1. Niall Ferguson’s divorce.
2. A wolf without a collar.
3. A Westerexit (the Iron Islands’ independence from Westeros).
4. Harry Styles leaving One Direction.
5. Leaving a nightclub, only to end up in a kebab shop.
6. Jumping off the Titanic.
7. Roger Federer past his prime.
8. A jail with the door left open.

As Britain wrestles with a divisive debate over whether to leave the European Union, the historian is naturally reminded of battles past: the First World War and his bitter 2010 divorce from Susan Douglas. In a cringe-inducing column in The Spectator, Ferguson linked up Brexit, World War I, and the wounds inflicted by his ex:

I suppose there are such things as amicable divorces. Mine wasn’t. Like the First World War, it was fought for more than four years, and ended with the Treaty of Versailles (by which I mean that it imposed territorial losses and the payment of annual reparations for a very long time).

Which brings me to Brexit, the ultimate divorce...

Ostensibly a defense of the “Remain” side of the Brexit debate, Ferguson’s column keeps returning to the scars that Douglas left on him. At times Ferguson sounds like the parody pundit Carl Diggler, who has a habit of linking every public event with his failed marriage.

By offering too much information about himself, Ferguson inadvertently offers a clue as to his politics. After all, if his divorce left him prostrate like Germany post-Versailles, then we can more easily understand why, like the Germany of the 1930s, Ferguson is so attracted to imperial conquest.

On Monday, the Senate voted down gun control measures that were introduced in the wake of the massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub. The failure was not surprising, but still remarkable, since there is broad agreement in the country that those on the terrorist watchlists should not be allowed to purchase guns. What happened?

One explanation, popularly held among liberals, is that the NRA has essentially purchased lawmakers’ votes. This isn’t wrong—only one senator who voted against yesterday’s measures didn’t receive money from the NRA. The suggestion that a powerful special interest is blocking the will of the people to protect the bottom lines of corporations at the expense of individual safety is broadly true, but still somewhat misleading: It overstates the power of the NRA, while understating the power of voters.

As Katherine Miller pointed out on Twitter, “Voters, not money, are the reason the NRA has power.” There is a small but highly effective minority in the country whose single issue is the freedom to buy whatever firearm they want. The NRA can leverage these voters against Republican incumbents, threatening to turn a vote for gun control into a primary challenge. The fact that the NRA gives politicians money certainly plays a role, but it is not the primary reason why it’s so difficult to pass even modest gun control legislation.

As Josh Marshall noted a week ago, Trump has only the semblance of a real campaign. The numbers back that up, according to reports filed last night to the Federal Election Commission. Trump has $1.3 million in cash on hand, after bringing in a meager $3.2 million in donations in May and personally loaning his campaign $2.2 million. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has $42 million on hand, after raising $28 million in May.

Other head-to-head comparisons do not bode well for Trump. He has 70 staffers nationwide, compared to 700 for Clinton. She and her allies have spent $26 million in advertising in the month of June; he has spent none, while his allies have spent less than $2 million. Clinton’s ads have attacked Trump for being incompetent, prejudiced, and a fraud, and they are coming in a crucial post-primary period, when the two parties’ presumptive nominees try to define one another for a national audience.

Trump was able to rely on Twitter and cable television to fuel his primary campaign. But primaries are much smaller affairs, involving hard-core voters who are familiar with the candidates and well-versed in the issues. A presidential campaign is tied to hundreds of other races, and is geared toward voters who show up at the polls once every four years. So far, it appears Trump is not running that kind of campaign.

New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reports that Trump’s former campaign manager was fired after Trump’s adult children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. (listed in order of how much Trump seems to like them) ordered he be fired. “Earlier Monday morning, Donald Trump and his adult children gathered for a regular strategy meeting at Trump Tower,” Sherman writes. “Also present was Corey Lewandowski, the campaign’s embattled manager. According to one senior Trump staffer briefed on the meeting, ‘things went south for Lewandowski, and he was fired.’”

This fits tidily into one of the narratives that has been central to the Trump campaign: That Trump is surrounded by both devils, who tell him to do dumb things that hurt his campaign, and by angels (mostly his children, usually just Ivanka) who tell him to stop doing dumb things. It was Ivanka, after all, who told him to stop referring to Mexicans as “rapists.” And Lewandowski, journalist grabber, was the biggest devil of them all.

But whether or not Trump’s kids engineered his downfall—and there’s no reason to doubt that they did—Lewandowski is little more than a fall guy for Trump’s recent troubles. Someone had to get pushed out the door and Corey Lewandowski was the easiest one of Trump’s thirty staffers to push. That’s not a coup, that’s just politics.

Mother Jones has unearthed a 1989 interview in which the presumptive Republican nominee expressed some odd views on race:

“A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. And, I think, sometimes a black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that but in actuality today, currently, it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a great. I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”

This view might strike most people as strange. After all, being born a wealthy white man has taken Trump much farther than most well-educated blacks. It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss Trump’s remarks as a personal folly. As is so often the case, he is merely making explicit what many Republicans think. In 2012, Mitt Romney said, “My dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico ... and uh, had he been born of uh, Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this.” The only difference is one of tone: Whereas Romney tried to jokingly suggest minorities are privileged, Trump blurted out the same idea.

Her attempt to woo millennials has been pretty rough sailing so far. Take when Clinton asked people on Twitter to express how their student debt made them feel in three emojis or less, or when her campaign made a BuzzFeed-like explainer of Republican politics through mostly unrelated Star Wars gifs.

The “trying to be hip” strategy both reinforces the idea that Clinton is a pandering robot and trivializes young voters—as if millennials won’t be able to digest their politics unless it is sugarcoated with emojis. However, it seems that the campaign is finally catching on, according to Politico:

But even as Clinton’s hipness comes under question, her aides say she’ll embrace her age—68, which is actually two years younger than Trump—and inner policy wonk. “She doesn’t need to be cool. She just needs to be who she is,” said Sarah Audelo, the Clinton campaign’s youth vote director. “That’s what young people are interested in. Young people want authenticity.”

As Elspeth Reeve has noted, Clinton is the most likeable when she lets her inner nerd shine. Fortunately, Clinton’s strategists are embracing what loving parents have been telling their nerdy children for centuries: Just be yourself.

George R.R. Martin has many deficiencies as a writer—like, you know, not finishing his goddamn books on time—but he has his moments, particularly when he sticks to his core themes. A few Game of Thrones episodes ago, the show articulated one of those themes nicely, when Ian McShane’s Septon Ray told the Hound, “Violence is a disease. You don’t cure a disease by spreading it to other people.”

But the  show actually subverts Martin’s famous “Broken Man” speech (delivered in the book by the inspiration for Ray, Septon Meribald). The gist is that war destroys everyone it touches. But in the show, the Hound responds, “You don’t cure it by dying, either.” As Sean T. Collins argued in Vulture, that fundamentally changed the speech, replacing a call for compassion with a call for righteous vengeance. And in the next episode of the show, the Hound goes on an Archer-esque rampage, murdering the innocent and guilty alike with equal fervor. 

Last night’s episode suffered from a similar moral calculus. First, Daenerys annihilates the Masters by realizing that power and intimidation are all it takes to defeat an enemy. The Battle of the Bastards was even less complex: The Good Starks were pitted against Evil Ramsay, a character so simplistically drawn he makes Lord Voldemort seem like he contains multitudes. There was no question that you were rooting for Ramsay to die, which is why his death was deemed “satisfying” in so many corners of the internet. His death was symbolically resonant–eaten by the dogs he had starved and mistreated—but still empty. 

As Game of Thrones rushes to the finish line, it’s muddling Martin’s most important and lasting theme. Martin knows that violence only begets more violence, but in Game of Thrones, the only way to stop unspeakable violence is even more unspeakable violence.

A report released today by Global Witness, an organization that investigates corruption related to natural resources, announced the record 185 killings—an increase of 59 percent from 2014.

The deaths occurred in 16 countries, the majority of which are in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Brazil, the Philippines, and Colombia topped the list. Indigenous people made up nearly 40 percent of the victims. In countries rich in natural resources like oil, wood, or mineable materials, indigenous lands are often seen as exploitable, as Global Witness explains, because of “weak land rights and geographic isolation.” Billy Kyte, the author of the report, told The Washington Post that the deaths were likely just “the tip of the iceberg,” because deaths go unreported in these countries and many occur in remote towns or rainforests.

In March of this year the assassination of high-profile Honduran activist Berta Cáceres further illuminated the persistent dangers that haunt indigenous and environmental activists throughout the world. The United Nations has also taken note. “The pattern of killings in many countries is becoming an epidemic,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, while visiting Brazil this year.