The Atlantic

With 61-plus days until the election, Donald Trump remains the only major-party nominee for the presidency or vice presidency of the post-Watergate era who has refused to release his tax returns. Not coincidentally, of all nominees through that period, Trump also has the most complicated and least-publicly-understood personal and corporate finances.

Why is he drawing the line here? Readers offer their hypotheses:

I started my career with a year as an IRS agent before jumping across the desk to work for a “Big Eight” firm (which I think is now the Big Four?).

It’s been a long time since I’ve been doing taxes, but my gut tells me Trump hasn’t filed in the first place.

I remember being involved with clients who had endured bankruptcies, the implosion of complex energy partnerships, and/or the collapse of the real-estate market.

Their partnership K1s would be delayed for so long that we’d sometimes have to file with numbers we ... well... sorta made up. Once the K1s arrived we could always go back and amend, but by providing some form of a reasonable estimate we could show good faith.

However, there were some clients that hated the tax code, and the entire Byzantine process (not to mention our fees). So some of them opted out until something came along and forced their hand to file (e.g., an audit).

As the old saying goes, those who give to glass foundations shouldn’t throw stones. Or something like that. In any case, after hitting Hillary Clinton hard over the Clinton Foundation, Donald Trump is under fresh scrutiny for his own foundation.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold has been reporting for months on the dearth of actual giving that Trump has done, despite repeated vows to donate to charity over the decades, but the story that’s broken through concerns a donation that Trump made to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican, in 2013. At the time, Bondi’s office was deciding whether or not to pursue a fraud case against Trump University and the Trump Institute. According to an aide, Bondi personally spoke with Trump, soliciting a donation to And Justice for All, a group backing her reelection. The Trump Foundation cut And Justice for All a $25,000 check, and four days Bondi dropped the investigation.

You’re not supposed to know what a Sia video really means the first time you watch it, or even the fifth. She’s the pop star of inscrutable meaning but unmistakable emotion, of inspirational slogans applicable to nearly any situation, of wigs and flesh-toned leotards and cute everykids doing dance moves that resemble mundane life remixed in a dream. The first time I watched the video for her new song “The Greatest,” I didn’t know what it was about. I just knew it was wonderful, and heavy.

Other viewers, though, picked up on something pretty obvious: The video must be connected to the June massacre of 49 people at an Orlando gay bar during a Latin night. Sia herself hasn’t confirmed this interpretation, but some of the performers in the video have posted messages that made it clear. There are 49 young dancers on screen. Their leader, Maddie Ziegler, paints rainbows on her face. At the end, everyone falls down in what seems to be a nightclub, revealing what looks like a bullet-riddled wall.

DURHAM, N.C.—The mercury was well above 90 inside the small gymnasium, and the crowd was starting to look a little wilted from an hour of waiting. But Bill Clinton was just getting started. Clad in his customary suit and tie, the Big Dog was roaming the stage, mic in hand, cracking jokes.

“A couple weeks ago I celebrated my 70th birthday—I still can’t believe it,” he said, chuckling. “All the young people, they’re probably wondering why I’m not wrapped like a mummy or something.”

That’s a helpful, if somewhat macabre, shorthand for thinking about Bill Clinton’s role on his wife’s campaign for president. With the home stretch of the election just beginning, and Clinton unable to open up a wide lead over Donald Trump, he’s hitting the trail along with a flock of other big-name surrogates. What does the 42nd president have to offer Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, how diminished are his gifts, and is his campaigning worth the risks? Bill Clinton is a piece of living history (to borrow a phrase), but he’s stumping for the woman who wants to represent America’s future.

ODESSA, Texas—Misty Stewart gave the worksheet to every student in the class: “The purpose of sex is for bonding and babies,” it read. Then she stood before a white board and began to tell the sophomores “a little story” about a fictional girl named Sarah and how she’s “affected by having sex outside of marriage.”

Misty, a sex-education instructor, was presenting that day in April at Odessa High School, a mini-mall-sized campus with buildings the color of pie crust. The teens slouched and giggled at the mention of sex. One girl kept in a single earbud, like a diplomat awaiting a translation to teenager-ese.

Sarah wants to remain abstinent until she finds “The One,” Misty says. Yet, she ventures to a party, she drinks too much, and she sleeps with a guy she barely knows. “The next morning,” she says, “he's gone.”

Benghazi? More like Lib-yawn.

Last week, the State Department announced that it had examined 15,000 Hillary Clinton emails that the former secretary had not turned over, but which the FBI had found in the course of its investigation into her use of a private email server and account. Of those, perhaps 30 were related to the September 11, 2012, terror attacks in Benghazi. After years of investigations, might these finally offer some fresh revelation about the attacks?

The answer is apparently no. The State Department said Wednesday morning that there were only three new emails, with the rest being duplicates. Of those three, two were simply forwarded copies of messages that had already been sent, including a memo from Clinton to the whole department. And the third was a January 2013 note from the U.S. ambassador to Brazil congratulating Clinton on her performance during testimony before Congress about the attacks. (The Wall Street Journal has all of them here.)

Locking out a university’s faculty right before the start of classes seems like a drastic step, but that is just what Long Island University (LIU) did this weekend, when it barred all 400 members of its faculty union from its Brooklyn campus, cut off their email accounts and health insurance, and told them they would be replaced. The move came three days after the union’s contract expired. Now, the faculty is furious, and planning rallies and pickets with support from the American Federation of Teachers. On Tuesday, faculty voted 226 to 10 to reject a proposed contract from LIU, and the faculty senate voiced their support for a vote of no-confidence in the university’s president Kimberly Cline, 135 to 10. Faculty rallied outside the university’s Brooklyn campus Wednesday with a giant inflatable rat as classes began, taught by non-union members.

Mark Levin didn’t leave any room for confusion. “I am not voting for Donald Trump. Period,” he said. “Count me as Never Trump.”

It turns out there’s a reason they say you should never say never.

“I’m gonna vote for Donald Trump. I’m gonna wind up voting for Donald Trump on Election Day,” the conservative pundit said on his radio show Tuesday.

As the presidential election nears, most conservatives and Republicans have made their views known on the GOP nominee. With a few notable exceptions—like Senator Jeff Flake, who continues to bluntly criticize Trump—officeholders have lined up behind Trump, either gladly or through tightly gritted teeth. There’s a logic to that: Political parties may carry a banner for an ideology, but they are above all built to win elections, and the Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump for president. Therefore, Republican leaders tend to back Trump. Conservative pundits and intellectuals, however, have led the resistance to Trump. More tied to conservative ideology, unlike Trump, and less tied to the GOP and its voters, they have been willing to write the nominee off.

On May 28, Harambe, a 17-year-old lowland gorilla was shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo worker to save a small child who had wandered into its enclosure. As such tragic incidents go, there was nothing particularly unusual about this one. Just a week earlier on May 21, for instance, zookeepers at the Santiago Zoo in Chile shot two lions, in an effort to save a man who had climbed in, apparently with suicidal intent. That event did not go on to make meme history. But for some reason, Harambe did.

Over the summer, Harambe evolved from ordinary tragedy to perfect meme: defined only by its ability to replicate; a medium of cultural evolution with no message, signifying nothing so much as its own virality. The animal-rights outrage narrative (complete with a petition demanding the prosecution of the child’s parents) ran out of momentum in bewildered exhaustion. Unlike the 2015 case of Cecil the Zimbabwean lion, shot by a millionaire American dentist who seemed like a perfectly designed target for outrage, there was no obvious villain in the Harambe story. Many parents responded strongly with a counter-narrative emphasizing that the parent in the case had not been unreasonably negligent.

In the winter of 2006, as part of my college honors thesis on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), I boarded a plane and traveled to St. Louis, Missouri to interview Phyllis Schlafly. The focus of my paper was on the national debates Schlafly had with Karen DeCrow, the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) during much of the campaign to pass the ERA. I already had spent multiple weeks with DeCrow, where she was based near my hometown in Western New York. It was time, I decided, to meet her foe.

My notes say we talked for an hour and a half. I remember it as three. She looked exactly the same as every picture and video I had seen of her: immaculate makeup, a pastel blue skirt-suit, and her trademark meringue of hair. Though I’d known she was in her early 80s when I visited, she still seemed so much older than I thought she'd be, and smaller. I suppose it’s hard for nightmares to live up to one’s imagination.