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.

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.

At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election.
But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection.

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Over the past decade, sleep has become better understood as a core part of wellness. But the stressors of modern life mean that Americans are getting less of it.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
“Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival,” the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin wrote in The Atlantic in 1911. “Of course that was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing.

Here are a few things that Donald Trump’s lawyer says a president ought to be immune from prosecution for doing:
selling nuclear secrets
employing the U.S. military to assassinate a political rival
launching a coup
During a Supreme Court hearing this morning, John Sauer, representing the former president, argued that each of these actions could be understood as an “official act” of the president, and that no current or former president may be charged with crimes for doing them.

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.
Katie survived for almost two years.