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Between the Super Tuesday results and the president’s State of the Union address, a Joe Biden–Donald Trump face-off—the first presidential rematch since the 1950s—has become all but certain.
The end of political centrism continues to be a prevailing theme.

What is the correct distance from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands.
Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
A Columbia historian said he’d discovered evidence of a lost sacred text with scandalous implications about the life of Jesus. Was it a fake? In a new Atlantic feature, the writer Ariel Sabar reports on the bitter ongoing debate—and the largely unexamined early life of the man who found it.

The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.
After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason.

Everyone knows AIs are dangerous. Everyone knows they can rattle off breakthroughs in wildlife tracking and protein folding before lunch, put half the workforce out of a job by supper, and fake enough reality to kill whatever’s left of democracy itself before lights out.
Fewer people admit that AIs are intelligent—not yet, anyway—and even fewer, that they might be conscious.

You might not have known it from Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal last night—a performance derided by members of her own party as “bizarre” and “confusing”—but up until then, Britt had distinguished herself in the Senate with a reputation for being startlingly, well, normal.
As in, she wasn’t obsessed with Twitter (or X, as it’s now called). She evinced more than a passing interest in policy. For her, conservatism seemed to mean things other than simply “supporting Trump.