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Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. It's autumn again. The extremely popular and enduring contest show The Great British Bake Off has returned for its 17th season, or series. The format is pretty straightforward: A dozen enthusiastic amateur British bakers are invited to the show's set—a large tent in a field—to participate in three baking challenges. At the end of those challenges, two judges decide who performed the best across the challenges, and name that person Star Baker. They also decide who performed the worst, and that person is eliminated from the competition. Then everyone goes home for the week, before returning for a new set of challenges, and another round of elimination. At the end of each season, one baker is named the winner, and everyone celebrates together, and the vibes are off the charts.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: We're in the middle of bye season now, which means some of your favorites—Texas, UCLA, Duke, Utah and others—are receiving well-deserved weeks off that will allow their fan bases to forget who they hate the most. Well, not forget, really, but maybe forget to mention for at least a few days. No coaches have been fired yet, but now that we're in October the time is rapidly approaching where a lot of professional Football Men will be given an opportunity to start spending more time with their families. Apologies to those families for what will befall them. The rest of the week, though, should be about small moves among big teams, as the upward funnel begins to gain suction and the power teams begin to sort themselves out. Margin of victory will start mattering less as simple victory begins to suffice, and the number of undefeated teams will shrink from its current total of 22 (out of 138, roughly 15 percent). The most intriguing of those teams might be North Dakota State, freshly escaped from dispensing ritual thumpings in the Missouri Valley and released into the allegedly more hostile environs of the Mountain West. They may even make a case for a playoff berth, provided the sentient oil stains on the committee deign to notice them. For the moment, they have to worry about Wyoming, as do we all.

As end-of-season Minnesota Lynx press conferences go, this year’s was pretty subdued. There was no “shit was stolen from us,” no missives delivered against Cathy Engelbert. “I don’t have a speech prepared, so everyone can relax,” Napheesa Collier said at the start of her exit interview Thursday afternoon. After an 87-71 loss to the New York Liberty in Game 2 of the first round of the playoffs, the eliminated Lynx are just looking inward.  The Liberty, set to the play the Atlanta Dream in the second round starting Sunday, became the first No. 8 seed to knock out a No. 1 seed in the first round. “It sucks,” was all Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve had to say about that distinction after the loss Tuesday night. It probably doesn’t deserve more analysis than that. The strength of this particular No. 8 seed is one reason: The Liberty are a veteran, playoff-tested team still led by one of the greatest players of all time. And in a way it did not a few years ago, when three-quarters of a 12-team league made the playoffs, it does also take a little more accomplishment to appear in the WNBA postseason these days. The last time the Liberty were a No. 8 seed, in 2021, they made the playoffs with a 12-20 record. This year, with a 26-18 record, they finished just seven games back of the Lynx, while eight games separated the Liberty and No. 9 Portland. Beyond unfortunate history, the first-round loss makes for a sooner-than-expected start to what might be the league’s most interesting offseason. The thought on everyone's mind Tuesday night and again at Minnesota's media availability Thursday was something like: Two's a coincidence, three's a trend. Why has the Lynx season ended in heartbreak for three straight years?

The most salient part of the accusation that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt lodged against former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a Senate hearing on Tuesday is that it was wrong. It was ecstatically and grandiosely wrong, and obviously wrong in ways that even a rudimentary blog-level fact check would have caught. It was wrong in ways that would only be possible at this particular low ebb in American political and broader executive function—based on unverified and unvetted information given only to Republican senators by the Department of Justice, too hastily put to oafish misuse by well-credentialed chumps of roughly equal laziness and ambition in the pursuit of a spiteful but otherwise opaque end. In that sense, it is extremely familiar. If it hadn't ended with Schmitt dangling upside down and blustering like the previously undiscovered suburban version of Yosemite Sam after becoming ensnared in his own malfunctioning perjury trap, it might not even have been news at all. In absolute terms, it was as stupid as more or less anything that's happened on the floor of the United States Senate in a century or so, a half-assed 16x-speed gloss on McCarthyism from people who do not really know what that or anything else was, and whose attention spans have left them incapable of parsing even your wordier memes. In relative terms, this is just what our government is like much of the time. It is not difficult to see what Schmitt was trying to do, and it is extremely easy to see how and why he and his staff of pale and chittering Renfields screwed it up. That failure is grounded in a tragicomic lack of Ball Knowledge, but also in either a more overtly comic inattention to detail, an aversion to even light investigative work, or both. Schmitt et al went through the DOJ's dump of Smith's text messages and believed they had found evidence of him secretly attending an Atlanta Hawks home game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 3, 2024. Accusing someone of attending a Hawks game is rude on the merits, but neither libelous nor scandalous in its own right; why Schmitt believed this was newsworthy, let alone a suitably bouncy springboard to soft-launch his own vice presidential ambitions, is something else entirely.

WUPPERTAL, Germany — When my friend in Cologne asked me if I might want to take a day trip, thanks to Cologne's proximity to various other notable cities (Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Bonn, among others), I said that I would like to go to Wuppertal to ride the Schwebebahn. To which they said, "I knew that's what you were going to say." My brand is strong. Before my trip to Germany, I declared this desire to ride the Wuppertal Schwebebahn to many of my close friends, and also several strangers. Some people thought it sounded pretty cool. Others said they were happy for me. More than once I was accused of making up words. Nothing about the glorious feat that is the Wuppertal Schwebebahn is made up. "Schwebebahn" means suspended railway, or literally "floating train," which is an apt way to describe a dangling monorail. It was the design of German engineer Eugen Langen and opened along and above the river Wupper in 1901, connecting several towns that would eventually merge to form the city of Wuppertal, or literally "Wupper valley." Both the early look of the train and its surroundings are captured in footage shot from the front of the Schwebebahn in 1902. Behold, "The Flying Train."

The thing about all goalie goals is that they rock. There are roughly 175 feet and six prideful skaters between the promised land and any netminder bold enough to even attempt to reach it. There have been but 21 goalie goals, scored by 18 different goalies, in the entire history of the NHL. The thing about Thursday night's goalie goal, specifically, is that no goalie since Ron Hextall has ever so clearly wanted it more than Igor Shesterkin. He is also exceedingly deserving. He is in that classic New York Ranger situation of being one of the league's elite stoppers, trapped on a team that does not seem capable of building a commensurate roster around him. Surely he thinks about how Henrik Lundqvist retired without a Cup. Surely he should get a little treat from time to time, something just for Igor. Often—notably often—that treat-seeking looks like firing a puck down the ice at an empty net. He does it so often that home crowds start anticipating the attempt as soon as the opposing goalie heads to the bench. He does it so often that Kenny Albert predicted it 10 minutes before it happened last night. And he has come so close. “I feel like probably a dozen times I’ve been on the bench thinking, ‘OK, this one goes in,’ and he barely misses,” said Mika Zibanejad. Shesterkin has said he scored one in juniors and has been chasing that high ever since. But he never found paydirt until last night.

One of Monk's most Monk-like episodes in all of Monk occurs in Season 2, Episode 7: "Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect." Adrian Monk, Tony Shalhoub's impersonation of Eeyore if the donkey had severe OCD, has taken to visiting Brian Babbage, a comatose man and his prime murder suspect, for an unofficial therapy session. Monk's actual therapist is away on vacation, and the private detective desperately needs someone to talk to. "He's a good listener," Monk tells his bewildered assistant, Sharona Fleming. Monk sits by Babbage's hospital bed and spills his many woes while doing what he does best: puttering around and noticing things. Monk notices Babbage's watch is a couple minutes fast—an unacceptable misalignment in his world—and as he fixes the watch, he notices a bit of glue stuck to the face. "What were you gluing?" Monk wonders aloud. Suddenly, a distant clatter causes Monk to whirl around and knock over a flowerpot, spilling dirt on the floor. Such disorder, the viewer knows, is unacceptable to Monk, who promptly fetches a vacuum to clean it up. Trusty wet wipe in hand, Monk unplugs a white cord from an outlet to plug in the vacuum and starts sucking up the dirt. The noise of the vacuum is almost loud enough to obscure the fact that Monk has just unplugged Babbage from life support. The man flatlines, but Monk plugs him back in and manages to restart his heart with CPR. Monk has, per his modus operandi, both wrecked and saved the day. The scene then cuts to a disgruntled outsider, a nurse, who, like many, disapproves of the Monkness of it all. Monk's improbable theory—that a man who was literally comatose while the murder happened was, in fact, the murderer—turns out to be right, of course. Brian Babbage had mailed bombs to his siblings so that he alone would inherit their late father's riches. The glue was the clue: The smear on Babbage's watch was evidence of how he glued the bombs inside blue mailboxes so that the packages would drop down and ship months later, after the adhesive degraded. And it turns out that Babbage's near-death experience—his second one, really—actually restarted his heart, allowing the police to confirm his guilt and arrest him.

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 repackaged 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