NowLoop

ESPN reporter Lindsey Thiry found herself accosted by an alarmingly big bug at Los Angeles Rams camp Thursday. She was preparing for a live report when the flying creature suddenly dive-bombed in. The bug hovered around Thiry for several seconds until the NFL reporter gave it a good and audible thwack with her mic. ESPN broadcaster Molly McGrath later interviewed Thiry about the identity of the bug. "What is that, a wasp? What was that, Lindsey?" McGrath asked. "It was the biggest bug I've ever seen," Thiry answered, having recovered from the ordeal.

Julien Kimmig's career began with a surprising abundance of feces. As a PhD student working at a Cambrian site in northern Canada, Kimmig realized that roughly half the fossils in that outcrop were coprolites, or fossilized poops. Kimmig, now the head of the paleontology and evolution division at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, wondered what explained the deluge of dung. In 2020, Russell Bicknell, an evolutionary biologist and paleobiologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, approached Kimmig with some Cambrian coprolites from southern Australia that no other scientists had particularly cared to study. Prehistoric poops in hand, Kimmig and Bicknell began compiling a database of the earliest evidence of turds on Earth. The project occasionally stalled, but the researchers eventually picked up on a pattern. In the early Cambrian period, around 538 million years ago, all droppings were microscopic. By the middle Cambrian, scat was finally visible to the naked eye, and it came in a cornucopia of forms: spheres, ellipses, pellets, cylinders, and the intriguingly named "exploded fecal carpets." The researchers realized this coincided with the development of animal guts. The fancier the gut, the fancier (and bigger) the poop. After tossing ideas around, they hit on a thesis: What if the presence of poop enabled early animals to expand into deeper waters, accelerating the evolution of life on Earth? Kimmig and Bicknell's paper on what they dub the "Cambrian fecal revolution" was recently published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. They make the case that as animals got bigger, their poops exploded in possibility, getting larger and more complicated. This positive feedback loop paved the way for species to expand into new territory, diversify, and define modern ecosystems. So stop whatever you're doing, especially if you're eating, and enjoy this conversation with Kimmig where we try to get to the bottom of the shit underlying the world as we know it. This interview, conducted this past Wednesday, has been lightly edited for clarity.

After inflaming a culture war and causing her teammates and colleagues to be bombarded with hypothetical questions for weeks due to her transphobic comments published in a national media outlet, Sophie Cunningham wants to stick to sports. "I'm going to let people just do the speaking for themselves, but for me, I want to get back to basketball," she said last Wednesday. If this past week has been her trying to get back to basketball, she might not ever catch up to it. Saturday's Fever-Sky game will keep Cunningham in the greater news cycle, albeit for a reason more germane to her sport. Late in the first quarter, Cunningham went up for a layup on a fast break, and Chicago's DiJonai Carrington clobbered her across the face, sending the Fever guard tumbling to the floor. Cunningham then popped up before she was corralled by her teammate Makayla Timpson in a classic "Hold me back" situation. The officiating crew reviewed the play and tagged Carrington with a flagrant 2 foul, automatically ejecting her from the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGpwi23QBSE

Alligator Alcatraz was a blueprint. Creating an ICE detention center out of tents, trailers, and cages amid the sawgrass wetlands of the Florida Everglades, and all of the dangerous reptiles that live there, is equally sadistic and laughable—ludicrously cruel, medieval in form and concept, legible more as a taunt than a security measure. Before it closed in June, the conditions of that concentration camp were dismal and inhumane. Disease ran rampant, adequate medical treatment was rarely given, and prisoners were subjected to disciplinary measures that Amnesty International found edged into torture. The security perimeter, beyond the usual fences and wire, was the harsh Florida elements and the alligators that gave the facility its nickname. Why would a country that pours billions of dollars into its military and policing, money that pays for torture programs and mass technological surveillance of its civilians, need to use tents as a prison in an area where the heat index can reach over 100 degrees and even the grass has teeth? Despite Alligator Alcatraz costing nearly $1 billion, it was defiantly and even proudly medieval in form and concept. It fits, too, that government officials engaged in manic rounds of cost-cutting as they tried to build more permanent facilities. Perhaps the Trump administration thought they would fund the project with all of the themed merch capitalizing off the racist bloodlust of the American conservative. Perhaps they didn't think about it very much at all. And yet, among the world leaders with which the sort of stagey brutality of Alligator Alcatraz would find its most appreciative audience, it has been an inspiration. For all of the billions of dollars that despotic states spend building and enforcing a system of control and surveillance upon non-consenting populations, this turn toward such cruelty feels oddly inevitable. On the merits, though, it is just another part of the deadly exchange of policing tactics between Israel and the United States.

Hello there. It's a slow summer Friday, so let's try to run out the clock with a staff chat. We'll be down below ready to answer any questions you might have. Update (3:11 p.m. ET): OK, we're wrapping up here! Enjoy the weekend.

Sarah: All summer long, we’ve been saying “Thank god there are two of us,” whether we’re hyping each other up to send jokes in Slack or encouraging each other to ask members of the staff to chat. But this may have been the toughest challenge we faced together.  Sohini: You never know where you might…

Some people are fans of the Dallas Cowboys. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dallas Cowboys. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Hit ‘em with the griddy, you little fucker. When else am I gonna get to use this clip to puff my chest? I gotta take my fun where I can get it. Your 2025 record: 7-9-1. You and I can normally count on the Dallas Cowboys to sabotage their own chances during the course of any given season, but in 2025 team owner and latent segregationist Jerry Jones decided to sabotage everything in advance by trading away All-Pro pass rusher Micah Parsons to Green Bay mere days before the season began. May as well cut your brakes before hopping into your car.

As LaMelo Ball gets settled in with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a clip of what appears to be his Charlotte residence has been circulating, due to the interior design choices therein. When I asked the user who circulated the video where he got it from, he said he found it on TikTok, where it was posted by a mover on the job, who appears to have deleted his original post. To the best of our knowledge, this is indeed LaMelo Ball's Charlotte home, or anyway the home of someone in possession of LaMelo Ball's NBA awards and Slam magazine cover. I suppose the even weirder possibility is that someone else lived there. This place is best experienced with fresh eyes, without any preparation, so watch the video below, and then we can review. OK: It's a Trolli gummy bag zoned for residential use. It's the online lobby for a vape-era Saints Row reboot. If you're on a $203.8 million contract, you get to move into the weed bodega that imports "exotic" Lays flavors. It has neon light fixtures everywhere, Pop-A-Shot, aliens sporting jewelry and shooting sleeves, mural caricatures of LaMelo himself in various styles. There's an inclusive bathroom sign featuring a yeti. There's a stack of $100 bills behind a pane of glass that reads, in part: "This is for emergencies—not pizza cravings."

The San Francisco Giants don't get to announce anything fun these days, but it would be too cheap even by the prevailing clearance-sale standards to lump the latest bit of ill news relating to the team in with all the others, so we won't. Mike Krukow, the former Giants pitcher, longtime radio analyst, and general Pez dispenser of joy at the ballpark, is retiring at the end of the year. While that unquestionably sucks, it sucks in the best kind of way, because Krukow did the best job he could and for as long as he could do it. Because his best was exemplary, he goes out honestly and without any regret that he could have somehow been better; it sucks for everyone else, but not for him. Krukow is 74, and has been working for the past 15-plus years with the degenerative muscle condition inclusion-body myositis, which has neutralized his ability to get from place to place. He has done all the games from his home in Reno over the past several years to minimize as best as can be managed the strain of the disease, but his ability to extract good feelings from the ballpark in good times, bad times, and these particular times has remained top-shelf work despite his distance from the games themselves. His longtime partner and friend, Duane Kuiper—36 years on the job, and now we're counting—had his own health scare last winter but remains on the mic, at least for the moment. As he explained to The Athletic's Andrew Baggarly, in his standard disarming way, "Maybe I’m happy he’s leaving. Did you ever think of that? It’s like the A’s and Giants with the A’s leaving. Now I’ve got the whole town to myself!" The natural response to that is "Too soon, you hyena." But because Krukow would have cheerily signed off on the bit, so must we all. You learned, if you ever heard the two do a game together, that they played off each other with the ease that only comes from two people who could spend six months together over the course of three-and-a-half decades without finding reasons to strangle each other. Few ballplayers could do it for even 10, and ex-ballplayers are virtually never asked to do so; Kuiper and Krukow played together on the Giants for three years, beginning in 1983, and talked to each other in public for decades. The pair did it so masterfully because they somehow made kismet their personal fidget spinners, with a synchronous hum that defined their work and their town. One could barely tell that Krukow was three-and-a-half hours away from Kuiper or their other partners, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming.

I discovered CarJitsu this past April at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where a bout was broadcast on a wall-mounted television above a display of Doritos. There is, truthfully, not much to explain about this newfangled sport. CarJitsu is an athletic contest, really a wrestling match, between two people who grapple inside a small car until one of them submits to some sort of chokehold or pin. There are two three-minute rounds but possibly a third if the match is tied after the second round. The combatants start buckled next to each in the passenger and driver seats (selection determined by a coin toss), then unbuckle themselves and attack. They are not allowed to punch or strike each other, much less jab or poke an eye. They can use the seatbelt to strangle each other, however, and this is in fact one of the crowning tactical maneuvers in the sport. They can trap someone’s head underneath the steering wheel or manipulate the levers that adjust the seats, weaponizing the seat itself to pin or press their opponent. Though the FAQ on Pro League Network’s CarJitsu website specifies that wrestlers cannot open the car’s doors during a fight, they have done exactly that during some matches I’ve watched. Perhaps the rules of CarJitsu are evolving, much like human culture in general. The advantage of opening the door and touching the ground is that it resets the round. CarJitsu wrestlers have accomplished all these feats and more in the interest of securing a sign of submission, either a tap or a verbal indication, like a scream, from their opponent. And that’s CarJitsu. It’s worth emphasizing that in the ideal state of submission, a CarJitsu combatant has been reduced to red-faced immobility and crammed into a crevice where most of us grimace to reach on the occasions we are obliged to retrieve an escaping M&M during a long car trip. None of this was clear to me back in April, when all I had planned was a flight to Oklahoma. But there’s something to be said for the unaided experience of not understanding what you see. A little instruction or experience will help you to appreciate the pleasures of Mark Rothko paintings or the finer points of bebop, but buying a banana at a Hudson News in the airport doesn’t help anyone immediately grasp why a man on the television wearing a skin-tight polyester workout shirt sprinkled with corporate logos is choking another man with a seatbelt inside a Toyota Scion. Especially puzzling are the onlookers sitting in folding chairs. A citizen of the world sometimes proceeds alone, hoping to gain knowledge and wisdom. I became fixated and proceeded to watch as much as I could take. If it counts as an invention, CarJitsu was invented by a mathematics graduate student from Russia named Vik Mikheev. A couple of entrepreneurs from the “alternative sports creator” Pro League Network (PLN), which also broadcasts slap fights, slap poker, as well as whatever Beastball and Coffin Wars are, then acquired the rights to CarJitsu and turned it into one of their premier products. They have been broadcasting since 2022 on their website, on YouTube, and on whatever backwater channels show up on airport convenience-store TVs. The PLN has a television studio in Branson, Mo., and perhaps will spread farther afield, like an infection. This past spring, they filmed a competition in Dubai.