Joseph Giarraputo, Founder and Editorial Director of Global Finance, speaks with Sabine Zucker, RBI’s Head of Group Transaction Banking, about the products and services required to support cross-border growth with smooth transactions and operational continuity in CEE markets.
Based on RBI’s over three decades of experience operating in these economies with 12 full-service banks, Zucker believes corporates have a lot to be excited about when looking at the region’s future. From Serbia, to Albania, to Croatia, for example, GDP growth is outpacing many Western European counterparts.
Yet companies need to be flexible in the face of the inevitable challenges stemming from uncertainty in today’s market environment as well as fluctuating geopolitical and compliance landscapes.
A case in point is the need for risk mitigating products like guarantees and letters of credit. At the same time, local transaction banking and trade finance expertise is vital to interpret and overcome requirements that differ from country to country.
More specifically, companies expanding into the CEE region need robust and comprehensive cash management and payment solutions. In response, RBI developed CMIplus, a flagship cash management platform designed from the ground up to support real-time, omnichannel treasury operations
Effective trade finance solutions are also essential to managing supply chains.These are particularly important for those international corporates that need longer guarantees for different types of business, in turn calling for local staff with on-the-ground expertise.
Watch this video to get further insights into what it takes for international businesses to succeed in CEE markets, and how an experienced banking partner can help.
In Megha Majumdar’s new novel “A Guardian and a Thief,” a cataclysmic climate event in the Bengali city of Kolkata has wiped out shelter and food supplies, leaving its citizens desperate and scrambling for survival. Among the families beset by the tragedy are Ma, her young daughter Mishti and Ma’s father Dadu. They are some of the fortunate ones, with approved passports to travel to the U.S., where Ma’s husband awaits them in Ann Arbor, Mich. But a brazen theft threatens their very existence.
“A Guardian and a Thief” is Majumdar’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed bestselling debut “A Burning.” We chatted with the author about white lies, the pleasures of anthropology and teaching as a form of learning.
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“A Guardian and a Thief” by Megha Majumdar
(Knopf)
Your novel takes place in Kolkata, which is your hometown. Why?
It’s one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. I was reading about all of these grim predictions. Kolkata has grown significantly hotter and is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades. Reading all of that was really sad, and it was really alarming. The book really grew out of these predictions about the future of the city.
Your character Boomba makes life very difficult for your family, yet he is really a victim of circumstance, right? Calamities can make good people do bad things.
This is the kind of question that got me into this book, which is, are there good people and monsters or do we contain elements of both in us? And is this revealed in a circumstance of scarcity and crisis? That’s the kind of question that I was very interested in. Boomba came to me initially as the thief of the title, but as I started writing more about him, I realized that it wouldn’t be truthful or interesting to simply make him the thief. He was more complex and I needed to write him with all of his complicated motivations and wishes and worries and regrets.
Everyone in the novel lies to some extent, whether it’s for self-preservation, or to protect their loved ones from being hurt.
I think it’s coming from love, actually, the loving function of lies and falsehoods. Anybody who has lived far away from home might find that this resonates with them: This feeling that when you are really far away from your loved ones, you need to assure them that you are OK, that things are all right. It’s a kind of love that you can offer them, because they cannot do anything to help you from so far away. So offering them falsehoods about how your circumstances are fine and they have nothing to worry about is an expression of love for them.
You studied anthropology in college. How did you move into fiction?
Anthropology is about the effort to understand [other people] while acknowledging that you can never fully know, that there are limits to how much any of us can understand another person’s life. That training, in listening for complexity in somebody else’s life story, and honoring the contradictions and intricacies of their life, and maintaining the humility to acknowledge that there are things about other people which will always remain mysterious to us — that space is so rich for a fiction writer.
You teach writing in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. How does that feed into your work?
It’s what I loved about working as a book editor. Teaching feels beautifully related to editorial work, because, once again, I am close to other writers. I’m close to their text, I am thinking with them through the questions of what this text is accomplishing. And I love having the opportunity to think through failures of prose with other incredibly smart and creative and ambitious writers. When I say failure, there’s nothing bad or stressful about it. I fail in my writing all the time. Failure is part of the process. Being able to look at those failures and ask, what is happening here is very useful.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Twenty-five years after “Almost Famous” put his origin story on movie screens, Cameron Crowe (left, with Robert Plant) reflects on his roots as a teenage music journalist.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Valorie Castellanos Clark writes that “The Radical Fund,” John Fabian Witt’s book about a Jazz Age millionaire who gave his money away is a “meticulous” story of “the ways a modest fund endowed by a reluctant heir managed to reshape American civil rights in less than 20 years.”
Leigh Haber is entranced with Gish Jen’s new novel “Bad Bad Girl,” about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, calling the book “suffused with love and a desire to finally understand.”
Vroman’s Bookstore is on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nine months after the Eaton fire, Vroman’s Bookstore continues to be a cherished haven for local residents. The store still vibrates with bookish energy as it continues its ambitious fundraising outreach campaigns for fire victims. We chatted with the store’s chief executive, Julia Cowlishaw, about how things are going at the beloved Pasadena institution.
Nine months after the fire, how is business?
Business has been steady this year and we’re pleased with that, given all the variables in the world.
What books are selling right now?
The new releases this fall are fabulous, and we are seeing a broad range of interests. In nonfiction there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand current events from historical perspectives and Jill Lepore’s “We the People” is one example on our bestseller list. Since it is fall, the list of cookbooks is amazing and Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook “Good Things” along with her older book “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” make great gifts. In fiction, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, Thomas Pynchon and Lily King’s new novels are popular, so literary fiction is alive and well.
How important has the store been for the community in such a challenging year?
Bookstores, including Vroman’s, have long been recognized as a third place in their communities. A third place gives people a space to come together with friends and family over a shared interest and a fine sense of community. That sense of community became even more important after the fires, and it was so important for us to be more than a bookstore and give back to our community in every way we could. Our community really responded by helping us raise money for several community foundations, and collect books and supplies for people impacted by the fires.
Francis Ford Coppola wants an offer he can’t refuse — on his timepieces.
The Academy Award-winning director is selling seven watches from his personal collection, including his custom F.P. Journe FFC Prototype, estimated to sell for more than $1 million, according to a statement from Phillips, the New York City-based auction house. Phillips will hold the auction on Dec. 6 and 7.
The sale could help stanch losses from last year’s box-office flop “Megalopolis,” which cost over $120 million to make and was largely financed by the 86-year-old director. The movie grossed only $14.3 million worldwide.
The film, Coppola’s first since his 2011 horror movie “Twixt,” premiered at Cannes last year to largely negative reviews. The Times’ Joshua Rothkopf called it a “wildly ambitious, overstuffed city epic.”
At a news conference at Cannes, Coppola discussed the tremendous amount of his own money that he had sunk into the film, saying that he “never cared about money” and that his children “don’t need a fortune.”
Among the Coppola timepieces also going under the hammer are examples from Patek Philippe, Blancpain and IWC.
But the headlining piece is the F.P. Journe FFC Prototype that features a black titanium, human-like hand that resembles a steampunk gauntlet that articulates the hours when the fingers extend or retract.
Francis Ford Coppola’s custom F.P. Journe FFC timepiece uses a single hand to indicate all 12 hours.
(Phillips)
The watch was a collaboration between Coppola and master watchmaker François-Paul Journe that began following a conversation the pair had during a visit he made to the filmmaker’s Inglenook winery in Napa Valley in 2012.
Coppola asked Journe if a human hand had ever been used to mark time. That question sparked a years-long conversation during which the watchmaker grappled with how to indicate the 12 hours of the dial using just five fingers.
Journe found his inspiration in Ambroise Paré, a 16th century French barber surgeon and an innovator of prosthetic limbs in particular, including Le Petit Lorrain, a prosthetic hand made of iron and leather that featured hidden gears and springs enabling the fingers to move, not dissimilar to a watch mechanism.
“Speaking with Francis in 2012 and hearing his idea on the use of a human hand to indicate time inspired me to create a watch I never could have imagined myself. The challenge was formidable — exactly the type of watchmaking project I adore,” said Journe in a statement.
Journe eventually created six prototypes and delivered Coppola’s watch to him in 2021.
“I’m proud to fully support the sale of this watch through Phillips to fund the creation of his artistic masterpieces in filmmaking,” he said.
Coppola first became interested in the watchmaker when he gifted his wife Eleanor an F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance in platinum with a white gold dial for Christmas in 2009, prompting the director to extend an invitation to Journe to visit him at his Napa winery.
Eleanor Coppola, a documentary filmmaker and writer, died in 2024 after 61 years of marriage. Her F.P. Journe timepiece is also part of the auction and is estimated to fetch between $120,000 to $240,000.
When it was first published in 1975, “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” was immediately recognized as something new. In six taut, probing, far-ranging essays about certain popular or otherwise forgotten musicians, author Greil Marcus cracked open a world of sojourners, tricksters, killers and confidence men — the lost subterranean underlife of America as inflected in the music itself.
“Mystery Train” was a landmark in cultural criticism that took on Rock ‘n’ Roll as a subject of intellectual inquiry. In 2011, Time magazine named “Mystery Train” one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of all time. For the book’s 50th anniversary, a new edition has been published, with a wealth of new writing from Marcus that brings his book up to date.
On a recent Zoom call, I chatted with him on the 50th anniversary of his book about its lasting impact, the anxiety of influence and the staying power of criticism.
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✍️ Author Chat
Book jacket of “Mystery Train” by Greil Marcus.
(Penguin Random House)
Congrats on 50 years of “Mystery Train.” Could you have possibly imagined that it would still have a life in 2025 when you wrote it in 1975?
For this book to have this kind of a life, you can’t predict it. I had a miserable time writing it. I’d never written a book before. I rented a room at a house near our little apartment, and just stayed there all day, trying to write or not trying to write, as the case may be. I didn’t have any hopes or ambitions for it. I just wanted it to look good.
This is the thickest edition of “Mystery Train” yet. Your “Notes and Discographies” section, where you update the reader on new books and recordings about the artists, among other things, is longer than the original text of the book.
That’s what’s kept the book alive. I mean, I still think the original chapters read well. I’m glad they came out the way they did, but for me, they opened up a continuing story, and that has sort of kept me on the beat so that I obsessively would follow every permutation that I could and write them in the notes section.
“Mystery Train” changed the way popular music was written about. Who were your literary antecedents?
Edmund Wilson, Pauline Kael, D.H. Lawrence’s critical studies. Hemingway’s short stories, just as a way to learn how to try to write. There was another book that was important to me, Michael Gray’s “Song and Dance Man,” which was a rigorous examination of Bob Dylan’s music. It was totally intimidating. His knowledge of blues, novels, poetry — I thought there’s no way I can write something as good as this. So I started doing a lot more reading, and listening more widely.
For many readers of the book, it was the first time they came across artists like Robert Johnson or Harmonica Frank. How did you discover these artists?
I was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine in 1969 when the Altamont disaster happened, when people were killed at a free Rolling Stones concert. It was an evil, awful day. I was drained and disgusted with what rock ‘n’ roll had become, and I didn’t want to listen to that music anymore. I found myself in this little record store in Berkeley, and I saw an album by Robert Johnson that had a song called “Four Until Late” that Eric Clapton’s band Cream had covered, so I took it home and played it, and that was just a revelation to me. It led me into another world. It became the bedrock of “Mystery Train.”
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger signs autographs at Altamont Speedway. Later, on Dec. 6, the Stones gave a concert where one fan was stabbed to death by a Hell’s Angel.
(Associated Press)
Your book explores how certain myths transfer across vastly disparate cultures. Had you read the great mythologist Joseph Campbell prior to writing the book?
I read a lot of Joseph Campbell in graduate school. Probably a half-dozen of his books. In some ways they cover the same territory as “Mystery Train.” Campbell makes the argument that myths persist, they don’t even need to be cultivated. They cultivate us, and they are passed on in almost invisible ways. That really struck a chord with me when reading Campbell’s work.
You’re very good at explaining what music sounds like. Are you influenced by fiction at all?
I’d say fiction is part of my work. One of the books that hovered over me when I was writing “Mystery Train” was “The Great Gatsby.” Certain lines, they sang out.
What is the purpose of criticism?
My next book is about Bryan Ferry, the leader of the band Roxy Music. Now, you listen to a song like Roxy Music’s “More Than This” and you say, what makes this so great? How did that happen? What is going on here? That’s what criticism is, just wrestling with your response to something. That thing where someone has captured a moment so completely that you sort of fall back in awe. That’s what I’ve been doing my whole life as a writer. There is this urge to, not exactly take possession of something, but to become a part of it to some small degree.
Your book plumbs the murky depths, exploring the mysterious dream life of America as transmuted through certain music. Are there any mysteries left for you?
Oh, yes, absolutely. I remember when I met Bob Dylan in 1997. He was getting an award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and I was to give a talk. We met and he asked what I was working on. I had just published a book called “Invisible Republic,” about his “Basement Tapes.” He said, “You should write a sequel to that. You only just scratched the surface.” Now, I’m not saying I did a bad job. He said that to me because certain music has infinite depth. So, yes, there are certainly more mysteries to think about.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Valerie Castallanos Clark loves Jade Chang’s new novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” calling it “equal parts love letter to Los Angeles, narrative about being a first-generation Asian American, exploration of grief and love and a found-family novel featuring an adoptee that doesn’t put reunion as the emotional climax.”
With “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon has delivered a late-career gem, according to David Kipen: “Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, ‘Shadow Ticket’ capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.”
Stories Books & Cafe is on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.
(Claudia Colodro)
Ever since it opened its doors in 2008, Stories Books & Cafe has been a community cornerstone. A snug yet carefully curated store, with loads of obscurantist art books and choice indie press titles, Stories also has a cafe tucked in the back that is always bustling. Owner Claudia Colodro runs the store as a creative cooperative with her five co-workers. I talked to the team about the shop on Sunset.
Stories is small, yet I always see titles in there I don’t see anywhere else.
Stories prides itself on its painstaking curation, influenced by every employee’s area of expertise. Much like the community we have garnered, Stories leans toward the eclectic, esoteric and even fringe. Over our 17 years in existence, Stories has been a bookstore that loves our local authors and independent publishers, and encourages readers to come in with an open mind more than a predetermined list.
Remarkably, you have endured in a neighborhood that has seen a lot of store closures, post-COVID.
In a world predominantly automatized and authoritative, we like our people and books to be a countermeasure to the mainstream creature comforts — in hopes to push people out of the path of least resistance and into the unseen abundance.
The chief spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department has resigned amid accusations from the region’s top federal prosecutor that her office was leaking information, according to three sources familiar with the matter but not cleared to speak publicly.
Jennifer Forkish, the LAPD’s public information director, said she left the department Thursday at the request of Chief Jim McDonnell but vehemently denied making any unauthorized disclosures.
“Any suggestion that I have ever shared or leaked information to the media is categorically false,” she said in a statement. “No one in the Department, including the Chief has ever raised or discussed this baseless allegation with me, because it simply never happened. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying.”
The three law enforcement sources said the chief’s concerns about Forkish’s overall performance had been mounting, and that pressure Tuesday from acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli may have prompted her ouster.
The drama began the prior evening after a Times reporter reached out to an official at the U.S. Attorney’s office to inquire about plans to schedule a news conference related to the Palisades fire.
Flanked by McDonnell and other law enforcement leaders, Essayli announced at a briefing on Wednesday that authorities had arrested and charged a 29-year-old Uber driver with intentionally sparking one of the most destructive fires in California history.
Before the media event, according to the three sources who had been briefed on the matter, Essayli called LAPD senior staff and demanded to know who in the department had tipped the paper off to the news conference, which had not yet been officially scheduled when The Times asked about it.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Forkish was suspected of revealing details about the news conference, which federal authorities announced to members of the media via email at 5 a.m. Wednesday.
Forkish had already left work that afternoon when McDonnell summoned her back to his office at LAPD headquarters for a meeting with him and Assistant Chief Dominic Choi, she told The Times. McDonnell did not reference a call with Essayli during the meeting, telling Forkish only that he did not share her long-term vision for the department’s public relations strategy, she said.
She said the conversation revolved around the difference of opinion about the department’s overall media strategy, adding “there has never been any conversation with me regarding the possibility of a leak with anyone from the LAPD.”
Choi would not address any phone conversation between LAPD leadership and Essayli. He told The Times he could not discuss Forkish’s case due to confidentiality around personnel matters but confirmed she submitted her letter of resignation on Thursday morning.
“We don’t wish any ill will or anything for her,” he said in a brief telephone interview. “We thank her for her service and everything she’s done and for her time with the department.”
McDonnell did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment on Thursday. Inquiries to the U.S. Attorney’s office and Mayor Karen Bass also went unreturned.
Forkish expressed gratitude for her time with the LAPD.
“After much thought, I’ve decided to step down from my role to pursue new opportunities,” she wrote in a statement. “I do so with immense pride in what my team and I accomplished together. We told the hard stories with honesty and balance, supported our officers and our city in moments of crisis, and built a foundation of professionalism that I’ll always be proud of.”
For months, word has circulated in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles that Essayli — a Trump appointee — is trying to root out leaks to the media. The LAPD has itself routinely opened investigations into employees who speak with journalists without authorization, and faced lawsuits from employees who claimed they were falsely accused of leaks.
Forkish began her career working for former Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine, who worked as an LAPD cop for more than three decades before going into politics. She later had stints at PR firms around town, including GCG Rose & Kindel, where she worked with Celine Cordero, the future mayor’s deputy chief of staff.
After working as a vice president of corporate communications for casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp. in Las Vegas, Forkish served as a spokesperson for former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón for several months in 2024.
Eric Rose, a partner at the lobbying and crisis communication firm EKA, where he was once Forkish’s boss, said she has made a positive mark at every stop of her career.
“Jennifer is an accomplished public affairs professional with deep and diverse expertise, having worked with elected officials at the local, state and federal levels for more than two decades,” he said.
But Forkish’s appointment to the LAPD job was not without controversy. Multiple department sources not authorized to speak publicly said a dispute over Forkish’s salary demands created tension before she started on the job. Then, the sources, said there was a disagreement over strategy between Forkish and her predecessor, Capt. Kelly Muniz, which ended with Muniz’s transfer to another unit.
Some press advocates say McDonnell’s tenure has been marked by conflict with the local media. The department faces lawsuits for aggressive behavior by officers toward journalists who covered protests against the Trump administration over the summer, and a federal judge has barred police from targeting reporters with less-lethal projectiles during demonstrations.
Adam Rose, a deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the department has in recent months been frustratingly unresponsive when confronted with reports of abuses by officers.
“While I often vehemently disagreed with past PIOs and past department leadership, at least they were responsive,” Rose said. “The fact that McDonnell and his staff are so recalcitrant — and are so reluctant — to do their jobs is shameful.”
In her statement, Forkish said she is proud of her time at the LAPD.
“I’ve always approached this work with transparency, respect, and accountability, and that will never change,” she said.
Times staff writers James Queally and Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
If all things had been equal, it’s likely that Roberts would have turned to Sasaki to start the inning. In just two weeks since returning from a shoulder injury and being moved to the bullpen, the converted rookie starter has become the club’s most dominant relief option.
But, for as much of a revelation as the 23-year-old right-hander had been in that time — posting four scoreless outings with a 100-mph fastball and unhittable splitter — the team remained conscientious about managing Sasaki’s workload, which included one appearance in Game 2 of the wild card series, then another in Game 1 of the NLDS just days prior.
Thus, with Roberts feeling confident enough in Treinen (the veteran right-hander coming off a career-worst season but also some recently improved outings) to protect a three-run cushion that felt relatively comfortable, he left Sasaki sitting in the bullpen despite the save situation.
He tried to take advantage of an opportunity to give his ace reliever rest.
“He hasn’t gone two out of three [days] much at all,” Roberts said after the game. “So I didn’t want to just kind of preemptively put him in there. I felt good with who we had.”
That plan, of course, almost backfired in disastrous fashion. Treinen gave up two runs without retiring a batter. Alex Vesia needed his defense to turn a wheel play on a Bryson Stott bunt to limit the damage from there. And in the end, Sasaki entered the game anyway to record the final out.
Moving forward, Roberts confirmed on Tuesday, Sasaki is “definitely the primary option now” for any future save situations — the closest the team will come to calling him their outright closer, since they could also choose to use him in high-leverage spots before the ninth.
“Obviously what Roki has done, has continued to show, has been very encouraging on a lot of fronts,” Roberts said.
The question, however, remains exactly how hard the Dodgers can ride him the rest of these playoffs; and how delicately they’ll have to balance the burden they place on a young pitcher who has never before pitched in a relief role.
“He’s not going to close every game, it’s just not feasible,” Roberts said Tuesday. “This is something he’s never done. And you’re expecting to go a few more weeks [in the postseason]. So all that stuff has to play in, that a lot of people don’t have any appreciation for.”
The deeper the Dodgers go in the playoffs, the more tricky this calculus will get.
For now, the team’s preference would be for Sasaki to have at least one day of rest before each of his outings. And while Roberts didn’t rule out using him back-to-back days, he described it as “the next graduation point” for the offseason Japanese signing (who had made only eight MLB starts at the beginning of the season before initially getting hurt and missing the next four months).
“There’s no guarantee what the stuff’s going to be like [in a back-to-back sequence],” Roberts said, adding that any potential usage of Saskai on consecutive days would require conversations beforehand with pitching coaches about how Sasaki looked in pregame catch sessions.
“I would love to have Roki throw every single day if he could, but that’s just not feasible,” Roberts reiterated. “Again, we have a lot of conversations, and then I make my decision.”
In other words, Sasaki will get the majority of save opportunities moving forward. But he likely won’t be the only one to handle such spots.
Sheehan responds in set-up role
Emmet Sheehan reacts after closing out the eighth inning against the Phillies in Game 2.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
After a promising regular season in which he posted a 2.82 ERA in 15 outings, the Dodgers looked to Emmet Sheehan to be a multi-inning set-up man for their beleaguered relief corps.
His first playoff outing was troublesome: Giving up two hits and two walks while recording only one out in Game 2 of the wild-card series against the Reds.
But on Monday night, he bounced back with two innings of one-run relief to keep the Dodgers’ lead intact entering the ninth.
The biggest moment of Sheehan’s outing (in which he retired the side in the seventh, before giving up a down-the-line triple to Max Kepler and RBI single to Trea Turner in the eighth) came after he’d yielded that lone run. The Phillies had left-handed sluggers Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper due up next. The Dodgers had Vesia, their top left-handed option, warming in the bullpen.
For a brief moment, as pitching coach Mark Prior came to the mound and Sheehan fidgeted with his PitchCom device during an extended pause, it appeared the Dodgers were just stalling for Vesia to get warm.
But Roberts ultimately stayed put and let Sheehan pitch to the Phillies’ star duo. His faith was rewarded with two outs that ended the inning. Sheehan struck out Schwarber with a 97.6-mph fastball on the inside corner, tied for his third-hardest pitch for a strikeout this season. Then he got Harper to fly out on a changeup, pumping a fist into his mitt as he skipped off the field.
“I think it just showed some adjustments that I made compared to that previous game [against the Reds],” Sheehan said.
The biggest one?
“Definitely controlling your emotions,” Sheehan acknowledged. “It’s a big piece of coming out of the bullpen. I’ve talked to a lot of guys about that, especially after Cincinnati where I wasn’t as comfortable out there.”
That Reds outing, of course, was a major red flag for the Dodgers’ bullpen plans. Given the struggles from the team’s traditional relievers entering the playoffs, Sheehan was supposed to essentially be a set-up man out of the bullpen capable of bridging the gap from the starting pitcher to the ninth.
Sheehan said, in that wild-card outing, he felt he was “trying to do a little too much, trying to be a little too fine with my pitches at the corners.”
“That’s not really my game,” he said in hindsight. “So I think just getting back to the approach and the game plan that’s been working for the past couple months was big. Trying to just go right at them and attack in the zone.”
Roberts gave Sheehan the leash to do that Monday, and will likely keep calling upon him in high-leverage spots moving forward, perhaps making Sheehan and Sasaki his preferred combination to close out the final innings of games.
“I just felt that his stuff was still real good [and that] he wasn’t going to run from those guys at the top,” Roberts said Tuesday of letting Sheehan face Schwarber and Harper (who are a combined one for 14 in the NLDS with two walks and eight strikeouts).
“I trusted him. I felt in that moment he was the best option. And it proved to be right.”
Treinen lacking ‘edge’
At the other end of the reliever trust spectrum is Treinen, who not only failed to retire any of the three batters he faced in Game 2 but also, at least in Roberts’ estimation, also didn’t look like someone confident in their stuff.
“I just didn’t see that edge last night,” Roberts said Tuesday, “that I know I’ve seen it many times over.”
Indeed, Treinen was the Dodgers’ most trusted reliever during their World Series run last year, when he was credited with three saves, two holds and two wins and punctuated his October with 2 ⅓ scoreless innings of relief in Game 5 of the World Series.
This season has been a different story, with Treinen stumbling to a career-worst 5.40 ERA after missing much of the first half with a forearm problem.
Despite that, Treinen had entered Monday on more of a high, after striking out three batters in his regular-season finale before making two scoreless appearances in the wild-card series.
The Phillies, however, took advantage of his inability this year to get as much swing-and-miss, fanning on just one of eight swings while stringing together a single and two doubles (the last one on a half-swing from Nick Castellanos against Treinen’s trademark sweeper).
“I felt that he was getting some momentum before that last one, so I’ll check in on him,” Roberts said. “But there’s ways of how you go about an outing, successful or not successful, and how a player carries himself matters to me.”
On Monday, Treinen didn’t check that box. And whether he will be thrown into such a high-leverage situation his next time out remains to be seen.
Christopher Soto, the founder of the Center for California Literature.
Los Angeles is, historically, a haven for writers and poets. In its city sprawl and California light, L.A. has fostered legendary writers from Joan Didion to Octavia E. Butler, created countercultural literary communities like the Watts Writers Workshop, and inspired Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”
Despite Los Angeles’ contributions to a rich literary history, the literary community struggles to stay rooted in place as writers’ spaces and financial support move elsewhere.
Take the National Endowment for the Humanities, which canceled over $10.2 million in humanities and arts funding to already-awarded projects in California. Or the devastating Pasadena and Altadena wildfires that decimated historic libraries and cultural archives.
For writers across the city, L.A. can feel like shaky literary ground. That’s where Christopher Soto has stepped in.
The Center for California Literature is Soto’s hopeful initiative for connecting writers across L.A. through readings, conversations and advocacy. In a period in which writers feel unsupported and concerned about the state of the arts, Soto says that the center is needed in L.A. more than ever.
The inspiration came about after Soto was commissioned by the L.A. Times to write a piece titled “Writers on Loving and Leaving Los Angeles,” about writers having to move out of L.A. due to a lack of opportunities. He says right as he was working on the article, it was decommissioned. The reason? The books editor who would have worked on it was laid off and subsequently had to leave L.A.
“It was so ironic. That article and the research I did for it really led me to see that there is a need for a structural solution. People shouldn’t have to choose between having a thriving arts life and having to leave their home,” Soto says.
Soto knew that waiting would only exacerbate the literary loss; if he wanted change, he said he needed to make it. He reached out to inspiring writers in his community for their support and found that people were searching for a place to gather and organize themselves. Roxane Gay, renowned author of the New York Times bestselling novels “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger,” is one of the center’s biggest supporters.
“There’s a lot of stories that literature is dead, or that literary communities are dying, but clearly they’re not. They’re alive and they’re well and we have to remember that,” Gay says. “Writing is a very solitary endeavor, but while we might write alone, we don’t exist as writers in the public sphere alone. We need community, whether it’s people to share our work with, people who understand our frustrations, or having people who will read our work.”
Soto and Gay imagine a future where the center is shaped by writers’ needs. With community as a centerpoint, the organization aims to serve poets and authors by giving them a platform to share their work, attend workshops and create connections among peers.
Gay joined a collective of notable speakers the night of the center’s official launch, which took place at Central L.A. start-up gallery Giovanni’s Room and was co-hosted with the Los Angeles Review of Books. Outside the launch, pupusas were sizzling and poets and book nerds stood in line for a bite or a read from a nearby Libros con Alma pop-up book cart.
The long line approaching the door was full of chatter and reunited friends, who stepped into the lobby and talked closely over the music mixed by DJ Izla. Although the gallery itself filled up quickly, growing warm and pupusa-scented, the energy was one of excitement and anticipation for people’s favorite authors and for a new beginning in the L.A. writers world.
In a corner of the gallery, in front of a paper backdrop and lush potted plants, Grammy-nominated contemporary poet aja monet stepped before the mic to open the night. She was assertive the moment she spoke, clarifying the pronunciation of her name (ah-ja) and simply introducing poems from her time as a political organizer in Florida.
As monet delved into her work, her voice was serious, contained and bursting with emotion. With every stanza, she settled into a musical rhythm that was satiric and bitingly honest. Her poems ranged from swampy oppressive memories of Florida to the nature of poetry to musings on hypocritical activists.
“A poem can rinse, reflect and reveal us / I give thanks for the intimacy of planting poems / the living that brings poems into being,” monet read.
The crowd hummed and swayed in agreement and cheered in recognition of the feelings that she captured. After her moving set, Viet Thanh Nguyen picked up right where she left off. Nguyen is best known for his debut Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” which discusses the Vietnam War’s impact on the U.S. through the lens of a Vietnamese American immigrant who navigates Hollywood social politics, integration and racial tension.
In the section Nguyen read that night, the main character challenges stereotypes of Vietnamese characters in a film, an attempt that is quickly shut down by a Hollywood executive. Nguyen chuckled as he finished — “The Sympathizer” was adapted into an HBO show, placing Nguyen into the very Hollywood spaces he criticized. He acknowledges this and affirmed that “after spending a lot of time in Hollywood, nobody has disputed this characterization.”
Author, actor and television writer Ryan O’Connell added to the conversation with a lengthy reading of “The Slut Diaries,” explorations of rediscovering sexuality in his 30s as a gay man with cerebral palsy. His reflections on sex and dating through the lens of gay and disabled identity, and the hilariously vulgar encounters that ensued, drew hoots and hollers from the crowd.
Camille Hernandez, a writer and poet laureate of Anaheim, was among O’Connell’s laughing audience.
“I love being from here, and I want to lift up the literature from here. It is really beautiful that you could be from some place with such a rich literary heritage, but it’s such a travesty that not many people know about it, so efforts like this are so important to uplifting writers like us, who can be funny and honest like Ryan O’Connell or inspiring like Roxane Gay once they have the community to support them,” Hernandez says. “We deserve this.”
As Gay closed the night, her brief statement encapsulated the promising energy of the center’s first gathering.
“We deserve the material and creative resources to practice our craft. We deserve an abundant community that is mindful of the past and active and engaging the present and able to imagine a radical and expansive future,” Gay said. “And so I hope that everyone here will join us in that work.”
As authors, poets and hopeful writers filtered out into the crisp night, conversations abounded about what was next. Some were excited for an afterparty rumored to feature Erykah Badu. Others projected a next reading presided by an even bigger crowd, feeding the hunger for the literary arts that the center aims to feed. Whatever comes next, the literary community of L.A. has a new home to gather in.
WASHINGTON — Halfway through President Trump’s inaugural White House meeting this term with congressional leadership days before a government shutdown, the red hats appeared on the president’s desk.
“Trump 2028,” they said, situated across from the seated lawmakers, Vice President JD Vance and several untouched Diet Cokes.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries leaned over to Vance, a potential 2028 contender, and quipped, “Hey, bro, you got a problem with this?”
The room chuckled in response.
“It was the random-most thing in the world, because we’re sitting there, we’re having a serious conversation, and all of a sudden these two red hats appear,” Jeffries recalled later at the Capitol.
“It was all so unserious,” the New York Democrat said, describing a roving cameraman capturing the moment. “We were there for serious reasons that it wasn’t really a big part of, you know, the discussion. It was theatrics.”
The moment was vintage Trump — grabbing the attention and seeking to throw negotiators off their game — but it also underscored the president’s disregard for Congress, a coequal branch of the government, and in particular his opponents across the political aisle.
From historic first meeting to viral trolling
What was once considered a historic occasion — the president of the United States convening his first “big four” meeting of congressional leaders from the House and Senate — was reduced to another viral souvenir of Trump trolling his opponent.
And after the more than hourlong session, the president failed to strike a deal with the leaders to prevent a federal government closure.
“We don’t want it to shut down,” Trump said at the White House the next day, hours before the midnight deadline.
This wasn’t just a routine meeting of the president and congressional leadership. It was the first time Trump had gathered the leaders of Congress, more than eight months into his presidency — and the first time he and Jeffries had officially met.
But more surprising was how little came from it.
Healthcare funds
During the White House meeting, Jeffries and Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer laid out their arguments for saving healthcare funding as part of the shutdown talks.
Trump said very little, doing more listening than talking, the leaders said.
“He didn’t seem to know about the healthcare premiums going up so much,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.
With the Republican leadership, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the conversation ranged across their views of the healthcare situation.
“Lively,” Thune (R-S.D.) later said.
The discussion included the Democrats’ demands to ensure subsidies to help people buy private insurance on the exchanges run by the Affordable Care Act are made permanent. The subsidies were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic and are set to expire at year’s end, which would cause premiums to skyrocket, nearly doubling in some cases.
The conversation also touched on the new rural hospital fund that is important to Republicans, set up under Trump’s big bill as a way to compensate for its cuts to Medicaid healthcare providers.
Johnson (R-La.) said Trump showed “strong, solid leadership. He listened to the arguments.”
Trying to catch the president’s attention
This is the best the Democrats could have hoped for — to have an airing before the president that began to turn the dial toward their demands. And it is what the GOP leaders had tried to avoid as each party tries to blame the shutdown on the other.
Johnson had suggested Trump back out of an initial meeting with the Democrats — after the president had agreed to one — arguing it would be a “waste of time.”
But Trump relented, and granted them Monday’s closed-door Oval Office session.
The Democrats have been here before. During Trump’s first term, the president repeatedly negotiated deals with the Democrats — “Chuck and Nancy,” as he called Schumer and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to fund the government, raise the debt limit and achieve other goals.
Those bargains Trump made frustrated his party’s lawmakers.
Republicans, aware of that history, are trying to steer the conversation in a different direction, saying they would leave the door open to discuss the healthcare issue with Democrats later — once the government has reopened. They also took issue with the characterization of Trump as unaware of the depth or magnitude of the healthcare situation.
“I’m highly skeptical the president was hearing about it for the first time,” Vance said afterward.
One Republican not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting and granted anonymity to do so said Schumer’s suggestion that Trump didn’t know about the subsidy problem was exaggerated.
So far in his second term, the president has been able to accomplish his priorities either on his own, with executive actions and the Elon Musk-led cuts that tore through federal offices, or with a compliant Congress passing his signature tax breaks and spending cuts bill, known as the “Big Beautiful Bill Act,” that is also fueling his mass deportation agenda.
But Washington doesn’t run on the White House alone, and Congress is not a majority-takes-all institution — traditionally, at least. Turning most bills into laws generally has required the give-and-take of bipartisan compromise, particularly in the Senate, and particularly when it comes to the annual appropriations needed to keep government running.
Then came the sombrero taunts
Hours after the lawmakers left the meeting, Trump’s team posted a fake video that showed Jeffries adorned in a sombrero with a faux mustache standing beside Schumer outside the White House. It was widely seen as racist.
“When I was practicing law, there was a Latin phrase that was always one of my favorites,” Jeffries said back at his office at the Capitol. “Res ipsa loquitur. It means: The thing speaks for itself.”
“We had a full airing of our positions on Monday, which should have set the baseline for a follow-up conversation from the administration to try to reignite a meaningful bipartisan path toward funding the government,” he said.
“Unfortunately, the president’s behavior subsequent to the White House meeting deteriorated into unhinged and unserious action.”
The world is a confusing and scary place right now. Many of us are anxious wanderers in the wilderness, looking for answers. Is it any wonder that the wellness industry is booming? Into this strange new world comes Jade Chang’s funny and poignant novel “What a Time to Be Alive,” whose protagonist Lola is broke and aimless — until a leaked video transforms her into an instant self-help guru.
Chang, whose first novel, “The Wangs vs. The World,” was a sharp satire on class and ambition, has now turned her gaze to the promise and peril of self-actualization through social media. I sat down with Chang to discuss spiritualism for profit, tech bros and trucker hats.
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✍️ Author Chat
Book jacket of “What a Time to Be Alive” by Jade Chang
(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Ecco)
This book almost didn’t make it, as you physically lost it.
I started it years ago. I was writing in longhand in a notebook, entire chapters of the book. I lost the notebook and I was devastated. Then I moved on and wrote “The Wangs vs. The World.” It took a long time to get back into writing this new book. By the time I circled back to it, the world had changed so much. I think I have become more generous about things, and the story benefited from it.
Lola, your protagonist, unwittingly becomes an online self-help guru on the basis of a leaked video that is posted on social media. She becomes a sort of accidental wellness expert.
As someone who didn’t grow up with religion, I have always been really fascinated by belief. Why do we want to believe, and how are we compelled to certain beliefs? And it was just kind of fascinating and amazing that people could find so much life in religious stories. As I was developing the story of this novel, I realized that everyone in the digital world takes a page from this book as well, using stories to convert listeners into believers. I think Lola starts out sort of thinking she is in above her head, but by the end, her sincerity shines through. She wants to believe what she is telling others to believe.
Do you think the internet breeds cynicism and has turned us all into an angry mob?
I don’t. The digital world doesn’t make us any different from who we are, but it can throw a lens on certain aspects of our behavior. I think the internet allows us to be our best and worst selves. Think about all those strangers who might contribute to a GoFundMe campaign because someone has had a serious injury and needs to pay their medical bills, which can yield tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. That’s the mob functioning at its best.
But isn’t it a little too easy to pull a con job online?
Yes, it’s easy to be inauthentic online, but it’s important to remember that online performance is a tiny percentage of someone’s life. That’s why I was so interested in writing about the rise of this self-help guru, because usually when these stories are told you only see it from the acolyte’s point of view or the skeptic’s point of view. But we all have to make money, and we all are pulling a little something over on someone at some point — it’s part of surviving in the world.
Lola cauterizes the pain in her personal life by offering panaceas to pain for strangers online, but she affects a false persona to do so.
It’s easy to assume that anything we do, whether it’s on social media or elsewhere online, is performative or fraudulent in some way. RuPaul has a great quote where he says gender is drag. Everything is drag, a performance. Every choice we make is often not reflective of our essential self. You can’t codify identity in clothes or that trucker hat you’re wearing; anything you’re going to choose is going to be influenced by the times in which you live and who you surround yourself with. I can only speak from experience, but I think it’s almost impossible to suppress your true self.
You mentioned how self-help gurus and tech bros have a similar public worldview.
As research for the book, I attended one of Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays at Royce Hall. Every single person that spoke had the same arc: “I was down in the dumps, and then I looked up from that hole and I saw a glimmer in the form of CrossFit,” or drumming, or whatever it was that pulled them up from the brink. Then I went to a TED talk, and these tech gurus are saying the exact same thing. It’s the narrative of our time. I saw that crossover, and I knew I had something to say. I was interested in this internal push and pull of, how much do you give in to this tactic, and how much do you not.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Hamilton Cain has mixed feelings about Patricia Lockwood’s autofictional account of the COVID-19 lockdown, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” praising Lockwood’s “rich and kinetic” prose but bemoaning her “self-indulgent and repetitious” narrative.
Steve Henson has a chat with tennis legend Björn Borg about his new memoir, “Heartbeats,” which delves into his heavy cocaine and alcohol use that began shortly after he walked away from the sport at age 26.
Karen Palmer’s harrowing memoir, “She’s Under Here,” “details forgery, a child’s kidnapping, a mental breakdown, struggles to stay afloat — and joy,” writes Bethanne Patrick.
And David A. Keeps reports on the fiscal inequities of the booming audiobook industry: “Many actors are vying for audiobook roles at a time when the talent pool is expanding and casting is becoming a growing topic of debate.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
The Book Jewel, located in the city of Westchester, is just minutes from LAX.
(The Book Jewel)
The Book Jewel is a welcome addition to the neighborhood of Westchester, an expansive bookstore with an excellent selection of fiction and nonfiction titles for locals, or those who might stop by there before catching their flight at nearby LAX. We talked with general manager Joseph Paulsen about the store.
Your store is serving a community that hasn’t had a general interest bookstore in quite some time.
The Book Jewel opened smack-dab in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic in August of 2020. Our Westchester community has supported us from Day 1, and we recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. We are the only bookstore in Westchester, and we are locally owned and independent. I live here in Westchester and have raised both of my sons here.
What’s selling right now?
Right now we’re selling tons of children’s literature and graphic novels (“InvestiGators,”Dav Pilkey, etc.). Of course, the ABA Independent Bestsellers. Lots of romantasy.
You are pretty close to LAX. Do you sell a lot of books to travelers?
The travelers give themselves away with their roller bags, and we catch ’em heading out of Los Angeles on the reg! They like long books for long flights. Lots of souvenirs too! We have some unique, local non-book items as well and offer a better vibe than the international terminal.
The Book Jewel is located at 6259 W. 87th St, Los Angeles, CA.
Daniel Chapo, Mozambique’s youngest and fifth president, joins Centre Stage for an in-depth conversation about leading a nation at a crossroads. Fifty years after independence, Mozambique is navigating the challenges of a young democracy—from conflict and displacement to the urgent need for inclusive development.
President Chapo shares how he’s tackling these issues while working to position Mozambique as a key player in Southern Africa. He talks about the country’s past, the importance of unity and his vision for a peaceful, prosperous future.
Like all great crime writers, Lou Berney knows that a ripping story is only as good as the characters that make it rip. With his new novel “Crooks,” Berney has created a family saga about a small-time operator named Buddy Mercurio, his pickpocket wife Lillian and their five children.
As Buddy’s brood leave the nest and stake their claim in the world, his patriarchal shadow looms large, and the sins of the father are hard to kick. I chatted with Berney about his sixth novel, crime and why smartphones are his worst enemy.
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✍️ Author Chat
Lou Berney, author of “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family.”
(Lou Berney)
How did you come to crime novels?
The writers I love tend to be crime writers. I really got turned on my freshman year of college to Flannery O’Connor and that just kind of blew my mind. To me, she’s the greatest crime writer ever. “Wise Blood,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Every one of her books has elements of a crime novel in them that she does really interesting things with.
But you started as a more traditional literary writer.
My first story was in “The New Yorker” when I was in grad school. I was writing straight literary fiction. Then I started writing screenplays and learning more about plot and storytelling. I just kind of settled into this idea of crime, which to me is the one genre where you can do almost anything you want. It’s such a big tent. And so it was a great way for me to embrace the limitless, essentially.
What about traditional crime writers?Who moves you?
A big influence was Elmore Leonard. Also Jim Thompson, who was a fellow Oklahoma writer. Those are two guys that really, really affected me. But the current state of crime fiction is just awesome. I love so many contemporary crime writers right now. Sara Gran, Kate Atkinson, Megan Abbott, S.A. Cosby. This is a golden age in some ways for weird, interesting crime fiction that takes you to different places. Everybody’s kind of doing their own thing, which I really love.
Are you a Walter Mosley fan?
A huge fan. I got to work with Walter this year. I wrote for a TV show called “The Lowdown” which was created by Sterlin Harjo, who created “Reservation Dogs.” Walter and I were the two novelists in the writers room, six hours a day for 20 weeks, and I just got to hear Walter Mosley talk. The guy is a genius. His thoughts on writing are just mind-blowingly good. So I got paid for an education.
I love the Mercurios. I feel like part of the appeal of a family like this is that they are everything most of us are not: They are bold risk–takers who dive into things without fear.
In writing about the Mercurios, I was getting to vicariously live these lives that were enormously appealing to me. You know, I don’t want to be a criminal and I would probably make a bad criminal, but it’s sure fun to sort of live without rules and live without fear and be reckless and do whatever you want.
“Crooks” is set in the pre-camera phone era, when life had an entirely different texture, and information traveled slowly.
I was walking through the airport yesterday, and it was so demoralizing to see every single person on their phone, with literally no exceptions. Everyone walking, sitting and standing were on their phones, and I thought, “Man, I’m glad I’m old enough to remember when none of that existed,” because that was way, way more interesting to me as a writer.
I love the chapters that are set in ’80s Los Angeles. How did you conjure all of that up?
I read a lot of old magazines. Los Angeles magazine was great. I got all the old issues on EBay. And I have a friend who grew up in the ‘80s in L.A., so I ran some stuff by him. I just love research. I wasn’t into homework as a kid at all, but now I’ve discovered that if it’s homework I need to do for a book, I’m all about it.
The novel is divided into six parts, and every section is so deftly plotted. How difficult is the plot for you?
I do extensive outlining so I can get a sense of plot. But I end up probably changing 75% of it as I go. With this book, the Jeremy chapter worked perfectly, whereas Alice took me like three times as long as any of the other chapters, because I had to keep figuring out how she was going to outsmart this guy, and nothing was working or wasn’t fitting right. It really depends on the particular kind of plotline.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Julia M. Klein thinks Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda does a fine job of probing the inner artist, a “joyous, charismatic, well-meaning, occasionally imperfect man.”
With Oasis and Pulp on the road, Dave Rowntree makes sure his group Blur gets a hand in the Britpop Revival with a book of band photographs.
And finally, our reviewers pick 30 Fall books that everyone must read.
📖 Bookstore Faves
A book-loving cat wanders through the aisles of Small World Books located on the Venice Boardwalk.
(Adam Lipman)
Small World Books is the grandaddy of indie book stores in L.A. Established in 1969 on the Venice Boardwalk, the store has always been well-curated and loaded with a diverse array of titles. We spoke with manager Adam Lipman about what customers are snatching up.
What are some popular genres that your customers like?
Romantasy, horror and architecture are getting snatched up right quick these days.
And those that love poetry are always impressed with our poetry section. But we are selling all types of books right now! From bestsellers to books about lo-fi cassette culture, sextrology, and Charles Oakley. Anything important or interesting to us we try to get in store and keep in stock.
Why are books still necessary in a wired world?
Susan Orleans wrote in “The Orchid Thief”: “There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.”
Part of why we are called Small World Books is because we believe books are an excellent way to “whittle the world down to a more manageable size,” small enough to not seem so overwhelmingly exhausting, and hopefully, then making it easier to expand our circle of empathy.
Roki Sasaki topped 100 mph a half-dozen times in four shutout innings of a rehab start for triple-A Oklahoma City on Tuesday, pushing himself back into the conversation for a spot on the Dodgers’ postseason pitching staff.
“We’ve all got to huddle up and figure out what’s the next plan,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I personally don’t know Roki’s plan after tonight.”
Sasaki struggled through four rehab appearances and seemed to have dropped off the Dodgers’ radar. But he gave up just a hit through the first four innings Tuesday before tiring in the fifth, when he gave up three runs, two walks, two hits and a hit batter.
He threw 90 pitches, 52 for strikes, striking out eight and walking four.
It’s unlikely Sasaki, 23, will be considered for a spot in the rotation but he could pitch out of the bullpen.
“Anything’s possible,” Roberts said. “I know he wants to contribute. So we’ve just got to see where he fits in. And we’ll have that conversation as an organization.”
Sasaki went 1-1 with a 4.72 ERA in eight starts before going on the injured list with a shoulder impingement in mid-May. In his first four rehab starts for Oklahoma City, he gave up 17 hits and 11 earned runs in 14 innings.
The Dodgers’ bullpen is starting to get crowded, however, with left-hander Alex Vesia returning from the injured list Tuesday. Vesia was 3-2 with a 2.75 ERA in 59 games before going to the sidelines on Aug. 23 with a right oblique strain. Right-hander Ben Casparius was optioned to Oklahoma City to create a roster spot for Vesia. Casparius was 7-5 with a 4.64 ERA in 46 games.
Roberts said as the postseason roster begins to come together the decisions on who stays and who goes with 2 ½ weeks left in the regular season become harder.
“The conversation with Ben yesterday wasn’t fun for anyone,” he said. “It starts to get tougher.”
He’ll have to have another one of those talks Wednesday before activating utility player Tommy Edman from the injury list. Outfielder Justin Dean, who has appeared mostly as a defensive replacement, batting just twice in 18 games entering Tuesday, is the most likely to be sent down.
When actor Cooper Hoffman pops up on a Zoom window for a joint interview, Andrew Barth Feldman practically bursts with joy.
“Oh my God,” Feldman exclaims. “Look at the buzz!”
The two friends, each in their own apartments in New York City, have not seen each other since Hoffman recently returned from Italy where he was shooting a role in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming movie about the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, his hair styled in a severe, dark buzz cut.
The pair immediately launch into a spirited, rhythmic back-and-forth, playfully bouncing around ideas, making jokes and finishing each other’s sentences. It is similar to the nonstop banter between their duo in “Poetic License,” which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight.
The first feature film directed by Maude Apatow, best known for her role on TV’s “Euphoria,” the film stars Apatow’s mother, Leslie Mann, as Liz, a woman who recently moved to a college town after her husband (Cliff “Method Man” Smith) joined the faculty there. Auditing a poetry class, Liz meets Ari (Hoffman) and Sam (Feldman), two awkward yet compellingly charming best friends who soon find themselves competing for her attention and affection.
Written by Raffi Donatich, the film is the first from Jewelbox Pictures, Apatow’s production company founded with her friend Olivia Rosenbloom, and comes into the festival still seeking distribution. (Keeping things in the family, the debuting director’s father, Judd Apatow, is a producer on the film as well.)
Via email, Maude Apatow spoke about the challenge of finding two actors who could not only play their individual roles, but also capture the speedy dynamic between them.
“A lot of the movie relies on the chemistry between Ari and Sam, so finding the perfect combo was massively important to me,” Apatow, 27, said. “After auditioning countless other boys, Andrew and Cooper were at the top of my list. … They were electric.”
Hoffman, 22, the son of late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and director-producer Mimi O’Donnell, first burst to attention with his starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 “Licorice Pizza.” He can also be seen in the new Stephen King adaptation “The Long Walk,” which opens next week, and he has a role in Gregg Araki’s upcoming “I Want Your Sex.”
Feldman, 23, stepped into the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway at age 16, younger even than the adolescent title character. He also starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the 2023 comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which his torchy showstopping performance of Hall & Oates’ bouncy ’80s “Maneater” has since racked up more than 18 million views on YouTube.
My conversation with the two actors took place on Labor Day. The following day Feldman began his nine-week run in the Tony-winning musical “Maybe Happy Ending.” Though playing the role of a robot, his casting, replacing the half-Filipino actor Darren Criss, sparked controversy and conversation around Asian representation on Broadway.
“It’s been the most vulnerable time of my whole entire life,” said Feldman of the response to his being cast in the show. “And I have much I want to say and for now the only place I really can is the show. I’m saying everything that I want to say, everything that I believe, I’m pouring my whole heart into the show itself. And I’m thankful that the conversation that’s been happening is happening. And I think this is my way of being part of it.”
“And one day we’ll have a much bigger conversation about it,” he adds, carefully. “But right now, I’m more excited to be talking about ‘Poetic License’ and anything would be reductive to the conversation to talk about it in this context. I don’t think it’s up to me to try to change any minds about it, only to do the best job I possibly can at uplifting this gorgeous, perfect story. Everything that I have to say for the time being is in the show. The show holds all of it.”
Feldman will miss three performances of the show over the weekend due to being in Toronto for the premiere of “Poetic License.”
Did the two of you meet making Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night?”
Andrew Barth Feldman: Boy, did we.
Cooper Hoffman: We also got this job [“Poetic License”] on “Saturday Night.”
Feldman: So here’s the story. We’ve been preparing to tell it for so long. And this is what happened: We became really fast, really close friends on “Saturday Night” and that was a huge cast of a lot of people who are still huge parts of both of our lives. But we clicked really instantly.
And I was taping for this movie and Cooper was taping for this movie, and we both loved the script and, especially on that set, everyone was taping for all of the same things all of the time. So I got a call from my agent that they were asking me to chemistry-read with Cooper and since we were in the same place, might as well be convenient if we just do it in the same place on Zoom. Cooper was on his way to hanging out with me at Dylan O’Brien’s Airbnb. I was already there and Cooper’s on his way. So I called him, told him that this was happening. That’s how he found out that we were chemistry-reading together. And I think both of us said, “Oh, we got the job.” Like, that’s it. As soon as they see what we do when we’re alone together and how insane it is, we’ll have this job. And that’s how it happened.
Hoffman: It’s so true. We ended up running the lines with Dylan O’Brien playing — I don’t know why we keep using his full name — but Dylan playing Leslie Mann’s character. Dylan played Liz.
Feldman: He was really good. I was kind of hoping he would do it.
Andrew Barth Feldman, attending the London premiere of “No Hard Feelings” in 2023.
(John Phillips / Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
Why do you think the two of you just clicked like this?
Feldman: Why do you love who you love? I think there are a lot of real similarities to us. We both had losses of parents really early on in our lives. And that I think instantly brought us to a level of vulnerability with each other that we didn’t necessarily have with other people. But in terms of the candor and the rhythm that we have with each other, it’s just kind of feels like one of those universe once-in-a-lifetime things.
Hoffman: I would very much agree. It was one of those weird things where, as we had to play best friends, we were kind of figuring each other out. Andrew was always someone that I felt very comfortable talking to about things. We rarely would talk about the movie. It was much more about life and other things. And I feel very privileged to have shot this movie with Andrew, actually.
There is something really fresh about your dynamic. The best I can describe the movie is that it’s an adult coming of age rom-com of male friendship.
Hoffman: I would say that’s better than anything that we would say. To me, the thing is that I love a male friendship. I love a male friendship that almost feels like they’re dating, they’re one step away from being married. And what does that bring? What happens when you rely on someone so heavily?
Cooper Hoffman arrives at 2022’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)
Feldman: I feel like we both had relationships growing up that you’re basically zero degrees away from romance. It is a romantic relationship. And that is — or was, I guess? — formerly maybe more taboo. There are more expectations of masculinity around that. But I think especially in our generation and especially as people who have decided to do art with our lives, there’s really no taboo around it at all. And in fact, something to be really celebrated. It is kind of the healing factor for young men right now: male relationships that you can be really vulnerable in.
And besides being Sam and Ari’s relationship, it was — and is — Cooper’s and my relationship. We couldn’t shut up really. I mean, that’s important to note is that we never, ever stopped talking. We would be talking and talking and then somewhere during our conversation we would hear action be called and we would just keep talking until we found our way into the scene. Kind of the way we did the whole movie was just trying to tell as much truth as possible because we knew that our relationship was all that really needed to be there to make the relationship of the characters work.
Hoffman: I also just had a thought that this interview’s going to be so annoying to read because it’s literally just going to be me and Andrew complimenting each other for however long. You should have never put us on a call together.
Feldman: This is our first interview about this.
Cooper Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 movie “Licorice Pizza.”
(MGM/UA)
How did the two of you find working with Maude? On the one hand, this is her feature directing debut. On the other hand, she’s been on movie sets her whole life.
Feldman: She was really good. In all of those moments of improvisation and exploring, she was a massive collaborator in that. And was pushing both of us to places that I wouldn’t have gone initially, risky places in these scenes. Every time we would shoot something, we’d do it, go away and talk about it for 10 minutes and just be inventing and zip-zap-zopping across the three of us, and then just be like, OK, let’s go get another one. It was this really creative process that for me as a young person coming up in this industry, I haven’t really had permission to participate in up until working with somebody like Maude. She’s not too much older than us. We’re all coming at this as collaborators as opposed to hierarchically.
Hoffman: The thing with Maude is there was a real level playing field in which we were all figuring out this thing together. And Maude just has inherently very good instincts as a director. She was grounded and she knew what she wanted, but she was much more open for us to go, “Hey, we don’t know what this is. Can we figure this thing out?” And it was debatably the most collaborative set I’ve been on. Which was really great that Maude allowed for that space to happen.
Cooper, do you see your character here as an extension of what you were doing in “Licorice Pizza”? It’s this guy who outwardly has a lot of game, but then inwardly is struggling. Did it feel that way to you as you were performing the role?
Hoffman: No. And here’s the reason for that, I’m not opposed to that convo but I think a real fear of an actor is that you’re doing the same thing every time. And so I think I’m inherently going to jump to being like, “No, this is a completely different person.” And the thing is, I don’t think Ari has game. I never wanted to play it like that. I think he’s extremely confident, but, not to bring up Dylan O’Brien again but Dylan O’Brien used a very good metaphor, which is you’re like a duck. It’s calm on the surface, paddling vigorously underneath. And it does feel like that for Ari.
Andrew Barth Feldman with Jennifer Lawrence in a scene from “No Hard Feelings.”
(Macall Polay / Sony Pictures)
Andrew, you have your own background in musical theater, but you also had your rendition of “Maneater” in “No Hard Feelings.” Do people now always want you to do a number in a movie? Was there any discussion of you doing a number in this one?
Feldman: There was very briefly a discussion of me doing a number in this movie. I think I was talking to Raffi early on and she was like, “Oh my God, I had this idea, what if you actually sing this thing?” And I was like, I can’t do another one. Not right now. It’s too soon after “Maneater” and “Maneater” is still a really huge part of my life. I want to give that moment its moment.
What do you mean, that “Maneater” is still a big part of your life?
Feldman: People ask me to sing it all the time.
Hoffman: What do you mean? It’s a masterpiece. I watched it on a plane the other day. I cried. I literally cried. I love that scene so much. I love that movie so much.
Guys, thank you for your time. I can’t even imagine how this would’ve worked if I’d interviewed you separately.
Feldman: We wouldn’t have done it.
Cooper: I would’ve just talked about Andrew the whole time. By the way, if you would’ve gotten us in the room together, this interview would’ve never ended. It would’ve been physical bits. It would’ve been a whole thing.
Feldman: We talked on set so much about these moments — that we would get to eventually do press together and talk about the movie because we really were, from the beginning, giving one performance of these two characters together.
For over 40 years, Scott Anderson has been one of America’s most incisive foreign correspondents, filing dispatches from trouble spots around the world with a novelist’s eye and a talent for disentangling complex issues. The author of seven previous books, Anderson’s latest is “King of Kings,” an immersive history of the events that led to the 1979 downfall of the shah of Iran and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theocratic republic. Anderson traces the roots of the Iranian revolution to the U.S. government’s sponsorship of the 1953 coup that restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power. A creeping co-dependency between the U.S. and Iran followed, abetted by massive military and oil contracts, at the same time that U.S. representatives in Iran turned a blind eye to the shah’s abuses of power and, later, Khomeini’s anti-Western jihadism.
I spoke with Anderson about his book, and the long tail of missteps that led to the occupation of the United States Embassy by Khomeini’s followers on Nov. 4, 1979.
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✍️ Author Chat
Author Scott Anderson.
(Nanette Burstein)
The overall feeling I get reading the book is fecklessness and foot–dragging on the part of the American government in the service of protecting our oil sales and military contracts with Iran. There seems to be a complete misunderstanding of, well, just about everything.
Even after the revolution when Khomeini had come in — that nine month period before the hostages were taken — the Americans pretty much replicated the mistakes they’d made with the shah. There’s this whole idea of like, well, they’re going through this revolutionary anti-American fervor right now, but they need us. They’re going to come back around because our economies are so intertwined. All their weapons are American, so they’re going to need us to service them. So there’s just this manner that everything was going to work out and, of course, that became institutionalized.
With a few exceptions, none of the U.S. officials in Iran even spoke Farsi. You talk about how they had all those cassettes of Khomeini’s speeches in the drawers at the CIA and no one bothered to translate them.
So Khomeini comes back from exile on Feb. 1, 1979, with 4 million people greeting him. He goes to the cemetery to give his inaugural speech and the Americans don’t even send an embassy worker. They don’t even send a local out to the cemetery to hear the speech. They didn’t know whether it is a pro- or anti-American speech. It was just astonishing.
Do you feel like 1972 is the turning point? This is the year that President Nixon lifted all restrictions for arms sales to Iran.
I really do. And for what I think is a pretty interesting reason. The shah was a congenitally insecure man. He could never be affirmed enough. And it doesn’t matter how many presidents said, “You’re our man,” he always needed to hear more and more. So what happened in ’72 was the shah’s dream came true. He had knelt at the feet of FDR in 1943. Kennedy was dismissive of him. He had always been trying to push in the door with the Americans. He’d been humiliated again and again. And now he’s got carte blanche from Nixon and Kissinger. This is when you saw the huge escalation in arms purchases and the catapulting of the Iranian military into the first tier of militaries around the world.
Do you think the revolution could have been prevented?
I spent a lot of time studying the revolution as it unfolded, and what struck me was how mysterious the whole thing was, how it came to be. There were so many moments where the outcome might have been different. If the shah’s confidante Asadollah Alam hadn’t died in the early days of the revolution, for example, because he was decisive and the shah was not. There were so many odd quirks that took things down a certain path.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Justin Currie, lead singer of Scottish rock band Del Amitri, chronicles his struggle with Parkinson’s in the book “The Tremolo Diaries.”
(Colin Constance)
“Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way,” Ilana Masad writes about the author’s new novel, “A New New Me.” “Such whimsy … could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer … that you know you are in good hands.”
R.F. Kuang’s new novel, “Katabasis,” is “a dark academic fantasy” that is “more mature and less showy” than the author’s earlier works, according to Valorie Castellanos Clark.
David Baron has written a book called “The Martians” about the frenzy over extraterrestrial life that gripped America at the turn of the 20th century, and Chris Vognar approves. Baron “approaches his subject with clarity, style and narrative drive,” he writes.
Finally, Stuart Miller talked with Justin Currie of the band Del Amitri about his new book, “The Tremolo Diaries,” about Currie’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease.
📖 Bookstore Faves
Malibu Village Books is the only general interest bookstore in Malibu. We spoke to owner Michelle Pierce about the beachside literary hub.
(Malibu Village Books)
Malibu Village Books is the first new bookstore to arrive in the beach city in 15 years. A small yet inviting space with a well curated selection of books, the store has had its share of challenges over the past year. I spoke to the store’s owner, Michelle Pierce, about it.
This is the first new bookstore to open in Malibu in quite some time. How did you come to open it?
I also own Lido Village Books in Newport Beach, and the owners of the Malibu Village Mall came by and liked what I was doing there, so they asked me if I wanted to open a store in their mall.
The fires have affected us enormously. With the Franklin fire, we lost so much of our holiday book sales, and then the Palisades fire shut down PCH for six months. So our sales are definitely down, and the summer tourism traffic has not been what it should be, so yes, we are definitely in a challenging period.
What about the locals? Are they shopping in your store?
Local residents are really excited that we’re here. We have a lot of active book clubs, and we’re working with the library on a lecture series at the Soho House, where we will bring in authors to speak. We’re still fighting, and the community is definitely supporting us. It’s true what they say — bookstores are all about community.
Malibu Village Books is located at 23359 Pacific Coast Highway #23359, Malibu, 90265.
This week, we are chatting with Ada Tseng and Jon Healey about their new book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.” We also take a look at what our critics read, and visit a bookstore that has become a social beehive in Culver City.
The entertainment industry is experiencing a massive transformation, as traditional jobs are vanishing and artificial intelligence increasingly upends the way media is created. Thankfully, former L.A. Times editors Ada Tseng and Jon Healey are here to help. The duo, with extensive experience covering show business, have written a new book for anyone who’s ever dreamed of working in Hollywood. Tseng and Healey interviewed hundreds of insiders who work in front of and behind the camera to provide a thorough look at how to break in, and what it’s like when you do find that dream job.
An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews.
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The glamorous fantasy of Hollywood is so intoxicating. But if you’re going to work in the industry, you need to navigate the day-to-day reality of it.
— Ada Tseng, co-author of “Breaking Into New Hollywood”
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Tseng and Healey are here to help you pursue your Hollywood dreams with their book, “Breaking Into New Hollywood.”
(Ricardo DeAratanha; Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
This is the most comprehensive how-to guide for Hollywood careers I’ve ever read. Where did the impetus for the book come from?
Ada: The book started as a Hollywood careers series at the Los Angeles Times, when Jon and I were editors on a team that specialized in writing guides and explainers. As we were thinking about how to be useful to L.A. Times readers, I pitched a project to help people who were interested in getting a job in Hollywood. A lot of people come to L.A. starry-eyed with big dreams, but the film and TV industry can be pretty brutal.
As journalists, we’re Hollywood outsiders, but we had access to hundreds of professionals who were generous enough to share what they wished they knew when they were starting out. We see it like this: On behalf of the people who don’t have connections in the industry, we cold-emailed people, asked for informational interviews, picked their brains, listened to stories of what they did to build a career — and did our best to consolidate their most practical pieces of advice into an actionable guide.
Jon: A lot of folks I interviewed had similar origin stories in this respect: They knew that they wanted to work in the industry in some capacity, but they didn’t know what exactly they could do. So it made sense to do a book for that sort of person — a guide that would show an array of possible career paths to people who didn’t know what role they wanted to fill.
I feel like “How to Break into the Business” books in the past have tended to focus on positive outcomes rather than the struggle. Did you want to temper expectations, or at least make sure people think things through very thoroughly before jumping in?
Ada: We just wanted to be honest. The glamorous fantasy of Hollywood is so intoxicating. But if you’re going to work in the industry, you need to navigate the day-to-day reality of it. I don’t think we were trying to encourage or discourage anyone. I’d hope that some people would read the chapters and think, “This seems doable, and now I can make a plan,” while others would read it and think, “If I’m honest with myself, I’m someone who needs more stability in my life.” Because it’s not just a career choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.
Jon: Right, this was about expectation-setting and reality-checking. The very first interviews I did in this project were of Foley artists. An expert I interviewed said there were 40 to 50 established Foley practitioners in the U.S., and 100 to 200 folks trying to get into the field. That’s a very tough nut to crack. Then there are the Hollywood unions, which present a catch-22 to anyone trying to join their ranks — they have to do a certain number of hours in jobs covered by union contracts, but union members get first crack at all those gigs.
Your book also covers jobs above and below the line. I think many people don’t even realize how many different career opportunities exist.
Ada: There are two things we heard over and over again. People would say, “It’s incredibly important to understand what all the different departments do.” And they’d also say, “So many people — even our own colleagues in the industry — don’t understand what we do.” So we wanted to encourage newcomers to learn about all different types of jobs in Hollywood and how they work together.
Jon: Talking about the emotional components is about setting expectations too. The vast majority of people who work in Hollywood, from A-list actors to entry-level grips, are freelancers. That’s a tough life of highs and lows, and you have to prepare for that mentally as well as financially. People have to hustle for years to establish themselves, and that takes an enormous capacity for rejection. On top of that is the physical toll the work can extract, especially on the folks involved in setting up and tearing down sets. Part of the point of the book is to tell people with Hollywood dreams that they’ll need to gird themselves emotionally and physically for the work.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Karin Slaughter’s new book series, which launches with “We Are All Guilty Here,” is not for the squeamish.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Mark Athatakis finds much to like in “Ready for My Close-Up,” David M. Lubin’s book about the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard.” “Though the book has its shortcomings,” he writes, “[Lubin] rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself.”
Robet Allen Papinchak weighs in on Phoebe Greenwood’s Middle East satire “Vulture,” finding it “a darkly comic, searing satire grounded in historic politics.”
Emma Sloley’s novel “The Island of Last Things” envisions a future where animal life, and then entire ecosystems, are wiped out, but Ilana Masad writes that Sloley also highlights “the small moments of beauty, joy and care that emerge even during … horrible times.”
“Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives,” says the owner of Culver City’s Village Well bookstore.
(Jennifer Caspar)
Four years after it opened its doors to the public, Village Well Books & Coffee has become a community locus in its Culver City neighborhood. Owner Jennifer Caspar has created a vibrant space with a full-service cafe, allowing her customers to linger for as long as they please while perusing Caspar’s ample and well-curated selection of new books. I chatted with Caspar about her store and what’s selling right now.
Why did you open the store?
I wanted a place where people can facilitate connections with others, because I think that’s what people need. Everyone is so overwhelmed by their phones and technology, and we tend to take the easy path, which is to not get out and see people.
Why books now? Why not the Substack, social media, etc.?
Books are an antidote to the constant distractions in our lives. People need to connect offline, and books give us a chance to settle down and focus. Studies show that what we learn from books stays with us longer. You can read a Kindle, and I do, but there is something about sitting down with words on paper. For me, it’s great physical therapy for my emotional state.
Village Well is located at 9900 Culver Blvd., Culver City.
HomeMediaExpert PerspectivesTransforming member experience – How Intellect’s strategic acquisition can change the way Canadian credit union members bank
Today’s era of digital transformation enables nimble and innovative tech players to revamp traditional financial services. Intellect Design Arena Ltd. is doing exactly that for Canada’s credit unions – enhancing the industry with a digital banking platform that offers users exciting features and functionality, yet with continuity of service to ensure it remains robust and reliable.
In discussion with Global Finance, Rajesh Saxena, CEO of the consumer banking division of Intellect Design Arena Ltd., explains that the acquisition of Forge Digital Banking Platform from Central 1 is an exciting opportunity to deepen the firm’s footprint in Canada and in the credit union segment of the financial industry.
Intellect Design Arena has been in the Canada market for 12 years, and Central 1’s Forge platform offered a strategic opportunity to expand its fast-growing digital banking platform (eMACH.ai DEP) into the credit union space to enhance and modernise the way credit unions engage and deliver services to their members.
The acquisition of Forge, which served around 170 credit unions nationwide, has accelerated access to a key market segment for Intellect Design Arena. It’s a good fit for both Intellect and Forge customers, who will benefit from transitioning from a legacy technology platform to the very modern eMACH.ai DEP platform with state-of-the-art architecture across APIs, micro services, cloud native and AI. The new platform will enhance the user experience and provide new features and functions that can be used by retail and commercial customers in the credit union sector, such as quick onboarding, digital lending, budget tracking and personal finance management.
At the same time, continuity is key given the mission-critical nature of the platform for the credit unions. To ensure a seamless transition and uninterrupted service for platform customers, Intellect is retaining the Forge platform team, who understand the local market, regulatory matters, business practices, and the SaaS platform and technology. Intellect now offers the best of both worlds – a world class digital banking platform eMACH.ai DEP platform and the familiarity of the Forge team which credit unions already know and trust. With this combination, Intellect is offering a go-to-market in just 12 weeks.
Watch this video to get more insights about how Intellect Design Arena is transforming this segment of Canadian financial services while also creating bandwidth to expand more quickly in the domestic market as new opportunities arise.
Aug. 7 (UPI) — New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be disqualified from the race due to an alleged call with the president.
That Cuomo recently spoke with President Donald Trump regarding the city’s mayoral race is in doubt, but Mamdani called the potential of such a conversation “disqualifying” for Cuomo.
“This is not just a shady backroom deal by a cynical politician; it is disqualifying,” Mamdani said in a prepared statement on Wednesday.
He also held a news conference on Thursday morning and was interviewed by a local radio station to address that matter, despite denials that such a conversation happened between Trump and Cuomo.
“The fact is, the president has three candidates in this race,” Mandani told WNYC public radio on Thursday morning, as reported by the New York Intelligencer.
“One that he’s directly been in touch with, another that he bailed out of legal trouble and now functionally controls, and the final one literally being a member of the same Republican Party,” Mamdani told WNYC.
Trump and Cuomo “in recent weeks” spoke over the phone, but representatives for both have denied it, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
When asked by reporters if he had spoken with Cuomo, Trump said, “No, I haven’t.”
A spokesman for Cuomo, likewise, denied that any recent conversation occurred between Trump and Cuomo.
“As far as I know, they have not discussed the race,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi told the Times in a prepared statement.
Mandani defeated Cuomo in the Democratic Party’s primary for the New York City mayoral race, but Cuomo has continued his candidacy as an independent.
Mayor Eric Adams also seeks re-election as an independent, while Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa is the Republican Party’s candidate.
The Trump administration recently dropped a federal case against Adams after a grand jury in September indicted him on federal charges accusing Adams of bribery, campaign finance and conspiracy.
Trump said the charges against Adams were “politically motivated” due to the mayor’s assistance with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Cuomo resigned as New York’s governor in 2021 amid an impeachment investigation regarding accusations of sexual harassment.
The president has expressed concerns about Mamdani, whom Trump has called a “communist” whose election would be disastrous for New York City.
Trump was born and raised in New York City and has property and business interests there.
Democratic New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference outside of 26 Federal Plaza in New York City on August 7, 2025. Photo by Derek French/UPI | License Photo
Emily Hunt Kivel’s book is unlike any novel you will read this year, a story about millennial angst that is also a bewitching fable. Evie Cavallo, Kivel’s protagonist, is a 20-something mid-level graphic designer at a New York ad agency who loses her rented apartment and finds herself cast adrift. Landing in a fictional backwater town in rural Texas called Gulluck, Evie discovers a hidden gift for shoemaking and finds herself welcomed into an eccentric community of fellow cobblers. “Dwelling” is social commentary wrapped into a delightful allegory about identity, work, ritual and tradecraft.
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I chatted with Kivel about her debut novel, and how, despite its fantastical elements, “Dwelling” nails our present cultural moment.
I think everyone is feeling it to some extent — this incredible lack of stability and alienation.
— Emily Hunt Kivel
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Emily Hunt Kivel’s “Dwelling” is “unlike any novel you will read this year,” writes Marc Weingarten.
(Julia Hole)
I started reading your book thinking, “Ugh, a polemic about the housing crisis,” and by the end of the book I was deeply moved by Evie’s journey.
That’s what I wanted. I wanted readers to think they were reading one thing and to end up at the end thinking, “Where the f— was I?” I wanted to write a book that changed shape and form while in the reader’s hands.
Was that the original intention going in?
I don’t know if I started out with the intention of writing the book I did, but I certainly didn’t want to write a maudlin dystopian commentary on the housing crisis. I did want to touch on this feeling of complete instability that millennials in particular are feeling, but also I think everyone is feeling it to some extent — this incredible lack of stability, and alienation.
Evie, maybe, kind of wants to be a creative, but instead she blossoms by learning a craft that involves using her hands and her head, not a computer.
I think there’s a parallel between finding a craft and coming into your own, and in that way, I think it’s a fairly earnest description of what it feels like to discover yourself through something that you’re passionate about. Evie goes from being an insular character who’s living a self-absorbed life, because that’s what society wants us to do, to living a life that’s actually very generous.
The book takes on the contours of a fable. Did you read fables in preparation?
I read a lot of fables just to keep myself motivated and interested during the writing process. One of the primary texts that I found very helpful was Italo Calvino’s translation of Italian folk tales. It brought me back to this kind of irreverent but weirdly earnest and enchanted quality that I wanted to create in the book.
Unmoored from her prior life, Evie finds her identity in Texas. I think this is something a lot of people are struggling with, not just Millennials. We are asking: Who are we? What is our purpose in life?
I think we’re meant to feel relatively valueless in our society right now. The economy wants us to feel that way, and so I think what Evie is doing is finding value in herself and giving the middle finger to the version of society that she was living in.
The key element of Evie’s new life is this robust community that welcomes her.
I wanted another world to open up to Evie, a world that’s oriented towards life rather than the self. The book is really the story of how to find a home, and what makes a home. Community is the only actual way to resist the forces that we have in our society that are alienating us from our work, friends and family.
In the acknowledgments, you thank the UCLA Writing Extension program. What was that experience like for you?
One of the most formative experiences of my life was the UCLA Extension. I went to UC Santa Barbara and was absolutely miserable. and so I graduated early and moved to L.A. I was finding community and portals into another world at the Extension, which is available to everyone. I was writing alongside such a diverse array of people. I finally started to feel like a writer there. I took classes with Lou Matthews, who I think is the heart of the program in many ways.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
“Jeopardy!” host and “The Complete Kennections” author Ken Jennings says he was “a sponge for weird information” as a kid.
Hamilton Cain weighs in on Ed Park’s new collection of stories “An Oral History of Atlantis,” submitting that “We’re complicit in his fiction … the act of reading a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all directions like a spray of bullets.”
Chuck Hogan’s “The Carpool Detectives,” about four moms who solved a murder, is a “true crime mystery that reads like a novel,” according to Diane Garrett.
“Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape,” says Jeff Resnik, general manager of Pages, A Bookstore in Manhattan Beach.
(Pages, A Bookstore)
Located just steps away from the ocean, Manhattan Beach literary mainstay Pages, A Bookstore is one of L.A.’s best indie shops. We chatted with general manager Jeff Resnik about what his customers are buying right now.
Do you find that, because you are near the ocean, people tend to look for beach reads during this time of year?
Definitely. Being so close to the ocean, we get a steady stream of readers looking for something light and enjoyable to bring to the beach. Whether it’s a breezy romance, fast-paced thriller, or witty novel, “beach reads” are in high demand during the summer, and we make a point to stay well-stocked on them.
Given the infinite text we can find on the internet, why are books still important?
There’s a tactile, immersive experience to reading a physical book — turning pages, marking favorite passages, setting it down on a nightstand. There’s a different kind of focus and connection that comes with holding a book. In our fast-paced, distraction-heavy world, reading invites us to slow down. Books aren’t just sources of information — they’re vessels for reflection, joy, and escape. One of the best parts of my job is helping people reconnect with that experience, or discover it for the first time.
Adam Aleksic has somehow managed to make linguistics cool. His rapid-fire videos have attracted an audience of millions across the social media universe.
An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews.
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A Harvard graduate with a linguistics degree, he has now published a book called “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” which explores in depth some of his more fanciful and fascinating theories. We chatted with Aleksic about edutainment, brainrot and President Trump as influencer in chief.
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
✍️ Author Chat
Author Adam Aleksic
(Adam Aleksic)
Did you get into linguistics because you wanted to explore online language?
I don’t think you can actually hope to fully be caught up with online language itself, as it’s mutating by the minute. The book is more of a road map of the general patterns we’re seeing. I personally got interested in etymology in ninth grade. I didn’t know I would be going into internet linguistics.
How do algorithms shape and change language on the web?
You can’t avoid talking about algorithms if you’re talking about modern language change. I’m looking at my own videos thinking, “Wow, I can’t say this specific word because of the algorithm. I have to say it another way.”
I use the example of the word “unalive” as a replacement for “kill.” That developed in English-language mental health spaces to circumvent platform community guidelines that were enforced by an algorithm used by Chinese government, which was then retooled for TikTok. Suddenly, “unalive” was all over the internet. Algorithms are creating new words.
In the book, you talk about context collapse, the notion that effective videos are designed to appear as if they are addressed directly to the user, even though they are, in fact, bringing in disparate users to a single focal point.
When you’re looking at a video on your For You page, you really think it’s for you. But it never is.
As a creator, I never think about individual people. I think about what’s going to go viral, but also, what do I want to make? I make the video first for myself, then I make it for the algorithm. Never do I consider the actual people that end up seeing the video.
Your phone is an extension of yourself. You perceive a message coming from your algorithmic version of yourself. The algorithm doesn’t actually align who my intended audience might be with who the actual audience is. It just sends my video to whatever makes the most money.
What about brainrot — the notion that the internet is damaging young people’s ability to think and reason. Does this apply to online language?
I think there’s no such thing as “brainrot” with words. They’ve done neurological studies. No word is worse for your brain than other words. Now, the other stuff, culturally, is another conversation. It probably is bad that these platforms are monopolizing our attention to sell us things. So I can say, linguistically, we’re fine.
Do you think the internet makes us smarter?
It’s an interesting question. What is “smarter”? I know that’s a hard thing to define. I think like with any tool, it can be true. Every tool has good and bad, right?
You talk about rage-baiting and hyperbole, or hype, as a tool to gain virality online. Our president is quite proficient at this tactic.
I think Trump’s language uniquely lends itself to virality. He has these phrasal templates, like “Make X Y Again,” or “This has been the greatest X in the history of Y.” People use his sentence structures as these skeletons, which they can remix. He coined “sad” as an interjection, which I regularly see my friends using. I don’t know how much of it is intentional. Maybe he just stumbled into it. But the fact of the matter is, I think we have Trump in office because he is uniquely suited to the internet.
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Anna Wintour, longtime Vogue editor and chair of the Met Gala, recently announced that she would be stepping back from some of her duties at the iconic Condé Nast magazine.
Hamilton Cain calls “The Aviator and the Showman,” Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s joint biography of Amelia Earhart and her husband, “a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife’s career may have cost her life.”
According to Ilana Massad, Kashana Cauley’s novel “The Payback,” a satire about student loans, of all things, is a “terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.”
Valorie Castellanos Clark thinks fan fiction writer turned novelist Brigette Knightley’s debut novel “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy” is “proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel.”
📖 Bookstore Faves
Hennessy + Ingalls bookstore serves those with a taste for the visual.
(Hennessy + Ingalls)
Today we are chatting with Carlos Chavez, a bookseller at Hennessey + Ingalls, a sprawling space in downtown L.A. that specializes in books about art, architecture, graphic design and all things visual.
What’s selling right now?
Because we are a speciality bookstore, sales are really across the board. Everyday it can be something different. Someone came in yesterday and bought a bunch of books featuring art from the painter and sculptor Claes Odenberg, for example. We also sell a lot of books on industrial design, and fashion designers have been buying books about shoes. The other day a prop designer came in and purchased books with red covers. It’s a mixed bag.
Art books can be very expensive. Why do you think there is still a market for them, despite the plenitude of images online?
There are still plenty of book lovers who want to hold a book, and they want to see it before they buy it. For many of our customers, books are a great source of artistic inspiration of the kind you just can’t find online. This is the kind of store where customers are free to linger for hours if they want to.
There has been a lot of social unrest downtown this year. How is the store coping?
Business has been up and down. Some days are better than others. I think people were scared to come out, but yesterday was a good day, for example.
It’s the biggest question that’s been asked over and over again about the night of Nov. 13, 2022, when four University of Idaho students — Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves — were brutally stabbed to death in their off-campus house in the college town of Moscow, Idaho: Why?
With no apparent motive or clue as to who could have committed such a heinous crime, Moscow became the epicenter of an intense investigation and a social media storm that Prime Video’s “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders” delves into over four episodes dropping on Friday.
Liz Garbus (“Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer”) and Matthew Galkin (“Murder in the Bayou”) share directing and executive producing duties on the docuseries, which is based on reporting by author James Patterson and investigative journalist Vicky Ward, and they knew early on what angle their production would take. “We decided that a very interesting and unexplored angle was to see what it was like inside the eye of the hurricane,” Galkin says. “So, for the people, the family members, the friends of the victims that had not ever spoken to the media, that was where we chose to focus our energies as far as access is concerned.”
That included exclusive interviews with Stacy and Jim Chapin, parents of 20-year-old Ethan, and Karen and Scott Laramie, parents of 21-year-old Mogen, who have never talked about the murders — despite numerous projects on the subject — and how it ripped apart not only the town of Moscow but their respective families.
Garbus and Galkin talked with The Times about how they gained the families’ trust, how social media affected the case, and the recent twists and turns that happened just before the series was set to air. For one, on July 2, primary suspect Bryan Kohberger, a former criminal justice doctoral student who was arrested six weeks after the murders, entered a plea agreement with a full confession of the murders — done to avoid the death penalty — just weeks before his trial was set to begin. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What were the origins of your involvement in the production and with crime novelist James Patterson?
Matthew Galkin: This was a story that I started tracking, obviously, when it happened, which was mid-November of 2022, and I didn’t make any outreach to any key people within the story, any of the families, until it was almost spring of 2023. We were tracking it to see how it developed once they made an arrest and once we could see the contours of the story and that things like social media played a major part in the energy created around this story.
Liz Garbus: Concurrently, as Matthew was laying the foundation for this by reaching out and trying to see where the families were on this story, I got outreach from James Patterson’s company about their interest in collaborating on a project around this case. That was quite fortuitous, and we laid some of those building blocks together and shared access and research. The film was made by its filmmakers, and the book [“The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy” by Patterson and Ward, which is being released on July 14] was reported by its writers, so they were operating on parallel tracks. We were able to support and help each other, but, truly, Matthew’s original outreach to the Chapin family is what laid the building blocks for this show and is really the bedrock of it.
Matthew Galkin, co-director of Prime Video’s “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders.”
(Matthew Galkin)
How was the gag order for law enforcement and other key people close to the case a challenge in telling your story?
Galkin: In this particular story, there was a probable cause affidavit that was filed in early January of ’23, which really laid out, up to that point, what investigative details existed in order to bring law enforcement toward the suspect and ultimately make the arrest. So we were able, at the very least, to tell that story through the details we learned through the probable cause affidavit.
It’s always a challenge if you don’t have all of the participating members of a story to try to tell the complete story. But in my past work, we tended to pick projects that are victim-centric more than law enforcement-centric. I’ve had experience telling stories through that perspective, so in a lot of ways, the limited access that we had actually lined up with the story we were trying to tell anyway.
Garbus: Even on “Gone Girls,” which was a show I made recently for Netflix, those murders were 10, 20, 30 years old. There were no gag orders, but there were certain people who didn’t want to talk for their own reasons, so sometimes, as documentary filmmakers, you have to pick a lane. What are you bringing to the story? What point of view can you fully express? And we clearly had that lane here.
And when you have that lane so clear early on, does that actually help get people to talk to you, especially those who hadn’t spoken to anyone before?
Galkin: I flew out to Washington state, and the first contact I made was to Jim and Stacy Chapin, who are the parents of Ethan, Hunter and Maizie. I convinced them to let me take them to lunch and just talk through what our vision of how to tell the story would be. I was probably the 50th in line to try to make a documentary project about it. They’ve been inundated at that point, and it was probably five or six months of journalists, documentary filmmakers [and] podcasters just coming out of the woodwork.
I know for a fact they looked at Liz’s track record, they looked at my track record, and I think they felt comfortable in the fact that if we were going to do crime stories, they were not usually from the killer’s point of view or even from law enforcement point of view. It’s usually from family or victim, so I think that gave them some comfort to know that they would have real input in how Ethan’s story was told. They liked the idea of picking one project to really go deep on and be able to help put Ethan’s narrative out to the world through their own voice, as opposed to other people who didn’t know Ethan telling it.
Maizie and Hunter Chapin were Ethan’s siblings. Both were interviewed for the documentary along with their parents.(Courtesy of Prime Video)
Did you know early on that social media would play such a big part in the case?
Galkin: It was actually the two main topics of conversation. My first conversation with the Chapins was our vision of how we were going to tell the story and also their experience dealing with the insane noise and pressures of social media sleuths and people reaching out, going into their DMs, creating theories about their children, about them, about their children’s friends — just the insanity. Obviously, there have been crime stories that deal with social media, but I have never experienced something of this magnitude with this much social media attention.
Garbus: Social media has become much of the atmosphere in the telling and digestion of crimes in the American public’s imagination of them. In some cases, it can be helpful, like the case of the Long Island serial killer, where the victims were not commanding national interest, and social media and advocates can play a huge role. Then there are other times in which the voracious appetites can overtake the story.
In your series, you don’t spend a lot of time dissecting all the gruesome details of the murders. Was that due to the law enforcement gag order?
Galkin: Maybe a little, but it was also a choice of ours. There are many other projects, documentary series or news specials about this case that go into all of the really horrific details of what happened in that house. It was a conversation from the beginning of how do we present this so it’s factual. We’re not necessarily avoiding things, but we didn’t feel like there was a reason to linger on those details because there were other aspects of the story that were of more interest to us.
Garbus: When you’re with these families and you experience the grief and trauma through them, that’s kind of what you need to know. The ways in which the ripple effect of the trauma has affected this entire friend group and all of these young people, that speaks volumes to what happened that day and we wanted to experience it through them.
Given the recent developments with Kohberger’s plea deal, did you change the tag at the end of your show?
Garbus: Thanks to some great postproduction supervisors and assistants, we will be updating the end card to have viewers be up to date with the plea.
Matthew Galkin and director of photography Jeff Hutchens on set of the re-created King Road house, where the murders occurred, in “One Night in Idaho: The College Murders.”
(Matthew Galkin)
In the latter half of the series, there’s talk about Kohberger and the notion of him being an incel, or involuntary celibate [where a person, usually male, is frustrated by a lack of sexual experiences]. How did that help understand a potential motive in the murders?
Garbus: That was something that was very interesting to us right at the beginning: Why were these young women targeted? We may never know with this plea deal now and it may remain a mystery, but there were signs, for sure, about involvement in that culture for us to explore that angle. As families watch this and they’re sitting with their sons and wondering what they might be doing online, this is the kind of conversation that people need to be having about the media, the infiltration of messages that young men receive today and it’s only getting more extreme in this moment.
Was four episodes always the amount to tell this story? Obviously, the case is still unfolding with Kohberger’s plea agreement. Could a sequel happen?
Galkin: Four episodes felt like the right amount of space to tell the story that we told. Obviously, there are still chapters unfolding, and if there is an appetite to continue to tell this story with our subjects and all of our partners, then certainly I think we’d be open to doing that. But we feel like we told a complete story here … every episode offers a pivot as to the perspectives that we’re seeing this case through, and every episode has a different lens.
Garbus: Clearly, our filmmaking stops at a certain point. You’ve had this plea deal, and the gag order will be lifted, so it is a capsule of time of what the families knew and understood since this tragedy happened up until a couple of months ago. We will see over the next weeks and months how much more we will learn, but it is a fragment of experience very much rooted in time.
Since there is so much interest in this case with many podcasts, documentaries and news stories out there, do you worry about that at all?
Garbus: In some ways you don’t think about it, but at the same time, when you’re setting off to make a project like this, you want to make sure you are saying something unique. We’re going to spend X number of years of our lives on this, and you want to make sure you’re adding something new to the discourse on the case. And, of course, it matters to us that this is the place where the Chapins and the Laramies will tell their story and that we are able to take care of it for them and the friends in the way that we intended. It matters just in that you want to make sure you have a lane that’s needed in the discourse and I think in this case we felt very clearly that we did.
Galkin: We knew from Day 1, given the access that we had, that our series would be unique to anything else on the market, because these are people that have never told their story before, and the way we were planning on doing it, which was truly from the inside, without any sort of outsider voices. So that was not an anxiety for us.
