It’s Shohei Ohtani Season in L.A.

Plus: the Trump stock bubble; the marvel of black holes; and the comfort of quilting. View in browser | Update your preferences Saturday, March 30, 2024 In today’s newsletter, Sho time, and then: • The Trump stock bubble • The marvel of black holes • The comfort of quilting It’s Shohei Ohtani Season in L.A. Even before the startling accusations made against Ohtani’s interpreter, the Dodgers star was seemingly at the center of civic life. By Emily Witt Photograph by Sean M. Haffey / Getty Los Angeles rarely unites around a collective obsession; the city is too large and diffuse for conversation to center on a single topic. But there are occasional exceptions, such as 1) if it’s raining and 2) Shohei Ohtani. On Thursday afternoon, the day of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ home opener at Dodger Stadium, it was not raining, so Ohtani, the team’s biggest star and the world’s greatest baseball player, had the conversation to himself. Not that he participates in it: Ohtani is so private that his rare public disclosures, no matter how anodyne, generate frenzies of interest. In November, when he accepted his second M.V.P award, he revealed that he had a dog, a Nederlandse kooikerhondje named Dekopin, or Decoy, for short. The dog dominated baseball discussion for days. A few months later, in an Instagram post, Ohtani revealed he had married. Nobody had ever even seen him with a girlfriend. The announcement was accompanied by a picture of Decoy, and Ohtani later described his bride, whom he did not name, as a “normal Japanese woman.” This turned out to be an understatement: she is Mamiko Tanaka, a former professional basketball player in Japan, and videos were soon circulating of her sinking three-pointers, accompanied by jokes that the couple would produce the Kwisatz Haderach, the messiah generated by the careful mixing of bloodlines in “Dune.” Keep reading From the News Desk Our Columnists The Trump Stock Bubble: How Long Will It Last? On paper, a Wall Street deal to take public the former President’s social-media company has given him a windfall of nearly $4.9 billion. But the stock is grossly overvalued and Trump can’t sell it immediately. By John Cassidy Elements Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Imagined It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe. By Rivka Galchen Editor’s Pick The Weekend Essay Piecing for Cover At our darkest moments, why do so many of us take up quilting? By Ayelet Waldman Books We Recommend This Week Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction. Ashoka, by Patrick Olivelle (Yale). This incisive biography aims to separate the historical Ashoka, who ruled a vast swath of the Indian subcontinent in the third century B.C., from the one of legend. Ashoka is commonly described as “the Buddhist ruler of India,” but in Olivelle’s rendering he is a ruler “who happened to be a Buddhist,” and whose devoutness was only a single aspect of a “unique and unprecedented” system of governance. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Pax Economica, by Marc-William Palen (Princeton). A comprehensive account of the modern free-trade movement and a timely act of historical reclamation, this book illuminates the forgotten legacy of left-wing advocacy for liberalized markets. Palen, a historian, reveals the movement’s origins to be internationalist and cosmopolitan, led by socialists, pacifists, and feminists, who viewed expanded trade as the only practical way to achieve lasting peace in a newly globalized world. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Here in Avalon, by Tara Isabella Burton (Simon & Schuster). Dreams of escaping the mundane animate this fairy-tale-inflected thriller set in contemporary New York. The novel’s action centers on Cecilia, a flighty “seeker” whose mercurial bent leads her to abandon a new marriage, ditch her sister, Rose, and take up with a cultish, seafaring cabaret troupe that recruits lonely souls with the promise “Another life is possible.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Bitter Water Opera, by Nicolette Polek (Graywolf). Gia, the narrator of this début novella, is disenchanted with the modern world. She’s a film scholar whose long-term relationship is crumbling; in the rubble, she finds a new obsession, a dancer and recluse named Marta, who retreated to the desert in order to perform on her own terms, and who mysteriously appears after Gia writes to her. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The best books of 2024 so far What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. Culture Dept. Fiction “Allah Have Mercy” I was aware that my daring escape had made Uncle look like a fool, and I knew that from that evening on I would be in the crosshairs of his vengeance. By Mohammed Naseehu Ali This Week in Fiction Mohammed Naseehu Ali on Life in Zongos The author discusses his story “Allah Have Mercy.” By Deborah Treisman Name Drop: Can you guess the identity of a notable person—contemporary or historical—in six clues? Play our trivia game » Thanks for reading. Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up. 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