messing with this file.

All I did was stare at it as it kept trying things and checking them, improving the code using random selections of data to check if it was all working. And then, it finished. I couldn’t believe it worked, so I opened it and was blown away with what it did.

It wasn’t perfect, however. In fact, it assumed that those extra rows where people got paid from other pots were a mistake and it filtered them out.

So I went back to the prompt:

I’ve been doing some of my own spot checking and there is a basic assumption at the beginning that is not correct. That assumption is lines 34-38 of the clean_salary_data.py. Specifically:

# Basic check: First column should be Cost Element (6 digits) # OR sometimes it’s empty if it’s a continuation? No, looking at the data, most data rows have it. # Let’s look at row 26: 512100,“Batman, Renee”,F,…

first_col = row[0].strip()

There are entries where the next line, which does not contain a cost object *is* a continuation. This data is university salary data, and how they show professors with endowed chairs, for example, is to put their faculty job on one line with a cost object, then the next line without one is their endowed chair line and at the bottom is a total line for that person. Not capturing the next few lines is causing some issues with accuracy. Can we capture those? For the vast majority of data, your method works extraordinarily well. It’s just not working for the few who have multiple salary inputs.

About 8 minutes later, I had an astonishingly good – much better though still not perfect - version of this data.

What’s wrong with it?

It didn’t want to make assumptions about spacing, so it left odd spacing that is an artifact of the PDF. So some people are Ma tt Waite or Profe ssor. The overlapping columns are an issue I’m likely going to have to contend with manually. I’m going to have to fill in blank columns and total up people to get to one row one person.

But I can’t stress this enough: this is light years beyond any tool I’ve been able to throw at this in years of trying. Every NICAR, I throw some new tool at it and leave disappointed. This is the first time my gob has been smacked by something an AI is doing.

Could I have written this code? Sure. I’ve even tried using pdfplumber to do it and didn’t have the same results. It would have taken me much longer, and frankly that’s probably enough to get me to go away. I’ve got papers to grade and students upset with me about how long it’s taking.

Can’t say this enough: astonished at what this might mean for freeing journalists up to do journalism instead of un-screwing up government PDFs.

Want to see all of the output? It’s on GitHub.

“Can you over estimate the time that it would take you to compile/copy the invoices requested and let me know when you have a chance?” one district employee wrote in a May 12, 2025, email, which York obtained in a broader record release. “Hopefully, when I let [York] know the cost they will not want to do it.”

In an email between school officials, a Lexington father found written confirmation of what many public records requesters have suspected: Public employees were conspiring to overcharge him for documents he was entitled to, in the hopes he would abandon the request.Photo illustration Ryan Huddle \ Globe staff

The request in question ended up getting fulfilled for free, rather than York having to pay the $1,000 estimate, as part of the same data release that the email was in. Lexington Superintendent Julie Hackett apologized to York after he notified her of the duplicitous email last month. But York and other residents have been assessed even higher cost estimates for other requests, documents show, and they suspect the intentional over-charging in this case reflects a broader culture at Lexington Public Schools.

In a broader sense, the email exemplifies the consequence-free resistance to releasing records by public agencies across Massachusetts, said Justin Silverman, an attorney and the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.

“It’s a symptom of our poor public records law that allows those in government agencies, whether it’s a school or some other public body, to play games with the law to withhold records that should be given to the public, and most of the time do so without any kind of accountability,” Silverman said.

Silverman said he could not recall another instance of such clear proof of deceit.

In an email to the Globe, Hackett reiterated her apology to York.

“The email was highly inappropriate and does not reflect our values,” Hackett said. “We have investigated and addressed the matter internally, and we appointed a new Records Access Officer.”

The email was written by Kristen McGrath, executive administrative assistant for human resources. Until recently, the district’s records officer was Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources Christine Lyons. Hackett said she could not comment on personnel matters, but both are still listed on the district website.

York’s records request was part of an investigation he and other parents launched into curriculum and central office spending, arising originally from concerns about special education and literacy instruction in the district. York was seeking documentation for expense reports by Hackett, among other records. How, he wanted to know, did the Central Office spend $25,000 last year at the Beauport Hotel, or more than $900 at a Capital Burger?

Shortly after McGrath sent the “over estimate” email in May, the district told York the request would take 40 hours to fulfill and cost $1,000. He launched a fund-raising campaign on May 13, which came to the superintendent’s attention, and that night she said at a School Committee meeting that she would cancel the invoice.

The district went on to release 60,000 pages of communications, which included the email that went unnoticed until last month.

Other records provided by York show that contrary to Hackett’s summary of district policy, the district has repeatedly charged residents fees, sometimes in excess of the $1,000 it sought on York’s request.

On Sept. 16, just a month before Hackett’s email, the district assessed a $2,198.75 fee to York to compile and redact records related to curriculum consultants.

Another parent shared records with the Globe indicating she was assessed $1,200 in fees for an August request; after she appealed to the state record’s supervisor in October and York notified the state of the email, her fee was reduced to $250.

Silverman said it was critical that the superintendent make sure employees comply with the law going forward, but it also shows the need for sharper teeth on the state’s public records law.

Massachusetts residents have made increasing appeals to the supervisor in recent years, with the number filed rising from about 1,600 in 2017 to about 3,000 last year, according to the public records division of the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office. But the records supervisor, part of the secretary of the Commonwealth’s office, has no ability to enforce its own rulings, Silverman said.

The attorney general’s office can take on cases, he added, but it rarely does.

In an attempt to get another record request fulfilled, York shared the “over-estimate” email with the state’s records supervisor, as evidence of a “broader culture within LPS regarding how public records are handled.”

In a response, the supervisor, Manza Arthur, took note of the email but took no further action, instead encouraging York and the school “to communicate further in order to facilitate producing records efficiently and affordably.”

Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the secretary of the Commonwealth, said the “office certainly does not condone or support any effort to overestimate or overcharge,” but it was not appropriate to refer the matter to the attorney general’s office without a determination on the merits of the fee estimate.

“If the requester is unsatisfied with the revised fee estimate they receive, they may certainly contact our office to reopen the appeal,” O’Malley said.

For York, it feels like there’s no clear way to get the records he’s seeking.

“Everything feels like a coverup,” York said. “They do what they want with zero accountability.”

John Hilliard of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.