This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible pos ..read more

In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express. For some writers connected with the organization, however, this reasoning was not so obvious. Six of them boycotted the gala, and 242 signed a letter of pro ..read more

In Las Vegas last Friday, I watched a Godzilla-sized puppy give a tongue bath to some 18,000 people. The visual—accompanied by laughter, slack jaws, and modest plumes of vaporized weed—arrived roughly three hours into a performance by Phish, the storied band, which has now been around for 40 years. At the moment in question, the band was launching into a capella scatting and mouth noising—what fans recognize as a vocal jam. And of course we were at the Sphere, a glorious, $2.3 billion arena that asks and answers the questions: What if the Earth had a moon that was made entirely of screens? And ..read more

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Occasionally you read a book that changes your sense of what a book can do. For me, that title was Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which recounts the history of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule over the Congo and how an early-20th-century human-rights campaign managed to bring world attention to the atrocities taking place in the name of profit. I went on to read all of Hochschild’s other books, and each one achieved the same difficult feat: bringing narrative flair to the story ..read more

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with. Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, recently visited one such data center in Goodyear, Arizona. Microsoft owns the facility, which may eventually use an estimated 56 million gallons of dri ..read more

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office. “How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act ..read more

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read The house of healing for the soul. But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation ..read more

At Columbia University, administrators and pro-Palestinian students occupying the main quad on campus are in a standoff. President Minouche Shafik has satisfied neither those clamoring for order nor those who want untrammeled protests. Yet a different leader may not have performed any better. The tensions here between free-speech values and antidiscrimination law are unusually complex and difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. Shafik presides over a lavishly funded center of research, teaching, civic acculturation, and student activism. Such institutions cannot thrive without strong free-sp ..read more

A few months ago, my doctor uttered a phrase I’d long dreaded: Your blood sugar is too high. With my family history of diabetes, and occasional powerful cravings for chocolate, I knew this was coming and what it would mean: To satisfy my sweet fix, I’d have to turn to sugar substitutes. Ughhhh. Dupes such as aspartame, stevia, and sucralose (the main ingredient in Splenda) are sweet and have few or zero calories, so they typically don’t spike your blood sugar like the real thing. But while there are now more sugar alternatives than ever, many people find that they taste terrible. The aspartame ..read more

Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival. The assault on expression, and on virtually every other mainstay of democracy, has become commonplace under Prime Minister Nar ..read more