Vox Sentences: In June, Turkey’s ruling party lost their majority. On Sunday, they got it back.

A shocking election result in Turkey; a big change to federal hiring from Obama; and what Republicans really want from the next presidential debate.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Erdogan? More like Erdo-won

Burak Kara/Getty Images

• The party of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a resounding victory in Turkey's elections on Sunday, reversing a June election where it lost its majority in Parliament.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The election totally shocked pollsters and pundits alike. This post from Michael Koplow is one of the more gobsmacked pieces of international punditry I (Dara) have ever seen.

  [Ottomans and Zionists / Michael Koplow]

• June's elections were seen as a turning point in Turkish politics, in which young activists who'd protested Erdogan's increasingly-totalitarian rule organized their way to a victory.

  [New York Times / Zeynep Tufekci]

• But over the summer, the ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurdish separatist group PKK collapsed. Erdogan had every incentive to escalate the conflict — and hope it scared Turks into voting for stability this month.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• If this sounds totalitarian, you're not wrong. Last week, police raided two TV stations — among the few media outlets critical of the government.

  [Human Rights Watch / Emma Sinclair-Webb]

• In case you're keeping score, this is the third embarrassing defeat for international election polling in 2015 (the UK and Israel were the other two). Pollsters are getting worried about their model.

  [New York Times / Cliff Zukin]

Obama bans the box

Screenshot via whitehouse.gov

• President Obama announced today that the federal government will "ban the box" in job applications: it won't ask applicants if they have a criminal record at the beginning of the hiring process.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• 19 states (and over 100 cities) have passed localized policies delaying or banning criminal checks in job applications — with some laws (like Minnesota's) applying to private employers as well.

  [National Employment Law Project]

• The push to "ban the box" is part of the backlash against mass incarceration more generally. But it's also a reaction to the increasing ubiquity of background checks in job applications — driven by the ease of online record searches, and served by a booming private background-check industry.

  [Crain's New York / Aaron Elstein]

• Meanwhile, 600,000 people are being released from prison every year, and one in four Americans have criminal records following them around.

  [Boston Globe / Ruth Graham]

• The government still discriminates against ex-prisoners in other ways: by banning people with certain convictions from public housing, for example.

  [NPR / Monica Haymond]

• Having a criminal record hurts some white ex-offenders more than black ones. A white applicant with a record is about as likely to get a job interview as a black applicant without a record.

  [American Journal of Sociology / Devah Pager]

• That raises the disturbing possibility that banning the box will help white ex-offenders get government jobs — while hurting black applicants who are automatically assumed to have a criminal history.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Lightening round!

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• The Republican presidential campaigns are in open revolt over last week's CNBC debate.

• The Republican National Committee, trying to do damage control, has suspended future NBC-affiliated debates. But the campaigns are also angry with the RNC itself, and want more control over debate formats going forward.

  [CNN / Dylan Byers and Brian Stetler]

• Some of the ideas being thrown out are good ones; some candidates, for example, want debate moderators to ask questions from a conservative standpoint. (If this sounds idiotic to you, this Timothy P. Carney piece lays out how it could be valuable.)

  [Washington Examiner / Timothy P. Carney]

• Some of the ideas are bad: Ben Carson's campaign floated the idea of 5-minute opening and closing statements for each candidate, which would leave very little debate time for debating.

  [Huffington Post / Sam Stein]

• On Sunday, the campaigns met for a summit to hash out demands, and details started to leak out almost immediately

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa and David Weigel]

• Ultimately, the demands the campaigns settled on are pretty minor: at least 30 seconds per candidate for opening and closing, and no "lightening rounds" (sic).

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• In a shocking move, team player Donald Trump is not going along with the rest of the party, and will negotiate with television networks himself.

  [Washington Post / Robert Costa and David Weigel]

MISCELLANEOUS

Fuck subtlety. [Slate / Forrest Wickman]

• Randall Bell specializes in selling homes where famous murders have occurred. Here's how he does it.

  [Vice / Manisha Krishnan]

• Kant and Descartes really wouldn't have cut it in modern day academia.

  [The Guardian / Lloyd Strickland]

• McDonald's is going into schools and offering programs advising kids on how to eat healthy. Yes, seriously.

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• In most of the world, and among black and Latino Americans, death rates are falling. Among white middle-aged Americans, they're spiking.

  [NYT / Gina Kolata]

VERBATIM

"More than 20 percent of pediatricians 'always' or 'often' turn away families who decline to get their babies vaccinated." [Boston Globe / Leah Samuel]

• "The price of solar energy has dropped 78 percent since Obama took office … The price of wind energy has also dropped 58 percent."

  [New Republic / Rebecca Leber]

• "Kant’s assistant, a theology student who was at a loss as to how to unite philosophy with theology, once asked Kant what books he should consult. KANT: Read travel descriptions!"

  [Walter Benjamin]

• "He’s the youngest but I have never seen any human being sweat like that."

  [Donald Trump on Marco Rubio via Bloomberg / Kendall Breitman]

• "Lincoln Chafee, a gentle, smiling bird you’d rather not be killing for dinner but you have to, that’s nature…"

  [Jezebel / Ellie Shechet]

WATCH THIS

Soul patches, explained [YouTube / Phil Edwards, Gina Barton]

Getty Images / Paul Bergen

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