111 MHz: ‘… 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

111 MHz: ‘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

Leaving it all behind. Every day now, immigration seems to be in the news across Europe and the U.S. It’s understandable; the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers have continued to break records each year since the pandemic let up. But what’s happening with the migrants themselves? Why are so many people around the world uprooting their lives? Today, Rebecca Hamlin looks at the causes driving the huge waves of migration globally, how these causes can interact and complicate one another, and the effects of government policies designed to stem it.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Seven Steps to Heaven.’ As long as it’s so hot, how about some sizzling Miles Davis—from a 1966 track collected in The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975. Later in his career, Davis slowed this number down, but here—just a few years before he went electric—this hard-bop number keeps the energy and showiness of the 1963 album track. But here it’s in full force, live at the Newport Jazz Festival—with Wayne Shorter on tenor, Herbie Hancock on keys, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Downfall in Dhaka. On August 5, the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled to India after weeks of public protests against her increasingly autocratic rule. Students had been demonstrating since June against a quota system restricting eligibility for government jobs, which people in the country widely see as secure and lucrative.

Bangladesh’s supreme court overturned the law behind the quota system, but the protests grew into a broader movement calling for Hasina’s removal. She’d ruled Bangladesh since 2009, regularly quashing dissent, including by killing opposition activists.

Amid the recent protests, government security forces and vigilantes from Hasina’s party—among them, a paramilitary unit whose past leaders have faced international sanctions over accusations of torture, kidnapping, and murder—cracked down on demonstrators, arresting more than 10,000 of them.

Why did the crackdown fail—and the rebellion work?

The most violent day of protests was August 4, as almost 100 demonstrators died in clashes across Bangladesh. But that evening, protest leaders decided to move up by one day a planned mass march to Hasina’s residence, originally scheduled for August 6. Instead of backing down when faced with a new curfew and rising violence, the protesters realized that the public’s fear of the regime had largely faded, allowing the movement to continue growing. Dozens of former senior military officers also called on its current leadership not to rescue “those who have created the current situation.” On August 5, the army chief announced Hasina’s resignation, saying he’d begin the formation of an interim government.

Hasina, one of the world’s longest-serving female leaders, was the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence and served as its first president. He and most of his family were assassinated in an army coup in 1975, survived only by Hasina and her sister.

—Michael Bluhm