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.I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not much of a puzzler. Growing up, I always preferred the quick satisfaction of a book or a movie to the more frustrating challenge lurking in the Sunday paper.

This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.In May 2022, California officials unanimously rejected a plan to build a $1.4 billion desalination plant in Huntington Beach. The plant, the officials said, would produce costly water and possibly harm the marine environment. The decision wasn’t an outright rejection of desalination, but it did highlight some of the problems that have made desalination an impractical solution to California’s water problems.

By now, you are most likely hyper-aware of the recent stunning progress in artificial intelligence due to the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard, and at least somewhat aware of the dangers posed by such systems’ frequent hallucinations and their predictable tone of supreme self-confidence and infallibility.

Earlier this week, a game of cricket turned into a diplomatic incident. England is involved in a five-match series with the touring Australian team. The second of these matches concluded on Sunday with an Australian victory assisted by the controversial dismissal—or “out,” as it would be in baseball—of an English batsman. Most informed commentators agreed with the game’s umpires that the dismissal was legal, but many onlookers felt it was unfair.

This week, Meta launched its Twitter competitor: Instagram’s Threads. I chatted with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about why Threads is appealing to users, and what it would take for the platform to succeed.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
“Step aside, Joe Biden.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The lonely, alienated young male narrator is a common figure in literature across time and place. Readers encounter him in the unnamed, frenzied protagonist who stalks around Christiania in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; in Leopold Bloom as he wanders James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses; and in J. D.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.Until now.The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       In 2000, I got the RIM 957, my first BlackBerry. It received, in real time, emails sent to my work account. Such receipt would cause the device to flash a light and buzz, pager-style. It buzzed constantly.

Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.