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...
Read MoreMartin Amis on the rise of Trump, Tom Wolfe on the origins of speech, Art Spiegelman on Si Lewen, fiction by Diane Williams, and more
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Illustrations of Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as it appeared between the 1930s and today.
Read MoreA 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...
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"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."
Read MoreA 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...
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."
Read MoreA 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...
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."
Read MorePolice 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...
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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
Read MoreTom 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
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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.
Read MoreGerman 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...
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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
Read MoreIn 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...
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Illustrations of Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, as it appeared in the 1930s and today.
Read MoreAt 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...
Read MoreBarack Obama visits Hiroshima; Tom Engelhardt searches for our atomic history
Read MoreMexican president Enrique Peña Nieto proposed legalizing same-sex marriage, Canadian parliament members introduced legislation that would ban discrimination against transgender people, and teenagers in Chester, Vermont, wore “Straight Pride” T-shirts to protest a new policy at their high school that allows transgender students to use whatever bathroom accords with their gender identity. A Louisiana lawmaker proposed and then withdrew legislation that would have required dancers at strip clubs to weigh less than 161 pounds. “I can’t strip, either,” said the representative. “I’m a little overweight.” Read more...
Read MoreRodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who called the pope a “son of a whore” and has been accused of running vigilante death squads that have killed 1,000 people, was elected president of the Philippines, promising to end crime in six months by “killing five criminals a week” and by restoring the “death penalty by hanging in public.” “If I fail,” he said during his campaign, “kill me.” Read more...
Read MoreHelen Ouyang on the cost of crowd-sourcing drugs, Paul Wood on Trump's supporters, Walter Kirn on political predictions, Sonia Faleiro on a man's search for his kidnapped children, and Rivka Galchen on The People v. O. J. Simpson.
Read MoreIndian scientists attempted to curb carbon emissions by making cows less flatulent, and the Tunisian champions of the cattle-herding mobile game Bagra were given an adult cow. A 10-year-old Finnish hacker was awarded $10,000 after discovering a bug in Instagram. “I could have deleted anyone’s comments,” he said. “Like Justin Bieber’s.” Justin Bieber was sued for destroying the iPhone of a man who took photos of him failing to complete a beer bong. Read more...
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