Voter Victories

Welcome to the Stone Soup Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox on the regular.

Congratulations Brazil & Serbia!!

We are in coalition with our neighbors around the globe, and that means celebrating their wins with them! A couple of huge swings happened this week:

• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's win in Brazil bucks a regional shift to the right and denies Trump a powerful ally
• Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic concedes defeat to the student-led movement in a seismic political shift

Are you ready to vote?

If you live in the US, you probably already know we have a midterm election coming up. This one matters a fucking lot, because it’ll either make or break the momentum of Project 2025, the game plan of American Fascism. Get your shit sorted out now so you can participate in this election and help turn the tide:

• Register/Check Your Registration
• Review Your Candidates
• Ballot Guide
• Get Out the Vote 2026 — events and volunteer opportunities near you
• What if you see ICE at the polls? — a zine by Greg Pak
• Hands Off Our Vote Election Protection Program — resource round up
• Lessons from Brazil — a Bluesky thread by Rafa Sales Ross

Thanks to Dana from the Stone Soup Supper Club for sharing some of these resources in the Supper Club Discord!

Currently Reading: American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children--Bo, DH, and Mido--find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John's oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California--where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children's futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other's lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice--for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers--is a kind of prayer.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Libro.fm | Find an Indie Bookstore

Featured New Release: The Tarot Trials by Katee Robert

The deck has always been stacked against her.

Kestrel has trained her whole life to compete in the Tarot Trials. Her mother won once, earning a place among the five ruling Cinque—then paid for it with her life, executed for alleged treason against the Minor Court.

But fortune favors the bold.

Now it falls to Kestrel to take up her mother’s mantle as Champion of the Moon, enter the Trials, and face her fate. If she can master her new powers of shadow and illusion, navigate the poisonous game of alliances and lies, and corner the fellow Champion who dealt the killing blow to her mother years ago, she may uncover the truth she’s seeking without losing her head… or her heart. But in the Trials, betrayal is a question of when, not if. And winning the game isn’t about what she must do to win, but who she needs to survive.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Libro.fm | Find an Indie Bookstore

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

-gailey