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 abroad this week, commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day with a warning about the risks to democracy around the world. His trip comes at a crucial time for the U.S., as he is dealt challenges from China, Russia, and Iran.

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.
In pop culture, questions of inheritance take on dramatic, often nasty proportions. Watching Succession, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in all wealthy families, the specter of death elicits insults, infighting, and betrayal.

For many years, I assumed that the appeal of a short story was that it was, well, short. Instead of slowly reading a novel over weeks, the reader of these bite-size plots can experience character development, crisis, and conclusion in just a few thousand words. But intentionally reading more short stories made me realize that I’d underestimated the form. These works aren’t just compressed novels: They offer an entirely different experience.

The government SUV is a white dot on the vast volcanic landscape. Beneath the open rear hatch, the geologists Jim Skinner and Alexandra Huff are bent over a map, glancing up at corresponding landmarks. To the west looms the giant lip of a volcano that flooded the area with scorching liquified rock tens of thousands of years ago. To the south, the triangular points of the San Francisco Peaks and, beyond them, the city of Flagstaff, Arizona. Grasses blanket the hills.

In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed the front-seat passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg. His 2014 Model S had become likely the first electric vehicle to drive 2 million kilometers, or more than 1.2 million miles. The car could have traveled from the Earth to the moon and back, twice, then circled the equator 11 times.

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.
For something so small and hollow, the drinking straw has become quite a potent symbol over the years.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Presidential elections in the United States are prolonged, chaotic, and torturous. (Please, not another election needle …) But they don’t come close to rivaling what happens in India.