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."

Democrats are pumping an unprecedented amount of money into ads about abortion rights, AP reports.

• Dems have already invested more than $124 million this year in TV ads referencing abortion — 20 times more than Ds spent on abortion-related ads in the 2018 midterms.

Why it matters: The estimates — based on AP's analysis of data from the nonpartisan research firm AdImpact — show the extent to which Democrats are betting their congressional majorities and key governorships on one issue.

🧮 By the numbers: Since the Supreme Court ruling in June, 1 in 3 dollars spent on TV ads by Democrats and allies has focused on abortion.

• Democrats' TV spending on abortion is larger than the GOP's combined tab for ads relating to the economy, crime and immigration.

🐘 Republicans are shying away:

• The number of Republican ads referencing abortion has dropped each month since May, as primary season wound down.

Smartphones have moved from luxury to lifeline. But people over 50 remain less likely to own the devices — and more likely to feel excluded by them, Axios' Peter Allen Clark writes.

• Why it matters: More than ever, services and businesses from banks to doctors' offices and restaurants to airlines expect users to have access to smartphones. But many older people still lack digital skills.

What's happening: Many new features introduced in Apple and Google products — including iOS' Crash Detection and Android's Live Translate — aim to save lives or actively improve real-time in-person interactions.

• But older users still show hesitancy to jump on the smartphone bandwagon. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found that 96% of U.S. adults age 18-29 own a smartphone, compared with 61% of those 65 and older.

📱 Designing devices and operating systems that are easier to use has become a focus for the tech industry, and there's been progress.

• Along with now-standard visual and audio accessibility customizations like text size, zoom and audio assists, phone makers have further extended phones' capabilities with additional speech interfaces and add-on devices.
• Apple's new iOS 16 added accessibility options for older users, with features like Door Detection and Live Captions.

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Adnan Syed, whose case was chronicled in the hit podcast "Serial," walked out of a Baltimore courthouse a free man yesterday.

• A judge tossed his conviction for the 1999 murder of high school classmate Hae Min Lee, Axios' Shawna Chen writes.

Why it matters: The podcast — and a 2019 HBO docuseries — cast doubt on the original prosecution and key pieces of evidence.

Prosecutors asked a city court to vacate his conviction last week, saying in a motion that information about two possible alternative suspects makes a new trial necessary.

• Judge Melissa Phinn granted their request and ordered Syed's release. He had been serving a life sentence since his 2000 conviction.

🔮 What's next: Prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to drop the murder charge against Syed, now 42 years old, or try him again.

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has a commanding and expanded lead over Democratic rival Stacey Abrams seven weeks out from midterms, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll out this morning.

• U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) is in a statistical dead heat with Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

Why it matters: The poll in this pivotal swing state offers a modest counterpoint to reports of Democratic gains in recent months, Axios' Michael Graff writes.

• The Warnock-Walker match, which could be key to Senate control, was one of the only reasons for Democrats' optimism in the poll, conducted by the University of Georgia's School of Policy and International Affairs.

Read the AJC story by Greg Bluestein, "AJC poll gives Republicans the edge in most races" (subscription) ... Share this graphic.

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

• 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 today at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York.

• Explore the findings.

Above: NBC's Cynthia McFadden traveled to an emergency zone in the Peruvian Amazon to show how dense rainforest became a desolate landscape "interrupted by toxic ponds of mercury."

• It's the first network news team permitted access to the area — decimated by illegal gold mining — by the country's special forces.

Watch the video.

The Imperial State Crown, part of the Crown Jewels, sparkles with 3,000+ stones (2,868 diamonds, 273 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, 5 rubies) atop Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Standard-draped coffin at her Committal Service at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

• Next to it are the sovereign's orb and scepter.

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