The Shiyan Lake Ecologic Park in China unveiled its “exciting and adventurous” glass-walled bathrooms, and a public restroom in Virginia was consumed by a sinkhole.Officials in Indiana asked motorists for heightened caution during deer-mating season, and snake catchers in Australia observed a rare snake orgy in an empty pool. In Germany, the seven-year hunt for a man responsible for slashing inflatable backyard pools ended with the arrest of a 27-year-old man, whose apartment also contained multiple inflatable mattresses. “We cannot rule out that the man has some kind of fetish,” said a police spokesman. Read more...
Read MoreHackers took control of a digital billboard in Jakarta and played a pornographic film, a church in Western Australia had its windows broken by a gang of children between the ages of four and eight who were armed with small rocks, and a Pittsburgh man was given 30 days to catch a wild rooster on his property before being penalized by the city. “I called the zoo,” the man said in court, “but they said they didn’t have the capabilities to catch a rooster.” Read more...
Read More“The suffering cannot disappear without a trace, we need to understand how and why,” says Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel laureate in literature and author of Secondhand Time.
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Robert Gumpert discusses "Division Street," his photo essay on homelessness in San Francisco, which was published in the October issue of Harper's Magazine
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Illustrations of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, as it appeared between 1928 and today.
Read MoreThe president of a Crime Stoppers chapter in Canada was fired for allegedly participating in the cultivation of cannabis, police in Mexico found a van outfitted with a ten-foot-long air cannon used to fire 60-pound bales of marijuana over the U.S. border, and an employee of the Royal Canadian Mint was suspected of having smuggled out an estimated $179,015 in “cookie-sized nuggets” of gold by coating them in Vaseline and hiding them in his rectum. Read more...
Read MoreDonald Trump advocates for stop-and-frisk; Petra Bartosiewicz considers the history of William Bratton's policing policies
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Harper's Magazine writer David Gargill on General Electric's failed Hudson River cleanup
Read MoreIn Minnesota, an Islamic State militant dressed as a private security guard stabbed nine people at a shopping mall, before being shot and killed in a Macy’s by an off-duty police officer. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump conceded that U.S. president Barack Obama was born in America, Jane Goodall compared Trump’s behavior to that of male chimpanzees performing dominance rituals, a dead Republican won his primary race for a seat in the New York State Assembly, and a deceased Siamese cat was sent a California voter-registration application in the mail. Read more...
Read MoreRobert Sullivan on the cult of Hamilton, Walter Kirn on the Republican National Convention, Rachel Nolan on El Salvador's anti-abortion machinery, a story by Joyce Carol Oates, and more
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From How to Be Perfect: An Illustrated Guide, with words by Ron Padgett and illustrations by Jason Novak. The book was published this month by Coffee House Press. Padgett's 2011 book, How Long, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Jason Novak's illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and on this website.
Read MoreA tractor-trailer crashed on I-95 in Delaware, spilling 8 million blank pennies; a tractor-trailer caught fire on I-68 in Maryland, burning bacon and ribs; and a new ATM in Ohio was dispensing pizzas rather than money. New York mayor Bill de Blasio announced that 50,000 oysters were being distributed on beds made of porcelain from recycled toilets. “This oyster bed,” said the mayor, “will serve multiple purposes.” Read more...
Read MoreNorth Korea fired three ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan. JetBlue put an unaccompanied five-year-old boy on the wrong plane, sending him to Boston instead of New York; the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a satellite leased by Facebook exploded on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral; and police in Florida arrested a man who posted his own “Wanted of the Week” mugshot on Facebook.A two-year-old girl was cited for littering by the Washington, D.C., Department of Public Works, a public library in Alabama announced plans to enforce jail sentences for overdue books, and convicted rapist Brock Turner was released from prison after serving three months of his six-month sentence. Read more...
Read MoreIn New Jersey, a newspaper published two obituaries of the same man, one by his wife and one by a woman claiming to be his girlfriend. A minor-league baseball player hit a grand slam, smashing the windshield of his own truck, which was parked outside the stadium. KFC released an “Extra Crispy” sunscreen that smells like fried chicken, and Colonel Sanders’s nephew may have accidentally leaked the company’s secret spice blend to a reporter. A family in Turkey got food poisoning at a dinner they organized to celebrate their recovery from food poisoning. Read more...
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From an interview with a girl in a reintegration program for former child soldiers in Colombia.
Read MoreA 12-year-old boy was placed in charge of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Jefferson County, Colorado, by his mother, an official campaign coordinator. “You have a responsibility to your children,” she said, “to teach them.” Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort resigned after it was reported that he received $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Manafort consulted, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation removed a statue of a naked Trump from Union Square. “NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection,” said a spokesperson, “no matter how small.” Read more...
Read MoreA Filipino congressman called for banning Trump from the Philippines after the candidate referred to the country as a “terrorist nation” and called its denizens “animals,” and a Trump supporter from Virginia traveled to New York City and climbed 16 stories of Trump Tower with suction cups to demand an audience with the candidate, who was campaigning in Virginia at the time. It was reported that Trump’s campaign manager received $12.7 million in “undisclosed cash payments” from a pro-Russian political party in 2012, and Clinton’s tax returns revealed that 96 percent of her charitable donations last year were made to the Clinton Family Foundation. A black coating of biofilm was found growing on monuments across Washington, D.C. Read more...
Read MoreAndrew Cockburn on the Saudi slaughter in Yemen, Carolyn Kormann on California homeowners’ battle with nature, Alan Jacobs on the disappearance of Christian intellectuals, a forum on a post-Obama foreign policy, a story by Alice McDermott, and more
Read MoreA grandmother in New Mexico was arrested for allowing her drunk 13-year-old grandson to drive, the start-up company Ambrosia announced plans to start clinical trials in which older adults seeking “rejuvenation” would receive blood transfusions from people between the ages of 16 and 25, and alumni contributions to colleges and universities nationwide dropped because of protests over racial equality on campuses. “I feel that I have been lied to, patronized, and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot,” wrote an Amherst alumnus. Read more...
Read MoreSidney Blumenthal on the origins of the Republican Party, the fallout from Clinton’s emails, and his new biography of Abraham Lincoln
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Above all, NAFTA is an investment agreement, financial and political in nature, and it has always been considered as such by both Republicans and Democrats.
Read MoreRepublican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced that he wouldn’t endorse Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for reelection, kicked a crying baby out of a rally in Virginia, asked Russia to steal U.S. State Department emails, reportedly asked three times during a national-security briefing why the United States shouldn’t use nuclear weapons, and said he wanted to hit a “little guy” so hard “his head would spin.” Researchers in the United Kingdom discovered an orangutan that mimics human conversations. Read more...
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