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.More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position A Red LineAlexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.Related: Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump. Today’s News ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry. Dispatches The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest? Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Tony Evans / Getty We’re All Reading WrongBy Alexandra Moe Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.” But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A new sweetener has joined the ranks of aspartame and stevia. Trump is getting what he wants. Bad Bunny has it all—and that’s the problem. Culture Break Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Watch. Challengers (out now in theaters) is a sexy sports thriller with plenty of moody intrigue.Read. These are six cult classics you need to check out.Play our daily crossword.P.S. Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.— CharlieStephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change.

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.In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.Karen Hao, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, recently visited one such data center in Goodyear, Arizona. Microsoft owns the facility, which may eventually use an estimated 56 million gallons of drinking water each year—“equivalent to the amount used by 670 Goodyear families,” Karen notes. No one’s at risk of going thirsty, but as Karen writes, “the supply of water in the region is quite limited, and the more that’s taken up by data centers, the less there is for, say, supplying tap water to new housing.”I followed up with Karen to ask about AI’s growing demands on our environment. It’s still a matter of debate whether the technology is truly worth its immense costs, even as tech companies commit more and more resources to it. How should we be thinking about all of this? “Companies are laying down data centers faster than ever in the race to build generative AI, but there has been very little accounting of their impacts on the environment,” Karen told me. “There’s a narrowing window in which the public should be asking: Is this what we want? Once the facilities have been built, it will be much more difficult to reverse the decision.”— Damon Beres, senior editor Illustration by Erik Carter AI Is Taking Water From the DesertBy Karen Hao One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above my head, or maybe from the buildings themselves. With no shelter from the blinding sunlight, I began to lose my sense of what was real. Microsoft announced its plans for this location, and two others not so far away, back in 2019—a week after the company revealed its initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the buzzy start-up that would later release ChatGPT. From that time on, OpenAI began to train its models exclusively on Microsoft’s servers; any query for an OpenAI product would flow through Microsoft’s cloud-computing network, Azure. In part to meet that demand, Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late. One semiconductor analyst called this “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” I’d traveled out to Arizona to see it for myself. The Goodyear site stretched along the road farther than my eyes could see. A black fence and tufts of desert plants lined its perimeter. I began to walk its length, clutching my phone and two bottles of water. According to city documents, Microsoft bought 279 acres for this location. For now, the plot holds two finished buildings, thick and squat, with vents and pipes visible along their sides. A third building is under construction, and seven more are on the way. Each will be decked out with rows of servers and computers that must be kept below a certain temperature. The complex has been designated partly for OpenAI’s use, according to a person familiar with the plan. (Both Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on this assertion.) And Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. Read the full article.What to Read Next Would limitlessness make us better writers?: “AI embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself,” Rachel Khong writes. “But I believe human impediments are what lead us to create meaningful art.” Neal Stephenson’s most stunning prediction: “The sci-fi legend coined the term metaverse, but he was most prescient about our AI age,” Matteo Wong writes. P.S.Earlier this week, President Joe Biden signed legislation that could result in a TikTok ban if the app isn’t divested from its Chinese parent company. As Charlie Warzel writes for The Atlantic, this will be a more complicated process than it seems—particularly when it comes to the app’s powerful AI algorithm.— Damon

Many Americans are reporting that they’d feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn’t always simple.