Angel the schnauzer strolled to the coffee table, stood up on his back legs, and pushed a nose toward the fruit platter. As dogs are known to do when food is left unattended. But this wasn’t just any dog—and his owner wasn’t just any owner. From across the room a sound rose, crisp and familiar to any fan of the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan. PSSHHT. A hand, tensed into a claw, rose in the air. The dog froze. Again: PSSHHT. (A commanding sound! Grabs attention and shows who's the boss!) Slowly, Angel backed down to the floor, walked away from the table, and curled up silently near his master's feet.

Highlights from the July issue of National Geographic: the lost city of Angkor, manta rays in the Maldives, Garrison Keillor goes to the state fair, the fire and ice of the New Zealand park where Lord of the Rings was filmed, giant telescopes; and Serbs look to the future.

Garrison Keillor’s mellifluous voice is practically as American as apple pie. Since 1974 he’s been telling stories from the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon every Saturday on his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. This month Keillor chronicles the goings-on at a place that does exist, if only for a short time: the great American state fair. He hit several of these “ritual carnivals” last summer, but he remembers the day this photo was taken at the Iowa fair particularly well. It was shortly after his 66th birthday, and he’d just made a friend in the dressing room. “Senator Tom Harkin and his wife came and visited me there, and he ironed my shirt,” he says. Keillor was busy shaving when the Iowa senator explained to him that as a child he had learned to “iron a good shirt.” Keillor hosted a live performance of his radio show that evening and recalls the ideal setting: “An Iowa crowd on a warm summer night, who’ve eaten some ice cream and a pork chop on a stick—no better audience in the world. There isn’t much you can do to put a dent in their day.”

Photo: Clad in his signature red tie, socks, and sneakers, Garrison Keillor reports from a racetrack near Iowa’s State Fair grandstand. Photograph by Joel Sartore.