Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. President Joe Biden is facing a unique set of challenges as he prepares to run for reelection. The most unique of all: No one his age has ever run for president. And voters are worried, even those who give him credit for an improving economy.

A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents.

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.When you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated.

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline 18 feet up out of the sea. The biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” Waters says.

Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.

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.I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom”
Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekPeople all over the world are divided about the best way forward in the Middle East.

Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress.No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The literary internet is full of lists that suggest books that will inform you about one subject or another—we just published one last week in this very newsletter (on what to read to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). But recently, we decided to go a bit deeper and asked Atlantic writers and editors for books that changed how they think.

On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians.