Shohei Ohtani, the No Kings Turnout, and an AI-Generated Video of Trump Spilling Shit Over NYC—Oh My!

Let us talk about unprecedented public events over this weekend because it was the best and the worst of all of us. On Friday night, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers put on an athletic performance beyond anything I have ever seen, and I covered sports full-time for six years, and continue to do so now and again. He did something that nobody alive ever had seen before because only Babe Ruth, while in the employ of the Boston Red Sox, ever came close to anything like it. He pitched six innings and struck out 10 Milwaukee Brewers. And he also hit three home runs, the second of which left Dodger Stadium—and, perhaps, Los Angeles County—entirely. Shirley Povich died in 1998 so, alas, there was nobody alive who could properly place these feats in context.

Then, on Saturday, seven million of us took to the streets and the parks and the common spaces of our cities to enjoy ourselves in protesting the policies of a president who marked the occasion by releasing an AI video that showed this third-generation draft dodger flying a fighter bomber and dropping bags of AI shit all over New York City, proving conclusively that, as long as he's remodeling the White House anyway, he might want to pad the walls of the Oval Office. In a weekend of glorious surprises and unprecedented human achievement, the president of the United States found an avenue through which he could (literally) perform his own personal shitshow. These are not ordinary times.