💸 1 big thing: Biden's price tag

Illustration of a large pile of money with a graduation cap on top.  

🔭 2. Not since 1963

3. Catch up quick

⚾️ 4. Parting shot: Biden hosts the Braves

Happy Monday: Today's PM — edited by Justin Green — is 430 words, a 2-minute read.

Thanks to Elizabeth Black for copy editing today's newsletter.

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Get Mike Allen’s afternoon take on the most important news of the day

Axios PM

 🏡 1 big thing: Starter homes fade

2. Newsom pushes Dems to go on offense

3. Why Trump ran 

4. 🔎 Inside the CIA 

5. 🌐 Charted: Guaranteed sick leave

6. 🏈 NFL barriers to Black coaches

7. 🐦 Keeper tweet

8. 🕊️ Pope endorses Smart Brevity 

Hello, Sunday.  Smart Brevity™ count: 1,192 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Jennifer Koons.

🌀 Breaking: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency as Tropical Storm Ian rumbled through the Caribbean. He said the storm could lash big swaths of the state with rain, wind and rising seas. Get the latest.

📬 Invite your friends to sign up to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line.

Catch up with the most important news of the day

Axios AM

1 big thing: Traffic jams back

2. 🚓 Why GOP trumpets crime

3. 🇮🇹 Far-right win in Italy

4. 🌀 Breaking: Ian strengthens to hurricane

5. 🐊 What the feds are reading

6. Biden readies for post-midterm turnover

7. NASA to crash into asteroid (on purpose)

8. ✏️ 1 fun thing: Draw your neighborhood

🍯 Happy Monday. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began last evening. Wishing you a sweet year!

Smart Brevity™ count: 1,192 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Noah Bressner.

1 big thing: Border stunts blasted

2. War crimes in Ukraine

🐶 4. Pups at the office

A worker holds her Maltese-poodle as she works at a desk

Happy Friday: Today's PM — edited by Justin Green — is 491 words, a 2-minute read.

⚡️ Investors are now treating Britain more like an emerging market, Axios Macro co-authors Neil Irwin and Courtenay Brown report.

🇨🇦 Heads-up, Canada: Hurricane Fiona is forecast to land as one of the country's strongest storms on record. Go deeper. 

Thanks to Sheryl Miller for copy editing today's newsletter.

🗳️ 1 big thing: Fall airwave stench

2. 💰 Rise of the six-figure salary

3. Two big stock-market debuts 

4. 🔭 Our sharpening Neptune-vision

5. ⚾ Fourth player to 700 homers

6. Parting shots: Elton John @ White House

Hello, Saturday. Smart Brevity™ count: 983 words ... 4 mins. Edited by Donica Phifer.

🌀 Breaking: Tropical Storm Ian, which formed late last night over the southern Caribbean, could become a major hurricane — crossing Cuba, then turning toward Florida by midweek. Get the latest.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — one of the most visible members of the Jan. 6 committee — will write an epilogue to the committee's future report, in an exclusive collaboration with The New Yorker and Celadon Books.

Why it matters: The book industry sees the report — not yet completed, with another hearing scheduled for Sept. 28 — as the hottest government document since "The Starr Report" in 1998.

Since the Jan. 6 report will be in the public domain, anyone can reprint it — there'll be countless versions. 

The New Yorker volume — with an introduction by Editor David Remnick, and edited by Celadon executive editor Bill Hamilton — will be published instantly as an e-book and paperback.

Raskin, a constitutional scholar, was the lead manager in the second impeachment of former President Trump.

Axios AM showed you the cover of The New York Times' planned version of the report.

MSNBC's Ari Melber announced this week that he's writing a 10,000-word "Foreword on the Coup Conspiracy" for a HarperCollins edition.

As Melber pointed out on his show, "The Beat," pay no attention to the publication dates on these books' preorder pages. Those are just placeholders: The committee has announced no release date.

Non-existent Jan. 6 report is hot with publishers

The book industry sees the report — not yet completed — as the hottest government document since "The Starr Report" in 1998.

Jan. 6 select committee

Politics & Policy

Our first book — "Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less" — is out today.

Why it matters to you: Smart Brevity is a new way to communicate that empowers anyone — intern to mogul — to be heard by communicating more crisply and clearly.

This book is for students, teachers, managers, leaders — anyone who needs to get people to hear and remember what matters.

If Axios AM serves you, please buy "Smart Brevity" — and consider sending it as a vote of confidence to a rising star in your life.

The book shares the secret sauce that I and my two co-founders, and now co-authors — Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz — have developed in 16 years of running media companies.

All our proceeds go to the Axios Fellowship Program, which allows us to hire more journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

The problem: In "Smart Brevity," published by Workman, we show you that people skip and skim most of the precious words you send into the world.

Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words with more velocity. This new and exhausting phenomenon has jammed our inboxes, paralyzed workplaces, clogged our minds.

We're more scattered, impatient, inundated. We scroll. We skim. We click. We share. Eye-tracking studies show we spend 26 seconds, on average, reading a piece of content.

The solution: Smart Brevity — the architecture we pioneered at Axios — helps combat that by showing you, step by step, how to bring muscle and hierarchy to what you say.

We include chapters on Smart Brevity for email ... meetings ... speeches ... presentations ... social media ... visuals ... and even how Smart Brevity can help you run a better company.

The bottom line: It's my joy to write this newsletter every day, 365 days a year. Readers have often asked over the years what they can do for me.

Finally, there is something: Please buy "Smart Brevity."

Axios book: How to be heard by the skimming, scanning generation

Smart Brevity is a new way to communicate that empowers anyone to be heard by communicating more crisply and clearly.

Axios

Our first book — &quot;<a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Smart Brevity" data-vars-click-url="https://smartbrevity.com/" data-vars-content-id="5159a8f3-efbc-4340-9b7f-d1983c2f577f" data-vars-headline="Axios book: How to be heard by the skimming, scanning generation" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://smartbrevity.com/" target="_blank">Smart Brevity</a>: The Power of Saying More with Less&quot; — is out today.Why it matters to you: Smart Brevity is a new way to communicate that empowers anyone — intern to mogul — to be heard by communicating more crisply and clearly.

Gallup CEO Jon Clifton — out this week with "Blind Spot," a book about improving people's lives through more and better data — tells me:

"We warned the world in the Fall of 2020 about the global rise of unhappiness. Many heard the information and thought: 'Isn’t that obvious? The entire world is suffering from a global pandemic.'"

"They were right, but the global rise of unhappiness has been coming for a decade. And if people think the pandemic caused the world’s unhappiness, then they haven’t been paying attention. We launched this book hoping that people would finally pay attention to the global rise in stress, sadness, physical pain, worry and anger."

A great life "is more than just money," Clifton writes:

After studying the 20% of people who report having a great life, Gallup finds they have five things in common: They are fulfilled by their work, have little financial stress, live in great communities, have good physical health, and have loved ones they can turn to for help.

Clifton tells me the book took two years. But he's been listening to the world’s global citizens for over 15 years through the Gallup World Poll.

Go deeper: Read a book excerpt ... Watch a video.

Gallup book: Global rise of unhappiness preceded COVID

Gallup CEO Jon Clifton is out this week with "Blind Spot," a book about improving lives through more and better data.

Gallup (company)

Global Negative Experience Index, by year

Gallup CEO <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Jon Clifton" data-vars-click-url="https://www.gallup.com/people/139397/jon-clifton.aspx" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.gallup.com/people/139397/jon-clifton.aspx" target="_blank">Jon Clifton</a> — out this week with &quot;<a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Blind Spot" data-vars-click-url="https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Global-Unhappiness-Leaders/dp/1595622454" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Spot-Global-Unhappiness-Leaders/dp/1595622454" target="_blank">Blind Spot</a>,&quot; a book about improving people&#x27;s lives through more and better data — tells me:<ul><li>&quot;We warned the world in the Fall of 2020 about the global rise of unhappiness. Many heard the information and thought: &#x27;Isn’t that obvious? The entire world is suffering from a global pandemic.&#x27;&quot;</li></ul>

The inaugural "Global Faith and Media Index," a partnership between The Radiant Foundation and HarrisX, is out with findings from a survey of 9,395 people in 18 countries.

Driving the news: 63% said high-quality content on faith and religion is needed in their countries.

53% believe media coverage actively ignores religion as an aspect of society and culture.

61% said media coverage often perpetuates faith-based stereotypes rather than addresses and protects against them.

The findings, commissioned by the Faith & Media Initiative, will be unveiled Tuesday at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York.

Poll: Media gives religion short shrift

Illustration of The Creation of Adam with Adam's hand replaced with a hand cursor.  

Religion

The inaugural &quot;Global Faith and Media Index,&quot; a partnership between The Radiant Foundation and HarrisX, is out with findings from a survey of 9,395 people in 18 countries.Driving the news: 63% said high-quality content on faith and religion is needed in their countries.

There are 3,300+ words in The Atlantic's adaptation of Maggie Haberman's forthcoming book, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America" — out a week from tomorrow.

The big picture: These are the ones that will get the most attention from the Department of Justice. They're from one of three interviews Trump gave Haberman for the book.

This one was at his club in Bedminster, N.J., on Sept. 16, 2021 — one year ago.

He demurred when I asked if he had taken any documents of note upon departing the White House — "nothing of great urgency, no," he said, before mentioning the letters that Kim Jong-un had sent him, which he had showed off to so many Oval Office visitors that advisers were concerned he was being careless with sensitive material.

"You were able to take those with you?" Haberman asked.

He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, "No, I think that's in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things."

In fact, Trump did not return the letters — which were included in boxes he had brought to Mar-a-Lago — to the National Archives until months later.

Reality check: The FBI in August seized 11,000+ documents and 1,800 other items from Mar-a-Lago. About 100 of the documents contained classification markings — some "top secret."

P.S. Trump said about Haberman during an interview at Mar-a-Lago: "I love being with her — she's like my psychiatrist."

Biggest takeaways for the feds in Maggie Haberman's Trump book

These passages are the ones that will get the most attention from the Department of Justice.

Former President Trump at a rally Friday in Wilmington, N.C.

Former President Trump at a rally Friday in Wilmington, N.C. Photo: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Donald Trump

There are 3,300+ words in The Atlantic&#x27;s adaptation of <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Maggie Haberman&#x27;s" data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2022/09/25/trump-president-2024-election-documents" data-vars-content-id="f71de8f1-f040-46a8-83b3-413bea0d1ca5" data-vars-headline="Biggest takeaways for the feds in Maggie Haberman&#x27;s Trump book" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2022/09/25/trump-president-2024-election-documents" target="_self">Maggie Haberman&#x27;s</a> forthcoming book, &quot;<a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="Confidence Man" data-vars-click-url="https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Man-Making-Breaking-America/dp/0593297342" data-vars-content-id="f71de8f1-f040-46a8-83b3-413bea0d1ca5" data-vars-headline="Biggest takeaways for the feds in Maggie Haberman&#x27;s Trump book" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Man-Making-Breaking-America/dp/0593297342" target="_blank">Confidence Man</a>: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America&quot; — out a week from tomorrow.The big picture: These are <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="the ones" data-vars-click-url="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/donald-trump-maggie-haberman-mar-a-lago/671510/" data-vars-content-id="f71de8f1-f040-46a8-83b3-413bea0d1ca5" data-vars-headline="Biggest takeaways for the feds in Maggie Haberman&#x27;s Trump book" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/donald-trump-maggie-haberman-mar-a-lago/671510/" target="_blank">the ones</a> that will get the most attention from the Department of Justice. They&#x27;re from one of three interviews Trump gave Haberman for the book.

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Biggest takeaways for the feds in Maggie Haberman's Trump book

Non-existent Jan. 6 report is hot with publishers

Poll: Media gives religion short shrift

Axios book: How to be heard by the skimming, scanning generation

Gallup book: Global rise of unhappiness preceded COVID

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💸 Axios PM: Biden's price tag

🚘 Axios AM: Traffic jams back

🥊 Axios AM: Why Trump ran

📺 Axios AM: Fall airwave stench

🎯 Axios PM: Supreme apology