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 we’re deciding what to eat (and what not to eat), human beings tend to rely on conventional wisdom. Junk food is bad for you. Eating too quickly is bad for you. And tasting an apple that’s been sitting alone in an office for at least 438 days? Really bad for you.

This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: 10 golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the past few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.

My love of going to the movies during the day began with my job. As a magazine editor tasked in the 2010s with finding entertainment stories, I often attended film screenings for journalists, many of which were scheduled for the early morning so that we could get to writing afterward. At first, I viewed these excursions as merely a professional obligation. I would walk into the screening bleary-eyed, coffee and pastry in hand, and slump into my seat.

When Carr Van Anda joined The New York Times as its managing editor on February 14, 1904⁠, the temperature inside the office dropped a few degrees—or so it felt.Van Anda, age 39, was a chilly newsroom presence, a formal man who wore rimless glasses and a stickpin through his starched collars. Times reporters lived in fear of his chastening glare. They called it the “death ray.”The most famous stories about “V.A.

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.Housing-policy experts largely agree that the solution to a housing-affordability crisis is to build more housing. Many residents support this notion in theory, until they’re faced with the possibility of new housing developments in their own backyard—in other words, NIMBYs.

Multiverses are, at this point, familiar ground for Hollywood. Films about extra-dimensional travel and parallel versions of ourselves aren’t restricted to the realm of comic-book nerdery; the reigning Best Picture winner at the hoary Oscars is all about “verse-jumping,” after all.

On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers, and other tech and business figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates, signed a one-sentence statement written by the Center for AI Safety declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

This article contains spoilers through the series finales of Succession and Ted Lasso.Succession ended on Sunday with a series finale whose title, like the three season finales before it, was taken from a John Berryman poem, “Dream Song 29.” Before the episode aired, there was widespread speculation about whether the poem alluded to any particular revelation.

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.When the French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall, it was for her highly personal books—autobiographical narratives in which she places herself on an operating table and also acts as the surgeon, splaying out her thoughts and anxieties and desires in meticulous, vulnerable detail.