Best Smell in the World

Smell is the sense with the shortest route to memory and by far the fewest words attached to it, which makes this bracket unusually hard to argue about out loud.

Nearly every entry is doing something other than simply smelling good. Fresh bread is the reason bakeries leave the door open. Rain on hot pavement has a name — petrichor — and comes from oils that plants release and soil holds until water arrives, which is far more specific than it feels at the time. Old books smell the way they do because the paper is slowly breaking down, so what people are enjoying there is technically decay. Cut grass is a distress signal from a plant that has just been injured. Thirty-two smells are in, with photographs standing in for something that cannot be photographed at all.

The rounds go faster here than in almost any other bracket on the site, and that is the point rather than a flaw. Nobody deliberates about smell. The answer arrives well before the reasoning does, and the reasoning gets invented afterwards to justify a decision already made.