The Latest

A 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...

A 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...

Andrew 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

A 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...

Sidney Blumenthal on the origins of the Republican Party, the fallout from Clinton’s emails, and his new biography of Abraham Lincoln

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.

Republican 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...

Life after five years in Al Shabaab

The Republican Party’s new platform said pornography was a “public-health crisis” and marriage was between a man and a woman, the porn-aggregation site PornHub reported that Cleveland-area searches for “Trump” had increased 648 percent, and, according to some male escorts near the convention, the number of married men using their services went up by a factor of six. “I haven’t been getting any calls,” said a female escort. Read more...

Martin Amis on the rise of Trump, Tom Wolfe on the origins of speech, Art Spiegelman on Si Lewen, fiction by Diane Williams, and more

Illustrations of Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as it appeared between the 1930s and today.

See Harper's Magazine contributors Art Spiegelman and Tomas van Houtryve at the International Festival of the Living Press in Couthures, France. Click here to download the program.

A 19-year-old stripper in Connecticut was arrested for arson after police found her boyfriend’s DNA on a potato, which she had allegedly shoved in the tailpipe of a van owned by the man whose business she set on fire; and inmates at a jail in El Dorado, Kansas, rioted in protest of a mashed-potato lunch. A former U.S. intelligence official said pornography constituted 80 percent of the material on jihadists’ seized laptops, and Starbucks and McDonald’s made porn inaccessible from their Wi-Fi networks. Read more...

"The injuries of slavery and its aftermath are palpable across these villages and farm communities, and the region’s relationship with Tubman’s legacy, and that of the Underground Railroad is, to the outsider, surprisingly fraught."

A 36-year-old man in San Diego was arrested for setting four homeless men on fire, killing three of them. A husband and wife from North Carolina were arrested after attacking each other with pizza rolls, a Kentucky woman was charged with assault after hitting her husband over the head with a burrito and stabbing him, and a Florida woman was accused of hitting her boyfriend with her baby, which, a witness said, she “swung like a bat.” Read more...

"In the next four months, Hillary Clinton will be promoted as a female pioneer. But she'll also be ridiculed as a caricature of feminine success, a woman who owes everything to her husband and is at the same time constantly humiliated in the light of his past infidelities."

A British court awarded a 60-year-old woman the right to use her daughter’s frozen eggs to bear her own grandchild, and identical twin sisters in Colorado and California delivered babies at 1:18 a.m. on the same day. In a town in Long Island, where there have been no reported Zika cases, officials approved the construction of bat houses to ward off the virus. OFF! was announced as the official insect-repellent supplier for the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. Read more...

"These tributes to Manifest Destiny are earnest and essentially staid, but the informal celebrations on the eve of the race have a temper and tang to them epitomized by one shirt I saw on Georgetown Road, the main drag at Indy. 'Back to Back' it said on top, 'World War Champs' on the bottom, with Old Glory in between."

Police in La Joya, Texas, offered a woman a taco after she reported being sexually assaulted by an officer, and it was revealed that the city of Chicago has spent at least $210 million on 600 police-misconduct lawsuits since 2012. A former prison in Philadelphia that has served as a horror-movie set was being prepared as a detention center for protesters arrested at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fired his campaign manager. “Ding dong the witch is dead,” tweeted a Trump adviser, shortly before resigning. Read more...

The euro and its discontents

Freddie Gray and the makings of an American uprising

A gunman kills 49 people with an AR-15 assault rifle at an Orlando nightclub; Dan Baum investigates whether gun-control laws could ever stop the weapon from proliferating

Tom Bissell on touring Israel with Christian Zionists, Joy Gordon on the Cuban embargo, Lawrence Jackson on Freddie Gray and the makings of an American uprising, a story by Paul Yoon, and more

The artist’s interpretation of a speech given in 63 B.C. by Marcus Tullius Cicero, the consul of Rome, in which he denounced senator Lucius Sergius Catilina’s plot to overthrow the Republic.

German nudists protested the proposed construction of a refugee shelter near their colony. An intoxicated man in Russia hacked off his friend’s penis. The Playboy mansion in California was bought by the heir to the Twinkie fortune, and a New Mexico man set fire to his apartment to protest his neighbors’ loud lovemaking. A fight between Russian and English soccer fans in France left 35 people wounded, and an Iranian soccer star was suspended for wearing SpongeBob-patterned pants. Read more...

A photograph from the series BLAST, by Jim Mangan, whose work is on view in the group exhibition Land Escapes, at Joshua Liner Gallery, in New York City. Courtesy the artist

The French left self-destructs

In Pennsylvania, a man crashed his Mercedes into a church, and in California, a man broke into a church, smashed furniture and bottles of sacramental wine for two hours, and set the building on fire. An Anglican vicar who was arrested for punching a paramedic and spitting at a police officer claimed that he had diplomatic immunity from the Vatican, and a man in Pennsylvania gave a group of Amish boys cans of beer and then rammed their horse and buggy with his car. “Rumspringa!” said the man. Read more...

Illustrations of Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, as it appeared in the 1930s and today.

At a retirement home in Ohio, Henry Heimlich, the 96-year-old inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, performed his procedure for the first time, dislodging a piece of hamburger from an 87-year-old woman’s airway. Merriam-Webster defined the hot dog as a sandwich. A judge in Italy dismissed a criminal complaint filed against a 50-year-old man who paid his child support in pizza and calzones, and a man in Texas paid a speeding ticket with 22,000 pennies. Read more...