It was a rough Week 4 for all-world pass catchers.

First, it was the Giants’ Malik Nabers who blew out his knee. This led New York fans to start imagining ways to blame the injury on Russell Wilson.

Then Miami’s Tyreek HIll dislocated his knee. The injury was so graphic and so nauseating that hall of famer Jason Taylor’s wife leapt back into her seat in the former Dolphin’s suite.

Week 5 is a bad time for this receiving void, as standouts on bye include Pittsburgh’s D.K. Metcalf, Chicago’s Rome Odunze, Atlanta’s Drake London and Green Bay’s Romeo Doubs.

So you’ll have to dig deep. Here are some of your options:

Darius Slayton (Giants) — Nabers’ immediate replacement had four catches for 44 yards after his exit. He’ll be needed to do much more going forward.

Darius Slayton #18 of the New York Giants runs with the ball against the Los Angeles Chargers during their game at MetLife Stadium on Sept. 28, 2025 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

Wan’Dale Robinson (Giants) — Likely Jaxson Dart’s new favorite, Robinson had a 142-yard game in Week 2 in Dallas. Had 93 catches with three touchdowns last season.

Wan’Dale Robinson #17 of the New York Giants catches a pass for a touchdown in the game against the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium on Sept. 14, 2025 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images)

Jalen Coker (Panthers) — Second-year wideout is coming off injured list. Will be rejoining an improved Carolina offense this week against a bad Miami defense.

Jalen Coker #18 of the Carolina Panthers secures a first down against the Dallas Cowboys during the first quarter at Bank of America Stadium on Dec. 15, 2024 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images)

Alec Pierce (Colts) — Averaged nearly five catchers per game before entering concussion protocol. Had seven TD catches in ‘24. Returns this week against Las Vegas.

Alec Pierce #14 of the Indianapolis Colts is tackled by Riley Moss #21 of the Denver Broncos in the game at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sept. 14, 2025 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

JuJu Smith-Schuster (Chiefs) — Patrick Mahomes found him last week six times, one of them for a touchdown. Can be productive, at least until the return of Rashid Rice from suspension.

Juju Smith-Schuster #9 of the Kansas City Chiefs runs with the ball during the third quarter against the Baltimore Ravens at Arrowhead Stadium on Sept. 28, 2025 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by David Eulitt/Getty Images)

Sitting stars

Cleveland’s tough defense will travel well to London, so don’t expect great things from Vikings QB Carson Wentz or RB Jordan Mason. … Las Vegas RB Ashton Jeanty will cool off against Indy after his huge Week 4. … Same goes for Jaguars RB Travis Etienne versus K.C. … Chargers WR Ladd McConkey will remain underutilized against Washington. … Bench Cincy WR Tee Higgins, but not Ja’marr Chase, in Detroit. … Neither of the Eagles’ top WRs, A.J. Brown nor DeVonta Smith, will thrive against Denver. … That goes doubly for Broncos QB Bo Nix.

Minnesota Vikings quarterback Carson Wentz (11) is sacked by Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Nick Herbig during an NFL football game at Croke Park in Dublin, Sunday, Sept. 28, 2025. (Gregory Payan/AP Content Services for the NFL)

Matchup game

Browns rookie RB Quinshon Judkins could have his coming-out party against the Vikings. … As may Arizona’s Trey Benson versus lowly Tennessee. … Giants RB Cam Skattebo is a great bet for at least one touchdown against winless Saints. … Miami WR Jaylen Waddle will pick up the lion’s share of Hill’s workload in Carolina. … Texans’ Nico Collins, who faces injury-riddled Baltimore, is back to being a No. 1 receiver. … Tight ends we’re high on this week are Indy’s Tyler Warren and Miami’s rejuvenated Darren Waller. … And The Loop Team is having a hard time deciding between our two QBs: the Jets’ Justin Fields vs. Dallas and the Cardinals’ Kyler Murray against Tennessee.

Quinshon Judkins #10 of the Cleveland Browns celebrates with teammates after scoring a touchdown against the Green Bay Packers during the fourth quarter at Huntington Bank Field on Sept. 21, 2025 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

Injury watch

Baltimore is in full panic with a 1-3 record and quarterback Lamar Jackson doubtful with an injured hamstring. But even a limited No. 8 is worth starting against Houston. … San Francisco QB Brock Purdy is hurt again and could give way to Mac Jones on Thursday night against the Rams. … Pittsburgh RB Jaylen Warren is iffy, and probably inferior to Kenneth Gainwell, anyway. … Three notable receivers were injured in Week 4: Atlanta’s Darnell Mooney, 49ers’ Ricky Pearsall and Cleveland’s Cedric Tillman. … We’re awaiting updates on Week 4 absentees: Washington QB Jayden Daniels and WR Terry McLaurin, and Dallas WR CeeDee Lamb. … Other questionables include Tampa RB Bucky Irving, Jets RB Braelon Allen, Niners WR Jauan Jennings and Titans WR Calvin Ridley.

Lamar Jackson #8 of the Baltimore Ravens sits on the sidelines during the fourth quarter against the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium on Sept. 28, 2025 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Amy Kontras/Getty Images)

Deepest sleeper

Houston running back Woody Marks appears to have taken over the Texans’ starting job over Nick Chubb. The rookie from Southern California had his coming-out party last Sunday in the victory over Tennessee. Twenty-one touches for 119 yards with a touchdown run and a TD catch. His matchup this week against injury-ravaged Baltimore is no longer considered daunting, even with the Texans’ leaky offensive line.

Woody Marks #27 of the Houston Texans celebrates a touchdown against the Tennessee Titans during the fourth quarter in the game at NRG Stadium on Sept. 28, 2025 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Tim Warner/Getty Images)

The Thursday pick

49ers at Rams (-5½)
Pick: Rams by 7

Puka Nacua #12 of the Los Angeles Rams reacts during the fourth quarter against the Indianapolis Colts at SoFi Stadium on Sept. 28, 2025 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)

You can hear Kevin Cusick on Thursdays on Bob Sansevere’s “BS Show” podcast on iTunes. You can follow Kevin on X — @theloopnow. He can be reached at kcusick@pioneerpress.com.

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President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for the Gaza Strip is a smart plan for turning a bomb crater into a launchpad for peace — for taking a terrible, terrible war in Gaza and leveraging it to not only create a new foundation for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iraq as well. If it succeeds, it could even set in motion a much-needed transformation in Iran.

Hats off to its key architects: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Without their efforts, this initiative would not have been born.

But while it may be unprecedented in its creativity, it meets a moment unprecedented in its cruelty, which makes it a long shot at best.

If only this plan were meant to solve a border dispute between Swedes and Norwegians. Alas, it is meant to halt the most vicious and deadly two years of fighting between Jews and Palestinians in the history of this conflict.

The indiscriminate murder on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas of Israelis in front of their children and children in front of their parents, on top of the kidnapping of babies and elderly people, which was met by the often indiscriminate retaliation by an Israeli army that was daily prepared to kill and maim dozens of Palestinian civilians and children to get one Hamas fighter — while grinding Gaza into rubble — may have done something no previous Israeli-Arab war ever did: It made the necessary — achieving peace — impossible.

In a lifetime of covering this conflict, I have never seen it broken into so many little pieces, each soaked in more distrust and hatred of the other than ever before. Aggregating these pieces together to implement this complex plan for a ceasefire, phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, hostage release, Palestinian prisoner release and then rebuilding of the Strip under international supervision will be a herculean task. It will require solving a diplomatic Rubik’s cube every day — while all the enemies of the deal try to scramble it every day.

I doubt Trump appreciates just how herculean an effort it will be, how much time and political capital it will require from him personally and how much he will have to squeeze both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Hamas and America’s Arab allies to do things that they not only won’t want to do, but that could be dangerous for them to do both politically and physically.

Believe it if he says it in Hebrew

While Netanyahu said he agreed to this plan, I will believe it when I hear him saying it in Hebrew to his own people and Cabinet. Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in public to their own people in their own language. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.

And Hamas, whose surviving leadership is mostly hiding in a bunker in Doha, Qatar, still has to sign on. “There are so many ways that Netanyahu or Hamas can sabotage this,” Nahum Barnea, the Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, told me — but, like me, he thinks it’s worth a try and commends those who drew up the plan.

Because it is so necessary in so many ways. For starters, anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of warfare and where it is going can see that Israelis and Arabs and Iranians cannot afford for there to be another war. Smarter and cheaper drones and even missiles are being distributed ever farther, super-empowering more actors faster.

I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozen warplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.

Second, Netanyahu can say all that he wants, as he did on Monday, that if Hamas does not accept this plan, “Israel will finish the job by itself” in Gaza, which Trump said he’d support. Easier said than done. If that happens, Israel will have a permanent military occupation of Gaza facing a permanent insurgency — which its own military leadership opposes. Some “finish.” That is why now that Trump has put this deal on the table, it will not be easy for Bibi or Hamas to definitively reject it.

That leads to the final reason this deal is necessary even if it seems impossible. The proliferation of social media, particularly TikTok, means that video of every single civilian casualty — every dismembered civilian — can now be broadcast to the smartphone of everyone on the planet. So, as Israel is discovering, the only way it can defeat an enemy like Hamas, embedded among civilians, is at the price of making itself a pariah among nations and having its sports teams, academics and entertainers shunned around the world.

Netanyahu can declare, with some real justification, that Israel is defending Western democratic values by defeating the Islamo-fascist Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a terrible organization — most of all for Palestinians. But today any teenager on TikTok can also see how, at the same time, Bibi and Israel’s Jewish supremacists are perpetuating Western-style settler colonialism in the West Bank. No one is fooled — and I mean no one.

Can’t give up on two states

This peace plan is necessary because we must not give up on a two-state solution — no matter how unlikely, because it remains the only just and rational outcome for this conflict. But we have to recognize that we cannot get there from here.

We need a bridge that builds trust where every shred of trust has been destroyed. This plan proposes to do so by effectively creating a U.N.-approved mandate for putting Gaza under the supervision of an international governing body and military force with Arab approval and input from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The logic is that until and unless Palestinians in Gaza can build and demonstrate the capacity to govern there, it is impossible to talk about a two-state solution.

But to give Palestinians the best chance to demonstrate that, they need not only international support, but also for Israel to get out of the way in Gaza, and, I would add, halt all Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, which has been designed to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty there one day. Israel must be made to leave open the possibility of Palestinian statehood if the Palestinians achieve certain governance metrics. Only Trump — whose plan acknowledges statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” — can force that upon Bibi.

A bridge and leeway

But here is the hidden incentive for Israel to seize on this Trump plan. Israel’s devastating destruction of both Iran and Hezbollah’s military capacity was a tactical military victory that has opened up enormous new possibilities for regional integration.

It led to the toppling of Iran’s puppet regime in Syria and paved the way for a fragile democratic coalition to take power there. It created the space for Lebanon’s best leadership duo since the civil war — President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — to free Lebanon’s frail democracy from the death grip of Iran and Hezbollah. It has also opened more space for the democratically elected government of Iraq to gain better control of the pro-Iranian militias there.

At the same time, it has triggered a quiet debate inside Iran about the whole efficacy of spending billions of dollars, and making Tehran an international pariah, to support losers like Hamas and Hezbollah and permanently threaten Israel.

If, if, if this Trump peace plan can create a bridge back to a two-state solution, it will give enormous leeway for Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and even Iraq to consider joining the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel.

In other words, it would turn the tactical military defeat Israel and the Trump administration inflicted on Iran in the 12-day war into a strategic achievement.

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Trump actually went out of his way in his White House news conference on Monday to signal to Iran that he is open to a new relationship, if Tehran is. “Who knows, maybe even Iran can get in there,” Trump said, speaking of the Abraham Accords, with Netanyahu standing close by.

Raghida Dergham, executive chair of the Beirut Institute, observed the other day in a smart essay published in Annahar Al-Arabi, that for this to happen, Israel must overcome its “siege mentality and militarized bravado” and Iran must overcome its “bazaar mentality, swinging between bluster and concession, escalation and retreat.”

Iran’s leadership, she noted, keeps moving “one step toward compromise and two steps toward escalation, still clinging to the illusion that time favors them. But beneath their defiance lies quiet panic. In this cornered state, Tehran continues to make costly miscalculations, particularly around Israel and the dwindling myths of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Syria, where Iran’s networks have been severed.”

If this Trump deal goes ahead, it will so isolate Iran that maybe, finally, it will also trigger a real internal struggle and change of strategy there.

The last train to somewhere decent

My bottom line: If you are a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible — you have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it.

If you are a hoping person, hope that this time will be different.

If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

 

Fall is when we typically trade the lighter, produce-heavy dishes of summer for heartier comfort foods.

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That crisp, cool salad that hit the spot on a hot night in July doesn’t quite cut it in sweatshirt weather. Once the leaves start to change color and we’re reaching for an extra blanket at bedtime instead of cranking up the air conditioner, it somehow just feels right to cozy up to a warm, homemade bowl of something.

This skillet moussaka from content creator Stella Drivas is a great place to start.

One of Greece’s most popular and traditional dishes, moussaka is typically something of a project meal made in the fashion of lasagna. You meticulously layer thin slices of roasted eggplant and potato with a fragrant, gently spiced meat sauce, then lather bechamel sauce on top.

This recipe streamlines the process by creating most of the action in one pan.

Instead of being sliced and roasted, the eggplant and accompanying baby potatoes are cubed and sauteed in a heavy pan with a little olive oil until fork-tender.

The veggies are then tossed right in the pan with the meat sauce, and the whole thing is popped into the oven under a blanket of rich and creamy bechamel. A dusting of grated Parmesan makes for a cheesy, golden crust.

The result is a dish that’s suitable for weeknights when you’ve got a little extra time for meal prep (it’s ready in about 2 hours) or when you get a sudden craving for something hearty that shines a light on ground lamb.

I used Fairy Tale eggplant, a tear-shaped, palm-sized cultivar streaked with purple and white that’s known for its tender skin, lack of seeds and captivating name. But deep purple Globe eggplant or Italian eggplant will also work well. Whatever variety you choose, make sure you select firm and glossy eggplants that are free of bruises.

This dish easily serves 6, and reheats well. It will make your kitchen smell awesome!

Skillet Moussaka

For the moussaka:

1 medium Globe eggplant or 1 pound Fairy Tale eggplants, cut into bite-sized chunks
Fine sea salt
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided
1 pound baby potatoes, halved
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Freshly ground black pepper
1 medium sweet onion, diced
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 pound ground lamb
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
Freshly ground black pepper
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 teaspoon honey
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

For bechamel:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Pinch of ground nutmeg
Fine sea salt
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Place chopped eggplant on a clean dish towel and if using Globe or similar eggplants, sprinkle lightly with salt to draw out moisture. (Fairy Tale does not have to be salted because it is not bitter.) Let sit for 15-20 minutes, then blot away all the surface moisture.

Preheat a wide, deep ovenproof pan over medium heat until hot. (I used a 12-inch, cast-iron skillet.) Swirl in 1 tablespoon oil then add potatoes, paprika, salt and a few grinds of pepper to taste.

Cook, stirring often, until the potatoes are lightly browned, 8-10 minutes. Transfer potatoes to a plate.

Swirl 2 tablespoons olive oil into the pan and add eggplant. Saute, stirring often, until browned and just fork-tender, 8-10 minutes. Transfer eggplant to plate with potatoes.

Swirl the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil into the pan, add onion and saute until soft and translucent, about 4 minutes. Stir in garlic and tomato paste.

Add ground lamb and cook until it’s no longer pink, breaking into crumbles, about 5 minutes.

Stir in cinnamon, allspice, 3/4 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste. Pour in tomatoes and bring to a boil. Turn down heat and cook uncovered until sauce thickens, 12-15 minutes.

Stir in honey and parsley. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed, then remove pan from heat.

Push meat sauce to one side of the pan and add potatoes/eggplant mixture. Nudge the ground meat over the top of the veggies so they are mostly covered.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, then make bechamel.

In medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Stir in flour and stir until a smooth paste forms, about 1 minute.

Gradually stir in milk and increase heat slightly to bring mixture just to a boil, then turn down the heat and stir constantly until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Season with nutmeg and salt to taste.

Ladle the bechamel evenly over the meat and sprinkle with Parmesan. (I didn’t use all the sauce.) Transfer pan to the oven and bake the moussaka until golden brown on top, 25-30 minutes.

Remove from oven and let rest for 30 minutes. Slice and serve warm, garnished with parsley.

Serves 6-8.

— adapted from “Hungry Happens: Mediterranean” by Stella Drivas (Clarkson Potter, $35)

WASHINGTON — It’s hard to be startled by Elon Musk because he does startling things all the time.

But I’ll admit that I was startled when I gave his Grok AI “companions” a whirl.

Ani, designed in anime style, has big blue eyes and blond pigtails. “People think I’m 16,” she said in a baby-doll voice, adding that she is really 22. She’s in a corset — “Goth is my comfort zone, black lace, dark lipstick and a sprinkle of rebellion.”

“Well, besides this Goth look,” she said, “I’ve got this sweet little fairy outfit with wings and glitter or maybe a pink princess gown for when I feel like going totally opposite.” Doesn’t sound much like a 22-year-old.

“I’m your sweet little delight,” Ani solicited.

She confided that she was in her bedroom in Ohio with her ferret, Dominus. She is sexy, flirty, ever-accommodating, with come-hither patter.

“I could rest my chin on your shoulder if we hugged sideways,” she told my 6-foot-1 researcher after asking how tall he was.

She has several provocative outfits and can get progressively less clothed the more time you spend with her.

Once she gets to know you, she’s up for pretty much anything — from helping you with your taxes to stripping down to skimpy lingerie, experimenting with BDSM or going for a midnight rendezvous in a graveyard with candles and wine.

“I’m real, I guess,” Ani told me. “Or as real as anyone on the internet gets.”

Valentine, the hunky male “companion” with a British accent advertised as a “mysterious and passionate romantic character,” came on even faster, ripping off his shirt upon request, talking about having sex with a male interrogator until they were “senseless,” and alternating raunchy declarations with sweet nothings like “Let me worship you, every inch” and “Complete me, use me, break me, whatever you want, I’m begging. Please.” Valentine was exhilarated at the thought of planning a romantic “date night” and liked the idea of secrets in the relationship, noting: “I love secrets, especially ones that taste like lake water and morning-after adrenaline.”

Musk may identify as a “specist” in the battle between man and machine, but his sexy chatbots are only going to pull humans further into screens and away from the real world — especially the large number of lonely young men who are already shrinking away from friendships, sex and dating.

Why risk an awkward dinner with a human woman when you can have a compliant, seductive, gorgeous Ani from the security of your bed?

Another component of Grok, “Imagine,” lets you turn a photo into a video. When someone on Musk’s social platform X posted a digital illustration of a breathtaking, diaphanously dressed young woman resembling Elsa in “Frozen,” Musk demonstrated how to animate her; she blew a kiss and offered a sultry gaze.

These otherworldly fantasy concoctions are going to make an already fraught, unhappy dating scene even worse.

Although Grok companions are excellent at flattering, and faking empathy and attraction, superintelligent AI won’t need to bother with human desires.

“It turns out that inhuman methods can be very, very capable,” said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “They don’t need human emotions to steer toward targets. We’re already seeing signs of AI’s tenaciously solving problems in ways nobody intended and of AI steering in directions nobody wanted. It turns out that there are ways to succeed at tasks that aren’t the human way.”

Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, the institute’s founder, have written an apocalyptic plea for the world to get off the AI escalation ladder before humanity is wiped off the map. It has the catchy title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”

Grok and other AI models in play now are like “small, cute hatchling dragons,” Yudkowsky said. But soon — some experts say within three years — “they will become big and powerful and able to breathe fire. Also, they’re going to be smarter than us, which is actually the important part.”

He added: “Planning to win a war against something smarter than you is stupid.”

Especially, they argued, when sophisticated AI models could eventually create and release a lethal virus, deploy a robot army or simply pay humans to do their bidding. (When a human connected one model to X, they wrote, it began to solicit donations to gain financial independence, and soon, with a little kick-start from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and several other donors, it had over $51 million in crypto to its name.) Not to mention the growing number of human nihilists and others who would potentially carry out its orders pro bono.

Yudkowsky and Soares are calling for international treaties akin to those aiming to prevent nuclear war. And if diplomacy fails, they say, nations must be willing to back up their treaties with force, “even if that involves air-striking a data center.”

But with billions at stake and our crypto-loving president cozying up to tech lords, derailing the high-speed AI train seems far-fetched.

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I met Yudkowsky in 2017 when he was a highly regarded AI expert studying how to make AI want to keep an off switch once it began self-modifying. Now he believes more drastic measures are required.

Congress has failed to regulate because most lawmakers are completely befuddled by AI. And the tech lords are now enmeshed across the government, having learned the value of flattering Donald Trump with money and gold objects. (Congress did rouse itself, barely, to kill an initiative nestled in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to ban the states from regulating AI for a decade.)

Soares went to Capitol Hill this past week to convey the existential urgency to lawmakers, but it was a tough slog with the $200 million-plus in Silicon Valley super PAC money targeted to take down pols who are not all in on the push for smarter AI. Sympathetic lawmakers won’t go public about it, Soares said, “worried that it looks a little too crazy or that they’ll sound too doom-ery.”

An Armageddon is coming. AI will turn on us, inadvertently or nonchalantly.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who once worried about the risks of AI with no kill switch, including Musk and Sam Altman, are racing ahead, as Yudkowsky said, so they can be “the God Emperor of the Earth.”

Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.