As candidates made their closing arguments on Sunday, Democrats braced for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country while Republicans predicted a red wave.
President Biden had hoped to preside over a moment of reconciliation after the turmoil of the Trump years. But the fever of polarizing politics has not broken ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Within hours of the brutal attack last week on Paul Pelosi, Republican officials and media figures began circulating groundless claims — nearly all of them sinister, and many homophobic — about what had happened.
As the midterms come to a close, the establishment politics of the two most recent Democratic presidents met the disruptive force of the last Republican one, with control of Congress at stake.
Russian families searching for loved ones say the system for finding missing soldiers is as disorganized as Vladimir Putin’s military effort, which has been marked by dysfunction from the beginning.
The layoffs hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning units, the teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments.
Republican candidates are focusing on crime and public safety, but their message is rooted not so much in data or policy as in voters’ feelings of unease.
After five elections in less than four years, Israel will have a stable government for the first time since 2019. But Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition could test the constitutional framework and social fabric.
Gabon knows its oil won’t last forever, so officials are turning to the Central African nation’s rainforest for revenue — while also promising to preserve it.
Financial Times – It could be the Shazam of smells. A California-based start-up has developed a device to sniff out substances such as drugs, explosives and viruses. Sniff tech is a burgeoning sector which could have major implications in fields including healthcare and security but may also raise issues over individual privacy. The FT’s Patrick McGee takes a trip to the lab and gets a good whiff of how the future might smell.
Koniku builds smell cyborgs. We will put out small form factor smell cyborgs in 10 million homes inside this decade. We aim to securely and safely diagnose disease and maintain health and wellness in real-time. We are building a marketplace that makes every individual the CEO of their own health.
Leading lawmakers and strategists are openly doubting the party’s kitchen-sink approach, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.
Abominations: Selected Essays From a Career of Courting Self-Destruction
By Lionel Shriver | Harper
With a restless imagination and an instinct to take on progressive orthodoxies, the novelist and essayist Lionel Shriver brings her “smart, plain-spoken and unpredictable” style to subjects that many writers prefer to shy away from. Review by Meghan Cox Gurdon.
In a trilogy of narratives that “broke the mold” in Civil War history, Bruce Catton told the story of the Eastern theater with an eye to the sacrifices and sufferings of the ordinary soldiers who fought and died on both sides. Review by Harold Holzer.
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
By Jonathan Freedland | Harper
Walter Rosenberg did not make it easy for the Nazi-allied regime in his native Slovakia to deport him—along with thousands of other Slovak Jews—to extermination camps like Auschwitz. But once he wound up there, he was determined to get out and spread the word of the ongoing genocide. Review by Diane Cole.
A long-awaited, posthumously published memoir from the star of “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” and other classics reveals the inner world of a hard-working actor who “breathed in insecurity and exhaled doubt.” Review by Michael O’Donnell.
What was for many years the center of the American sports calendar has lost some of its grip on the collective imagination. But a journey through October Classics past proves that the magic of the World Series still has a potent charm. Review by David M. Shribman.
The pioneering figure of modern dance was a daring innovator, a technical perfectionist and a preternaturally gifted performer. While she transformed the way a generation of dancers thought about movement, she looked for ways to claim her art firmly as an American one. Review by Hamilton Cain.
The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting
By Steve Hendricks | Abrams Press
Fasting has a long history of use as a spiritual aid—a ritual of purification and turning away from indulgence—and as a tool for protest. But emerging science suggests that its positive effects on physical health can no longer be overlooked. Review by Matthew Rees.
Ray Bradbury’s unique science fiction owed more to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s darkly symbolic stories than to H.G. Wells’s rationalist visions. On a Mars that held curious correspondences to the Midwestern country of Bradbury’s youth, fathers and sons negotiated the strange spaces between them. Review by Brad Leithauser.
The “stage manager” of the American Revolution has resisted attempts by historians to pin down the details of his life. Stacy Schiff finds a potential key to Samuel Adams’s enigmatic character in the financial tumult of his family’s business. Review by Mark G. Spencer.
The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of Empire
By Joseph Sassoon | Pantheon
The business empire of the Sassoon dynasty began in Bombay, where the family of Iraqi Jews had fled to escape persecution, and flourished in the opium trade with China. The “Rothschilds of Asia” kept a low profile—and when the tides of fortune turned against them, their once-global enterprise became a distant memory. Review by Norman Lebrecht.
The court’s conservative majority was wary of plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that take account of race to foster educational diversity.
Federal prosecutors filed charges on Monday against the man the police said broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and struck her husband with a hammer.
The contests are close in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Many voters want Republicans to flip the Senate, but prefer the Democrat in their state.
Boomers Daily 