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.

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.The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.

Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app.

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched.

When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.