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No Politics Is Local

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You can’t find many clichés hoarier than Tip O’Neill’s rule that “all politics is local.” A truism is supposed to be true, though. Does this one still hold?
Tomorrow’s elections make the case that the opposite is more accurate these days: No politics is local.

Today’s Atlantic Trivia

The 37-volume Naturalis Historia, written by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, is the world’s earliest surviving encyclopedia. In the first century C.E., Pliny set out to collect the breadth of human knowledge, and millennia later, it’s still a great document for learning a little bit about everything. It has chapters on sugar, Germany, the rainbow, Cesarean births, the art of painting, and hypothetical antipodes.

A Confederacy of Toddlers

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In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.

What’s a Scandal When Everything Is Outrageous

The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post.

The Solution to the Third-Term Threat

American Presidents are plainly meant to be term-limited. The Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, spells it out: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Donald Trump has sometimes sung a different tune, though. In March, he told NBC News that “there are methods” by which he could continue serving past the end of his term, and that he was “not joking.” Riffing on this, the Trump Organization’s website began selling “Trump 2028” paraphernalia.

Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on Denial of His U.S. Visa & Trump’s Threat to Strike Nigeria

We speak to Wole Soyinka, the 91-year-old celebrated Nigerian writer and first African Nobel laureate, who recently had his U.S. visa revoked after he made comments critical of Trump. As Trump threatens U.S. military action against Nigeria over claims of a “Christian genocide” in the country, Soyinka says, “when religious differences began to be invoked as a means of political power, and even social and economic powers, we’ve had unquestionably the issue of impunity.

Trump Threatens to Go “Guns-a-Blazing” into Nigeria over “Killing of Christians”

President Trump is threatening to bomb Nigeria, alleging the country is failing to protect Christians from persecution, even as many victims of the fundamentalist insurgent group Boko Haram are Muslims. “This theme of persecution of Christians is a very politically charged, and actually religiously charged, theme for evangelicals across the world,” says Anthea Butler, the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.

“Our Time Is Now”: Zohran Mamdani’s Mayoral Campaign Inspires NYC’s Working-Class South Asians

Democracy Now!’s Anjali Kamat reports on working-class South Asian support for New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. South Asian voter turnout increased by 40% during the Democratic primary, contributing to Mamdani’s upset victory against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is now running as an independent candidate. “We’ve had several South Asian or Indo-Caribbean candidates, and none of them elicit this response.

Trump Throws “Great Gatsby” Party at Mar-a-Lago as Food Stamps End for Millions

President Trump held a lavish Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago Friday, just hours before an estimated 42 million people lost SNAP benefits across the country. Kirk Curnutt, the executive director of the international F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, says that while ”Gatsby is famous for its lavish party scenes, [what] people often miss is that the entire thrust of the book is to critique that conspicuous consumption and the wastage that goes on in these sorts of events.

“Denying People the Right to Food”: Millions Could Go Hungry as Trump Admin Holds Up SNAP Benefits

As the U.S. federal government shutdown enters its second month, over 40 million people are now struggling to feed themselves and their families after SNAP food assistance was cut off over the weekend. “We are headed for a major public health and economic crisis,” says child hunger expert Mariana Chilton. She adds that by refusing to disburse SNAP benefits, “the Trump administration is breaking the law.