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I was trying to puzzle out how to plagiarize my new podcast best friend while simultaneously filling in for him for this week’s Jamboroo, and for all my skill in stealing other people’s takes, I couldn’t figure out how to effectively disguise it. So instead, I’ll build off what Drew wrote last week while referencing research someone else did. I was trying to see why teams are blitzing more this year, even setting aside blitz maven Brian Flores (his Vikings defense is currently blitzing at a mind-boggling 76.9 percent for the season, according to PFF) and former Flores assistant Daronte Jones, now defensive coordinator at Washington (the Commanders are second in blitz rate at 52.1 percent). In 2026, it turns out that teams that already loved to blitz are the ones blitzing more—median and bottom-fifth percentile blitz rates have not increased by any amount over the last few seasons. But it still invites the question: Why are blitz-happy teams blitzing more?

It turns out you can trace America’s 2008 financial crash, in a roundabout way, to 18th-century Prussia. The Seven Years’ War left the kingdom in financial shambles: Just to afford the fighting, Prussia’s king, Frederick the Great, had hired private minters to ramp up currency production. So in 1769, Frederick the Great landed on a novel strategy to keep money flowing into his borders. He organized cash-poor nobles into cooperatives, and began offering, to the highest bidders, bonds based on the value of their land. European investors snapped them up, giving Prussia the injection of cash it needed. It was, as the journalist Robin Wigglesworth writes in his new book, A Fabulous Debt: The Epic History of How Bonds Built the Modern World, possibly the world’s first mortgage bond sale. A Fabulous Debt is a rollicking look at the development of the bond market, perhaps the least appreciated—but, Wigglesworth convincingly argues, the most important—financial market in the world today. Wigglesworth connects overzealous use of bonds both to the Great Recession and to America’s massive ballooning $40 trillion national debt. Paired with another recent book, David I. Backer’s As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools, which chronicles the crushing consequences of the bond market on public schools, a picture emerges of bonds as a little-noticed, and increasingly popular, lever for inequality.    Whether we realize it or not, bonds interlace nearly every facet of our lives. They are basically IOUs that pay out on fixed terms, and that governments and other large institutions issue to raise money. If you have an investment portfolio, it probably contains a slice of bonds sold by the U.S. Treasury. The interest rates of Treasury bonds tend to define the entire market: when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates on its long-term bonds, as it did recently, your auto lender and your credit card company will probably soon hike their rates, too. But bonds show up in increasingly far-flung corners of the economy, too. Bonds likely fund your local public school or bridge improvement project, and they facilitate the resale of your home mortgage. Summer camps issue bonds to raise money, and so do hospitals and local, state, and national governments. All kinds of consumer debts can be re-packaged as bonds, and sold to ever more distant bidders. 

When former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin revealed that he had been working on a Minecraft city for 12 years, I brushed it off. The idea of an NFL coach—a Super Bowl-winning coach who never had a losing season—taking time over a decade-plus to truly lock into Minecraft city planning just didn't seem realistic, or like the result would be particularly interesting. I doubted Tomlin's gamer credentials. Well, joke's on me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h_pQ1-5iQg

Hockey season has begun, and all teams are equal in the eyes of the creator. Hope springs triumphant for 32 collectives each striving as one, and the Stanley Cup lies shining before them, ready to be seized. In rebuttal, there's this, from The Athletic's Kevin Kurz: https://twitter.com/KKurzNHL/status/2105504339452145902

The WNBA playoffs are not about intricate offensive sets, squeezing efficiency from your ninth and 10th players, or winning the game on the margins—at least not as much as they are about Real Hoops. Arike Ogunbowale taught the Golden State Valkyries that painful lesson Wednesday night, gouging their would-be smothering defense for a WNBA playoff-record 45 points and forcing her Dallas Wings through to a deciding Game 3 in the process. That Ogunbowale had both the talent and temperament for this sort of explosion should never have been in doubt. She's notched 41 before, and takes on the burden of volume scoring with a Waitersesque flair. It's impressive, yes, though not always part of a winning formula, and subject to wild variance depending on whether Ogunbowale makes or misses the bad shots she can't help but jack. This year, she's taken a relative backseat as Paige Bueckers has spent her sophomore campaign with the ball in her hands. Game 1 was their season in miniature: Bueckers poured in a hyper-efficient 21 points, while Ogunbowale took only seven shots and wound up a game-worst minus-31. The Valks won by 24. Something had to change. It was Ogunbowale's time. Game 2 was fantastic, a 108-100 overtime win for the Wings in which Dallas posed serious questions about the championship viability of the top remaining seed, dictated the tempo, and overcame both a career-high 36 points from Gabby Williams and a 3-for-13 night from Bueckers. It was all because of Ogunbowale.

The following is excerpted from Every Time a Bell Rings, a book of essays about It's A Wonderful Life by Lauren Theisen and Emily St. James. It is available for purchase now. The bridge in Seneca Falls really does look just like the one that George and Clarence find themselves underneath in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s short, accessible to pedestrians, made of steel beams that join together to form triangles, and stands just a little bit detached from the town’s main street. I knew when I started writing this book that Seneca Falls claimed to be the real-life inspiration for Bedford Falls, that this New York village with a famous feminist history hosted a festival for the movie every year, and as I started my work, I looked forward, specifically, to standing on that bridge. I knew, of course, that it wasn’t the real bridge, that any kind of location shooting was cost-prohibitive, and that the movie was filmed in California. But I was wondering if I might channel a little of George Bailey in myself, looking out onto the water, reenacting a great American moment of hope rediscovered. When I actually went to Seneca Falls and stood on that bridge, however, I found myself less interested in fiction and more attracted, instead, to a plaque that’s hung there for over a century, which commemorates a very real story.

Dear Mascot Manners, I have a lot of time on my hands now, so I figured I'd write you with an etiquette question. My team, the Boston Red Sox, just got beaten by our archrival New York Yankees. They beat us in two games, 9-0 and 9-2. But before we lost Game 2 Wednesday night, one of our guys, Nick, hit a home run. It got us within six runs. I think most of us would have rather just gotten out of there as quickly as possible. But we have a tradition: When you hit a home run, you wear the Wally Head. One of our other guys, Jarren, came up with it last year. It's our "thing." So we made Nick wear the Wally Head after his homer, but I don't think he wanted to. I don't think any of us were particularly into it. Frankly the whole ceremony felt kind of embarrassing.

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Drew answers a question about extracurricular activities.

The U.S. Department of Education this week formally withdrew updates made during the Joe Biden presidency to the federal law banning discrimination in education based on sex. Specifically, the Education Department is removing language that expanded Title IX protections to cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The changes also mark the official return of previous regulations, previously enacted during Donald Trump's first term, that significantly narrowed the types of sexual misconduct and harassment reports schools and universities must investigate. Title IX is the federal law passed in the 1970s that banned discrimination based on sex in education. It's widely credited with making the United States a global leader in women's sports, as well as forcing schools and universities to investigate reports of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.

The Drake Maye Crisis, now seven weeks long stretching back to last season's playoffs, shows no signs of abating. His performance against the Jaguars in Week 3 was his worst yet, and he has now turned the ball over 15 times in his last seven games. What the fuck is going on? Will Maye ever be good again, or has his career been derailed by the un-Christian behavior of his head coach? These questions and many more are the subject of this week's episode of All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/86479eed-5de7-4198-bc8c-f3a8c19c1e6f We also address the J.J. McCarthy trade, the welcome resurgence of Case Keenum, and, thanks to listener Zachary, we get deeper intel on the dangers of modern artificial turf. And we do it all in LESS than two hours this time around. In fact, we have a format tweak coming next week that will make our bullshit even faster and bullshittier. We don’t shy away from contact (via Riverside call) here at All Ball. When others go soft, we go hard. It’s what you, the audience, deserve.