Weather report: Klåvudden Naturreservat, Hårga, Sweden. A breezy day among the Scots pines at the Klåvudden Naturreservat outside Hårga on August 12. A high temperature of 22.7^◦ C (73^◦F). Just out of frame: Lake Vättern, the sixth-largest lake in Europe.

The rise and fall of violent crime in America. What goes up doesn’t always come down. In the 1960s, the American murder rate shot up, ultimately doubling between 1960 and 1975—and stayed high throughout the 1980s. There’s no gravitational force keeping this rate from soaring; once it rises, it could keep rising. So, when the U.S. murder rate increased by 29 percent between 2019 and 2020, it was reasonable to fear an ongoing upward trend.

But that’s not what happened. The murder rate fell by 13 percent last year—and then by 26 percent in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. Why? Today, Tracey Meares explores what we know, and still don't know, about it.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Along the Banks of Rivers.’ From the mid-1990s, here’s Chicago’s Tortoise, off their album Millions Now Living Will Never Die. The track is languorous, with a twangy lead guitar over a hint of brushed snares and organ tones. There’s something outdoors-in-the-Old West to it—sounds for the waning days of summer up here in the Northern Hemisphere.

—Brendan Hasenstab

It’s the data, stupid. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom on August 5, District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google controlled a monopoly on internet search and had engaged in years of illegal acts to thwart competition. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling—emphasizing that the company had exploited its position to charge advertisers well above market rates to place ads against search results. Meanwhile, Google has an 89 percent share of the overall search market and a 95 percent share of the mobile search market in the U.S.—and a 92 percent and 95 percent share globally.

Mehta has given Google and the U.S. administration a deadline of early September to file their recommendations for remedies to the corporation’s search monopoly. He could choose to break Google up—forcing it to split up its search, advertising, and Android phone businesses, for instance—or, say, ban the kind of deals Google struck with Apple to make Google the default search engine on iPhones.

So what’s a judge to do?

Mehta gave little indication in his ruling. Some have compared the case to the government’s courtroom victory over Microsoft in 1999, when the U.S. successfully sued it for abusing the monopoly of its Windows operating system.

But this case is, in at least one important way, unprecedented: Windows was only one operating system among many; Google’s search engine provides vastly better results and dominates the market because it has so much vastly more of the most valuable commodity there is in the digital realm: data—server farms and server farms of data; orders of magnitude more data than any of its competitors.

All this data allows Google to guess better than anyone what people really want when they type in their search queries—and its value to Google illustrates its value across the economy in this digital era: The quantity and quality of data largely determine the capabilities—and profitability—of social media, news media, AI, and advertising today. Those with the best data on their audiences and products have a colossal advantage over their competitors.

In this light, Julia Angwin, a former technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica—now the founder of the nonprofit publication The Markup, covering the effects of technology on contemporary society—suggests a framework for thinking about the question Judge Mehta is facing: If Google had to make its data available to competitors and potential competitors, Angwin says, it would be consistent with the way some telecommunications companies have to make their lines available to others—to enable effective competition among internet providers. And as long as Google doesn’t have to make that data available, she says, there’ll never be real competition in search—no matter what else a judge might impose.

—Michael Bluhm

New sway for the nationalist right in Europe. Across the continent in June and July, far-right parties kept doing better and better in major elections. In France, the United Kingdom—and throughout the European Union, in elections to the European Parliament—parties on the nationalist right won record results. Now, they have considerably more power to drive policy changes—foremost among them, tightening immigration and loosening climate-related regulation. What these parties don’t have—yet, at any rate—is control of any governments in London, Paris, or Brussels.

So what do their recent political wins mean for Europe? Today, Matthias Matthijs explores the implications—suggesting the significance may be less in what far-right politicians plan to do next and more in why people have voted for them in the first place.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Bonneville Park 4.’ Here we go in a contemporary classical direction with Devin Maxwell’s Timebending—with Christine Tavolacci, Eric Km Clark, and Katie Porter—and please be sure to take that album title seriously! Time bending is exactly what Maxwell, the composer, is doing. He features violins that seem focused on a harsh drone and then adds stressed-out flutes to the mix. The percussion underneath seems like a wink. And the layering, repetition, and gentle manipulations of these elements all come together—in a transcendent maelstrom.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The paranoid style in American politics (2024). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the U.S. presidential race last Friday and endorsed Donald Trump. Kennedy had been polling around 5 percent—low by the standards of America’s established parties, but high by those of any third party.

Third-party presidential candidates tend to have recognizable political views. In 2000, Ralph Nader represented the Greens, and in 2016, Gary Johnson, the Libertarians. Kennedy, however, has shown little ideological coherence: He began his campaign as a Democrat, continued as an independent, flirted with the Libertarian Party, and ended by throwing his support to the Republican nominee.

A very strange campaign.

In the course of it, Kennedy has said the Covid vaccine is a bioweapon targeting “certain races”; he’s also said a worm once ate part of his brain; he believes the Central Intelligence Agency killed not only his father but also his uncle, the 35th president of the United States.

Plenty of sensible people might be attracted to a conspiracy theory or two, but for Kennedy conspiracy is a whole style of thought. Which might feel like a sign of the times. But in the U.S., it’s not unusual. It can feel almost familiar.

In 1964—60 years ago now—the American historian Richard Hofstadter described a “paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Already then, he wrote, the style was “far from new.” New England preachers warned against the Illuminati in the eighteenth century; there was a strong anti-Masonic movement in the 1820s; and then, of course, there was McCarthyism in the middle of the last century—which extrapolated from the real threat of communism to an out-of-control pattern of persecution that’s still infamous by McCarthy’s name.

The politics of the United States has turned on some wild ideas, again and again. And here again.

—Gustav Jönsson

5 W Main: The Sentinel State. Chinese society has undergone radical, at times tumultuous, change since Mao Zedong established the communist People’s Republic in 1949. But since Mao, social and economic revolutions haven’t meant political revolution in China—and today, the Communist Party’s hold on power is, apparently, firmer than ever. Why’s that?

Minxin Pei’s recent book, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, makes the case that the fundamental reason is China’s near-total ability to spy constantly on its citizens. Pei, a professor of governance at Claremont McKenna College, has mapped it out: While high-tech facial recognition cameras are important to the Chinese surveillance system, what's even more important is the relatively small group of secret-police officers who command millions of informants.

If it feels like we’ve seen this before, the East German Stasi also had informers in every room—and the East German Stasi is long gone, along with the East German regime. But dwelling on the connection may be too optimistic.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘First Idea Part One.’ The four musicians of 137 are veterans of the post-jazz groups Portishead and Sons of Kemet. Here, on the new album Strangeness Oscillation, it’s instrumental fusion. Improvisation is the rule—animal spirits. Listen for that psychedelic swirl.

—Brendan Hasenstab