111MHz: ‘Time Code.’ For his latest record, The Berklee Sessions, the British DJ and producer Robin Rimbeau, who records as Scanner, teams up with the American saxophonist and composer Neil Leonard. The result is something new, transposing the jazz-fusion aesthetics of IDM to a looser, more improvisational setting.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Ukraine attacks. For nearly a year, the war in Europe had settled into a stalemate, with Russian and Ukrainian forces both dug into fortified positions, unable to gain more than a few kilometers of territory.

Until last week. On August 6, Ukraine launched a sudden cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, seizing some 28 villages—and catching the Kremlin’s armed forces completely by surprise. It marked the first time since World War II that a foreign military had invaded Russia.

The operation seems also to have caught the United States by surprise—the U.S. being the Ukrainian military’s biggest funder and supplier. Kyiv didn’t tell Washington that it planned to go into Russia; and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been notably quiet about it—saying only that Russia had used the region to launch strikes against Ukraine and that Kyiv was drawing up a humanitarian plan for the area’s residents.

So far, neither Zelensky, his military, nor the country’s closest allies in America have explained what Ukraine intended to accomplish by taking control of all these villages in Kursk. So why’d they do it?

Zelensky has been clear that Kyiv doesn’t expect to hold the territory; the region has never been part of Ukraine. But the operation has clearly invigorated the Ukrainians: Reporting and social media show lots of illustrations of boosted morale among their soldiers and civilians—as well as somber questions and recriminations among Russians about how this could happen.

For his part, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says he figures Ukraine wants to force the Kremlin to redeploy troops to Kursk so they won’t be available to fight in Ukraine—and possibly to improve Kyiv’s negotiating position in any potential peace talks.

But Ukraine’s strategy is unclear—and the scale of the Russian response, uncertain. Ukraine has meanwhile faced critical shortages of manpower—and now, it has some of its most effective units exposed in Russian territory.

—Michael Bluhm

This is your economy on war. It can feel confusing to see vibrant economic results coming from Russia—despite more than two and a half years of war and much-publicized Western sanctions. But the country continues to generate striking growth: Its GDP rose by 4.0 percent in the second quarter of 2024, and it looks certain to rise more than any advanced economy’s for the rest of the year.

How is that possible? Today, Dmitri Alperovitch explores a transformation in Russia’s economy that’s enabling it to run hot in the near term—but risks burning it out in the long.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘… Smoke.’ If you saw Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car, you’ve heard the work of Eiko Ishibashi, a singer-songwriter and composer in the Japanese jazz and film-scoring world. This track—drawn from her score for Hamaguchi’s subsequent film, the 2023 drama Evil Does Not Exist—is propulsive and pretty, in equal measures.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Homeless in New York. This summer, authorities in NYC began evicting migrants from the city’s shelter system. While New York State is the only U.S. state recognizing a universal right to shelter, New York City is facing an overwhelming capacity crisis—with some 64,300 migrants in tents, hotels, and dormitories—that’s forcing it to restrict this right: Adult migrants who can’t secure any exemption will now only get 30 days of shelter—or if they’re young adults, 60 days. More and more are now sleeping rough—on streets, in parks, or on the subway.

And it isn’t just New York: Massachusetts also began evicting migrants this month. Meanwhile, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered local officials to close homeless encampments across his state. And the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that local governments may ban people from sleeping outdoors. Of course, the problem is that people who sleep outdoors would like to sleep indoors but can’t.

The context for all of this is 2023’s historic spike in American homelessness, now accounting for more than 650,000 people. As Dennis Culhane explains, roughly three-quarters of the newly homeless are from an influx of migrants over the southern border. Which Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott responded to by ordering tens of thousands of migrants bussed to other parts of America—including New York City. In total, more than 200,000 migrants have passed through the city’s shelter system since early 2022. With fewer crossing the border now, that system is now a little less strained than it was at its peak in January—but not much less.

—Gustav Jönsson

Weather report: Halifax, Canada. Sunrise over the harbor in the Nova Scotian capital, July 25, just before a spell of rain—on a day that topped out at 21.7^◦ C (71^◦ F). The metal mesh installation, titled “Sail,” was created by the Italian sculptor Eduardo Tresoldi.

Trickles to a flood. This July, the U.S. Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, raised around $310 million in campaign contributions. That’s more than twice what Barack Obama collected in his record-breaking fundraising month in September 2008. What’s more, almost all of Harris’s July contributions came from small donors. Understanding politics means following the money, as they say. So how are these dramatic contributions affecting the current U.S. presidential election? Today, Robin Kolodny talks about the growing importance of these small donors, parties’ increasingly tight control over political fundraising generally, and how together they’re reshaping democracy in America.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Flight From the City.’ In 2016, the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson released his debut from Deutsche Grammophon, Orphée. It’s a retelling of the myth of Orpheus, on a quest to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the underworld. Loss, rebirth, creativity. What starts with a gentle piano motif is bolstered by swelling strings and touches of the electronic textures Jóhannsson was known for.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Inherent vice. Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for this November’s U.S. presidential election, has chosen Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. The selection followed weeks of impassioned speculation in the American press about who among the potentials would be most electorally useful for the Harris campaign: Could Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly help on the politics of immigration? Would Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro “deliver” his swing state? Did Walz have enough national name recognition? The questions have been circulating constantly in the media; the answers have been as varied as they’ve been confident.

Meanwhile, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump—whose own running mate, J.D. Vance, has unusually low approval ratings—said, “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.” … Which is it?

The truth appears to be: No one knows. Not even professional historians. As William Hogeland has noted, since Trump’s election in 2016, there’s been a tendency among historians operating as public intellectuals to talk about the future as though it were written in the past—including, recently, to claim, with great conviction, that truly to understand American history is to understand that Biden departing the race this late would doom the Democrats. A variation, it seems, on what James Fallows refers to as the “predictive style in American journalism.”

Trump may be right that vice presidential nominees often haven’t mattered much. But there’s a reasonable case that in 2008, the Republican presidential nominee that year, John McCain, wasn’t helped by choosing Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin to join his ticket. Looking to past elections to predict future ones may be less like science and more like counting white swans to prove all swans are white: Even if the VP pick hasn’t mattered in the past, it means little about what will matter now.

—Gustav Jönsson