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We followed the Owl Whisperer around the gun battery toward a grove of pitch pines, where he had seen the saw-whet owl. Then I heard someone ask behind me, “Where are they going?” I turned around and saw a couple I had met earlier. My heart sank. I had learned that they were getting into birding and that we lived in the same neighborhood. I wanted to tell them. I really did. I knew how exciting this could be for them. But there was an owl code in New York.

Hear me out: Evan Bouchard is the Oilers' most important player. This does not mean they'd suffer the most if he were removed from the equation; their pair of all-universe forwards obviously qualify there. It also does not mean he's a constant shortcoming holding the team back from a Cup; that person wears a lot more pads. What Bouchard is to Edmonton is pivotal: a No. 1 defenseman who's now paid like it, who has the puck on his stick more than just about anyone, who quarterbacks a lethal attack, who is a threat from anywhere—and who can't seem to stop doing very silly things that cost games. As Bouchard goes, so go the Oilers. It makes thematic sense that Edmonton's identity—potent! yet flawed; sexy to watch! yet prone to disaster—would be so tied up in an offensive defenseman. Bouchard clearly does enough on the attack to make the trade-offs worth it. He was third on the team in scoring last year and in their last two deep postseason runs. He's got a heavy slapper and he's a great puck-mover, and his chemistry with McDavid and Draisaitl is real, and tight. The Oilers locked him up as their No. 1 blueliner for four years for a reason. But he's also more than occasionally confounding, making turnovers you wouldn't want to see from an AHL guy, and at age 26 it's pretty safe to say this is just Who He Is. It's easier to deal with when he's scoring, and the Oilers are winning. When he's not and they're not, it's crazymaking. Here's how the scoring opened in Rangers-Oilers on Thursday:

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: Good news for SEC teams across the land: The next coach at LSU is almost certainly going to be a spectacular failure. This news comes after Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suggested, and probably not tongue-in-cheek, that "Maybe we'll let President Trump pick it. He loves winners.” This came in a presser in which he also announced that soon-to-be-no-longer athletic director Scott Woodward, whose last two football hires totaled $124 million in buyouts, would not be picking Brian Kelly’s doomed successor, adding, “We're gonna put metrics on it because I'm tired of rewarding failure in this country and then leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill." Ignoring the fact that Jeffy was deeply involved in the process when the Kelly contract was negotiated, this leads to the obvious conundrum: If you had only Trump, Landry or Woodward to pick your next coach, how soon would it be before you shut down the program? However badly it plays, it’s all good news at the other 15 campuses—even Kentucky.

You might think of Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth, as the story of two animals.  On the front cover, you see the silhouette of a lone penguin, somewhere in the middle distance, setting off from icy tundra to the mountains. While never made explicit in the text, this image is an obvious reference to a memorable vignette from Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While speaking to a penguin scientist, Dr. Engli, Herzog inquires about the possibility of "insanity in penguins."

It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I have to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won’t linger on that washed-up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick’s official website. It’s a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick’s weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.

Last year, Defector’s operations geniuses submitted our annual Tip Jar drives for consideration in the Online Journalism Awards category of “Innovation in Revenue Strategy” for mid-size newsrooms. We did not win. The award instead went to the Kyiv Independent for “building a sustainable media business during war.” While we maintain that “sending David Roth to…

Here we go again. Serie A featured last season's best sprint to the finish, with a tight title race, an intense melee for the European spots, and a five-team relegation scrap. Napoli emerged as champions, Juventus snagged the last Champions League spot, and Empoli and Venezia got shot into hell (Serie B). It was a thrilling conclusion to a thrilling season. This season has started much in the same way both at the bottom and especially at the top, where the Italian league looks set to have yet another season-long battle royal. Through nine matches, Italy's top seven teams are separated by just six points, the second-tightest margin in Europe's top five leagues (France's Ligue 1 has a gap of only four points, but the financial and talent gap between Paris Saint-Germain and the rest robs that league of any real intrigue even when the Parisians don't win). Defending champion Napoli is still on top with 21 points, though it shares that spot with Roma, now helmed by former Atalanta manager and hipster darling Gian Piero Gasperini. Milans Internazionale and AC are right behind with 18 points each, and then Como (16 points) and Bologna (15) have the last two European spots in their grasp at the moment.

To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that across multiple fronts, I’m on the losing team. It is equally difficult not to be overcome by the anxiety that these battles might be marching through my neighborhood and up to my front door any day now. In an effort to preserve my sanity, I made the decision to “unplug” a couple weeks back—no news, no social media updates of egregious political dereliction and moral turpitude. My best friend since age 13 visited from Hawaii for my birthday, and we set about immersing ourselves in art. We started with a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday morning, where we were immediately greeted by white banners hanging ceiling to floor, one of which declared:

The freshwater flatworm Stenostomum brevipharyngium is, by all accounts, a simple fellow. The worm is small and entirely soft. It has no eyes, only sensory pits that control balance and orientation. This simplicity makes it easy for S. brevipharyngium to make more of itself in every way possible. The flatworm can regenerate major parts of its body, such as sensory organs and musculature, as well as make more worms via asexual reproduction. The most famous form of asexual reproduction might be budding, in which a new organism emerges from a "bud" on a parent like a new polyp emerging from a coral. But the way S. brevipharyngium sees it—which here is a turn of phrase, as the worms have no eyes—budding is for squares. These flatworms reproduce through a process called paratomy, in which an individual forms new organs inside their original body before splitting into two. This happens through a different molecular process than mere regeneration, in which a split worm regrows a head or a tail. In paratomy, the worm must obey its existing body axis—understanding which end of the original worm is the head and which is the tail so they can put their new tail and new head in the right places.