Eight years ago, a middle-aged husband and wife in Wisconsin published their first book, Monogamy With Benefits, under pseudonyms. “We couldn’t be more entrenched in the local establishment,” they wrote, noting their jobs as executives at respected organizations and their nonprofit work and appearances on the local news. “So we’re not exactly the kind of couple you’d expect to be engaged in adventurous sex with others.

The Texas National Guard has taken hostage a 2.5-mile stretch of the U.S. border with Mexico. According to a shocking Supreme Court filing by the Justice Department early yesterday morning, armed soldiers and vehicles deployed by the state have repeatedly denied U.S. Border Patrol agents access to the Shelby Park area in Eagle Pass, Texas.

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Some of President Joe Biden’s critics argue that he did not have the authority to launch yesterday’s strikes in Yemen, but America’s presidents have significant constitutional powers regarding the use of military force.

When the writer Ryan Broderick joined Substack in 2020, it felt, he told me, like an “oasis.” The email-newsletter platform gave him a direct line to his readers. He did not have to deal with the chaos and controversy of social media. Substack was far from perfect, he knew—COVID conspiracies flourished, and on at least one occasion, trans writers on the platform were doxxed and harassed—but compared with the rest of the internet, he found the conditions tolerable. Until they weren’t.

ChatGPT has certainly captured the world’s imagination since its release at the end of 2022. But in day-to-day life, it is still a relatively niche product—a curiosity that leads people to ask questions that begin “Have you tried … ?” or “What do you think about … ?” Its maker, OpenAI, has a much more expansive vision. Its aim is seemingly to completely remake how people use the internet.

Ever since C. Auguste Dupin pinned the death of a Parisian mother and daughter on an escaped orangutan, the murder mystery has remained one of mainstream culture’s most enduring, flexible, and popular narrative formats. The lonesome detective—with a stern constitution, hair-trigger nonsense detector, and endearing alcohol dependency—is a reliably compelling protagonist, capable of crossing legal lines and meting out justice.

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A century and a half after they were writing, authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky still rule the canon of Russian literature.