The purpose of a car's design is to take something that will essentially exist to consumers as an appliance and elevate it into something that they can project an identity onto, and therefore justify blowing 10-to-100 grand to acquire. The grand project of drawing the most fuckable windowed toaster has brought many evolutions, and just as evolution keeps making crabs, car designers keep going, "Yo, what if they could climb on it?" What follows is a history of their attempts to help us goofy car owners clamber up our vehicles, and the reasons we have had to.

Why Climb? Poop Is Gross!

The last few weeks have been a string of hard times for Indiana-based basketball, even with victories strewn across the landscape. The Indiana Pacers reached the NBA Finals—good—but lost Tyrese Haliburton to a torn Achilles tendon in Game 7—very bad. The Indiana Fever are now the WNBA's leading draw because of Caitlin Clark—good—but Clark has been injured twice, first her quad muscle and more recently her groin—bad—in addition to finishing ninth at her position in player voting for the All-Star Game—confusing—and being the subject of Christine Brennan's upcoming unauthorized hagiography—ominous.

But those were circumstantial. Now we know something is karmically amiss, because a vengeful universe has just taken out Red Panda.

The Los Angeles Kings entered free agency with one mission: to build a team better than the Oilers, who've eliminated them in the first round in each of the last four postseasons. Enter new GM Ken Holland, who in his post–Red Wings career has a pathological fetish for signin...

Only a few years ago, JD Vance was boasting about his immigrant roots. “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 book that launched him into the public consciousness.

Given that he leveraged the success of that bestseller and the movie it spawned into a job just a heartbeat away from the top spot in the most anti-immigrant administration in American history, it's kind of delicious watching the foreigners he'd claimed as kin fail to admit he’s really one of them.

Damian Lillard's tenure as a star almost certainly fell apart when his left Achilles tendon did in late April. Now his tenure as a Milwaukee Buck is over, too. The team announced Tuesday that it will waive Lillard and stretch the remaining $113 million on his contract over the next five years, thus concluding the oddly unsatisfying Giannis-Dame era.

On paper, it was a perfect fit; on the court, it never cohered. Lillard will receive all that money he's due without having to play another basketball game. Surely he wants to play more, however. He also turns 35 in two weeks, and will be 36 by the time he's ready to log serious minutes again, on a repaired tendon, as a 6-foot-2 guard already toeing the line of athletic viability.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about farmers markets, vibrators, dogs in mild peril, and more.

Your letters:

The kneejerk response to the Ohio legislature helping Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to stop being the Cleveland part of that descriptor was a marvelous bit of cynicism-driven political powerlifting that, in its own way, is exactly what Ohio, the Browns, and particularl...

You might think that the coolest place to hit a baseball is over the fence. But Red Sox outfielder Wilyer Abreu is here to prove you wrong. In a Boston win where he also smashed a grand slam the traditional way, Abreu earned an inside-the-park dong with a trick shot off Fenw...

In 2019, while in Peru as a camp counselor, Tyler Andrews set his first Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the 37.9-mile Salkantay Inca Trail, which leads to the summit of Machu Picchu. Andrews’s time beat the previous mark by more than two hours. He identified primarily as a dista...

It should be impossible—water-from-a-stone impossible, faster-than-light-travel impossible—to make a bad movie about scary dinosaurs. And yet, according to reviews for Jurassic World Rebirth, out this week, they have done just that for the fourth time in a row.

Something is amiss here. These are dinosaurs: the biggest, meanest fuckers to ever walk the Earth—the demons and dragons of nightmare and legend, surely the source of some deep mammalian atavistic fear in the basest parts of our brainstem. If filmmakers can't squeeze two hours of excitement out of being chased by these horrors of tooth and nail, filmmakers need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask, How am I failing the dinos? The answer is that they are not respecting them properly, and trying to invent, new, bigger, smarter, scarier versions of dinosaurs. This is pathetic. Stick to saurians!

A little less than 320 feet away, the ball leaves Matt Waldon's right hand. All night, it has been ornery. It has misbehaved. The ball is Waldron's enemy. It's supposed to knuckle, and instead it rebels, skittering out of his hand like it's possessed by some force other than...

The morning after the Panthers raised the Stanley Cup, some idiot wrote that it would be "nearly impossible" for Florida to re-sign its two top pending free agents, forward Sam Bennett and defenseman Aaron Ekblad. That idiot didn't even include mention of Brad Marchand in th...

The WNBA announced on Monday that it will expand to 18 teams by 2030, adding franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. By the end of this transformative round of expansion, the league will have added six teams in six years. The Golden State Valkyries joined the WNBA...

CM Punk ruled as the coolest guy in North American professional wrestling in a few different eras. An indie firebrand in the first half of the 2000s, the straight-edge icon signed with WWE in 2005 and built himself into an avatar for fans frustrated by the company's de facto...

Without Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing would be last in the 2025 Constructors' Championship. Assume that whoever takes Verstappen's seat would perform on par with Red Bull's second drivers so far, and Red Bull can upgrade that to a tidy second-to-last place. So long as the ...

One of the reasons there are so many games in any league's season is, well, greed. In fact, that's all the reasons because how else can we turn Caitlin Clark into sorghum futures on the hoof? 

But one of the hidden benefits of this conglomoglut of games is that every team can go on a heater every year, if only to momentarily lie to their fans about the rosy future they neither deserve nor will achieve. The Colorado Cleveland Spiders Of The New Millennium have won four in a row this season, for the love of the galactic pixies, so like we said, anyone can do it.

It's time to to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Brandon Koppy and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Brandon lives in Dripping Springs, Texas, just outside Austin, with his wife and two little girls. You can also find his puzzles in The New York Times or on his blog, see17across.com.

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that our submissions are closed through July 31. 

Luis Severino signed a three-year, $67 million deal this past winter to serve at the whims of the West Sacramento Athletics Of Yolo County. He knew he was signing with the A's because that's what they told him he was doing, but he had not sufficiently considered the West Sacramento Of Yolo County part, and is now miserable because of it.

In a chat with The Athletic's Yankees beat writer Brendan Kuty, Severino, who left New York last year to sign the largest contract in A's history, emptied out his grievances when asked why his road splits (2-2, 3.23, etc.) are so much better than his home splits (0-7, 6.79, etc.), and his analysis boils down to this: West Sac sucks.

We haven't had a good philosophical whinge about the intentional walk in a while, mostly because we all have lives to attend to, but in the aftermath of Sunday's Nationals-Angels game (and speaking of philosophical whinges, can any Nats-Halos game truly ever matter enough to...

Rockies interim manager Warren Schaeffer works out. This is something you can tell just by looking at him. The 40-year-old former minor leaguer carries himself in a way that is meant to broadcast that he still gets after it in the gym. You just know the squat rack absolutely hates to see this guy coming.

Looking like Gabe Kapler hasn't previously had much of a positive effect on any MLB manager's performance, not even Gabe Kapler's. But during Sunday's game against the Brewers, Schaeffer found a way to put all the strength and dexterity contained in his haunches to good use. After home plate umpire Ramon De Jesus hit Tyler Freeman with a quick-trigger ejection for arguing a third-strike call in the top of the third inning, Schaeffer came charging out of the dugout to stick up for his player.

The New York Mets are no strangers to the players-only meeting. Astute readers will remember the fellas coming together for one such meeting in May 2024, when the team was 11 games under .500 and the season seemed to be slipping away. Those Mets ended up winning 89 games and...

After a weekend of quarterfinal crackers at Croke Park and a Sunday evening draw at GAA headquarters in Dublin, the Final Four of the 2025 All-Ireland football championships is set. Meath will face Donegal, and Kerry will take on Tyrone. 

More than 132,000 folks flocked to the mythically fab Croker for the four games over two days to see who would stay alive in the run for the Sam Maguire Cup, and who would be sent home Sam-less. In a topsy-turvy quarterfinal played at Croke Saturday afternoon, Donegal was down seven points to Monaghan at the half. But graybeard forward Michael Murphy, who was retired and working as a sports pundit for Irish TV for the last two years before un-retiring, and the rest of the surging Forgotten County squad blitzed their Ulster province rivals coming out of the break on the way to six-point win, 1-26 to 1-20.

Malik Beasley had a career year with the Detroit Pistons this past season, during which he became one of the best high-volume three-point shooters in the league. That fabulous campaign, in which he made 319 threes and scored 16 points per game, came at a great time for Beasley's finances, as he is set to enter free agency tomorrow. Unfortunately, his career might now be over.

That grim possibility is brought to us by ESPN's Shams Charania, who reports that Beasley is currently the subject of a federal investigation into allegations of gambling on NBA games and prop bets. According to Charania, the investigation is focused on bets that were made during the 2023–24 NBA season, when Beasley was a member of the Milwaukee Bucks. According to ESPN's David Purdum, at least one U.S. sports book detected unusual betting interest on Beasley's statistics in January 2024.

In what will someday rightly be known as boxing’s Jake Paul Era, it’s not how you fight that matters, it’s who you fight. 

Paul, a Disney kid turned punchfluencer, was at it again last night, beating another opponent whose name recognition outweighed his current level of abilities. The latest tomato can of the month was Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., a guy who despite holding the world middleweight title back in 2012 has always only gotten noticed for what comes before “Jr.”; his father, Julio Sr., who had a career 107-6-2 ring record and held belts in three weight classes, is perhaps the most popular Mexican athlete of all time. 

Current Chargers and former Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh was added as a defendant on Friday in a class-action lawsuit against former Wolverines assistant coach Matt Weiss. The suit, filed by 11 anonymous women, is just one of more than a dozen civil cases that have been ...

Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary has led to a lot of vile reactions from across the political spectrum. That'd be expected from any Republican, but plenty of liberals are willing to go against their own party and attack a Muslim who supports Palestinians. So it was surprising, but not that surprising, to hear a high-ranking Democrat like New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand lose her mind over Mamdani on Thursday's edition of The Brian Lehrer Show.

WNYC host Brian Lehrer began the interview by asking Gillibrand if she would endorse Mamdani in November's general election. "Not today, but I did speak with him yesterday," the senator said. "I congratulated him on his victory, and I raised some issues that, if he does become the mayor, will be very important that we not only work on together, but I raised some concerns that I had."

As I started the recently released Hulu two-part documentary, Call Her Alex, about the outlandishly successful host of the podcast Call Her Daddy, I knew only a handful of facts about Alex Cooper: She's very popular with young women, she’s beautiful in a way I strongly assoc...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

It's hard for music to feel as exciting and urgent today as it used to, back when it was central to pop culture. Today, music feels like that thing you hear playing at your favorite coffee shop or you listen to while at the gym when you can't find a podcast that blathers on for two hours. It's background noise for another activity rather than the activity itself. Unless you're a nerd about it, people don't seem to engage with it with much depth anymore.

The NHL and the Players' Association are reportedly close to announcing agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, ensuring extended labor peace in a league that hasn't had much of that in the last couple decades. Some smallish things are set to change: the season e...

Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a recurring series about books and reading them.

I like to put on my gym clothes nine hours before I actually go. I wake up, dress for the gym, and then sit at my desk blogging all day, because I know that if I do this, the likelihood of me actually going to the gym increases by 500 percent. If I put on another outfit, there is no way I will go to the gym, because this would require me to change into my gym clothes, and my brain hates me. My evil brain will accept any excuse to keep me from doing things that are good for me. So in an attempt to usurp my own brain, I outplay it. I lower the barriers to entry and make it as easy for me to go to the gym as possible. This is how I win.