The Latest

The threat of violence weighs heavy on Qatar’s blue-collar female migrants. 

Randall Kennedy defends respectability politics, Heather Mallick examines the career of Stephen Harper, Marco Roth reviews Houellebecq’s new novel, and more

More than 100 people were killed when a crane collapsed in Mecca’s Grand Mosque during a thunderstorm. President Obama announced that the United States would admit 10,000 Syrian refugees for resettlement over the next year, and the European Union presented a plan to settle 160,000 refugees among its member states. “This proposal,” said the European Commission’s president, “is quite modest.” Read more...

Serena Williams loses the U.S. Open; David Foster Wallace reflects on his boyhood tennis career

Harper’s Magazine contributors to be honored at the White House

Did Thomas Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?

The military rulers of Thailand rejected a new constitution, the war-crimes trial of the Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda began at the International Criminal Court, and the president of Guatemala resigned his post and was then arrested on charges of fraud and corruption. In Tennessee, a judge cited the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in his rejection of a straight couple’s divorce petition. “Tennessee's judiciary must now await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court," he wrote, "as to what is not a marriage.” Read more...

Photographs from the U.S.-Mexican border 

A California park, drawn from memories of childhood

The Syrian government carried out air strikes and barrel bombings against rebels in the Damascus suburb of Douma, killing at least 150 civilians; Syrian rebels accused the Islamic State of using mustard gas on children; the head of an international gay-rights organization told the United Nations that the Islamic State has shot, stoned, beheaded, or pushed from tall buildings at least 30 gay, lesbian, and transgender people; and a study in Germany found that civil wars, political uprisings, and the spread of the Islamic State have improved air quality in the Middle East. “Negative NO₂ trends,” the scientists wrote, “are associated with humanitarian catastrophes.” Read more...

In five easy lessons

In Trinidad, the rise of Jack Warner—and his putative fall—has become something of a parable for the larger foibles of the “nation building” project it’s been engaged in

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter announced he would begin radiation therapy for brain cancer and said he hoped to see the eradication of the guinea worm before he dies. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump held a rally that drew at least 20,000 people in Mobile, Alabama; and poll found that 81 percent of North Carolina voters are unsure how they feel about Deez Nuts, a 15-year-old presidential candidate. “Anyone,” said Deez Nuts, “can run.”

Six cents for lost prestige

In Mississippi, a suit was filed challenging a state law that forbids adoption by same-sex couples; in Ohio, a judicial-conduct board announced that judges who perform marriages must wed same-sex couples; and the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who stopped issuing all marriage licenses when same-sex unions became legal, did not show up for work after receiving a court order to resume issuing licenses. Read more...

William Deresiewicz discusses education in the age of neoliberalism, Andrew Cockburn argues that invasive species don’t deserve their bad reputations, Elaine Blair reviews Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, and more

How $1.8 billion in aid to Ukraine was funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy 

The Islamic State captured at least 230 people in the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn and threatened to behead a man for protesting the arrests of Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated women in Egypt. Nineteen girls held hostage by the group in Mosul, Iraq, were executed for refusing to have sex with soldiers, and the United Nations confirmed the authenticity of an Islamic State pamphlet listing the prices of its sex slaves. “The girls get peddled,” said one U.N. official, “like barrels of petrol.” Read more...

A nurse's story

Welcome to the nerve-wracking reality of being Finland. 

Thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants attempted to reach England by entering the Channel Tunnel in Calais, France, and jumping onto passing trucks and freight trains. French authorities sent 120 riot police, equipped with dogs and tear gas, to assist the 60 officers who were already blocking the migrants’ passage. A Sudanese man was killed while trying to hop on a truck, becoming the ninth migrant since June to have died while attempting to cross into Britain. “It’s an incredible place,” said British prime minister David Cameron, “to live.”Read more...

How American high school students learn to loathe literature

Watching Turkey's election in Diyarbakir

Mississippi authorities began investigating a suspicious car accident that resulted in the death of a black man who was an advocate for the Confederate flag. A former Baltimore police officer was told by a venue owner in Glen Burnie, Maryland, that he couldn’t perform in blackface at a fundraiser for the officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody. Police in Texas released a video of the arrest of Sandra Bland, a black woman who later hanged herself in jail, showing an officer pointing a stun gun at Bland and saying, “I will light you up.”  Read more...

An illustration of Johannes Kepler writing his science-fiction novel, Somnium, in 1608. 

Kai Wright spends two years in a town where the Great Recession never ended; Mya Frazier explores the discomfiting economics of police brutality; Sarah Manguso, Michelle Tea, and eight other contributors discuss parenthood; and Harpers.org launches a metered paywall

A man kills four Marines and a Navy sailor in Tennessee, the Islamic State’s chief singer-songwriter dies in an airstrike, and a squirrel is detained for stalking

"The fix was in from the beginning, despite the revolt. Fast-track authority was never in danger."

“A progressive Europe—the Europe of sustainable growth and social cohesion—would be one thing. The gridlocked, reactionary, petty, and vicious Europe that actually exists is another. It cannot and should not last for very long.”