On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted that MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she visited Mar-a-Lago last December. On Tuesday, in the Oval Office, he interrupted a phone call with the Irish prime minister to call over a female Irish journalist, Caitriona Perry, while referring to her “nice smile” and “this beautiful Irish press.”

The incidents are two sides of the same coin. Two decades ago, a pair of social psychologists, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, distinguished between what they called “hostile” and “benevolent” sexism. Hostile sexism manifests itself in derogatory or threatening comments about a woman’s appearance, capacities, or behavior. Benevolent sexism, by contrast, manifests itself in praise or chivalry that nonetheless reaffirms a woman’s subordinate status. Telling your female coworker that she’s ugly is an expression of hostile sexism. Telling your female coworker that she’s pretty is an expression of benevolent sexism. Sexually assaulting a female colleague is an expression of hostile sexism. Suggesting that a female colleague needs help carrying her bags is an expression of benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism may be more antagonistic and aggressive but benevolent sexism also conveys the message that women should be valued for their appearance, and that they are not equal to men.

Updated at 12:55 p.m. ET

A feud between President Donald Trump and the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough escalated on Friday when the cable news hosts accused the White House of attempting to threaten and intimidate them with the publication of a negative story in the tabloid publication the National Enquirer.

Brzezinski and Scarborough made the explosive allegations in a Washington Post op-ed titled “Donald Trump is not well,” Friday morning. “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” the pair wrote. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”  

The least convincing Republican defense of Donald Trump’s attack on Mika Brzezinski surely belongs to White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who declared that Americans “knew what they were getting” when they elected him. The implication is that because Americans understood that Trump was a vulgar misogynist during the campaign, there’s nothing wrong with his vulgar misogyny today.

Put aside the fact that a majority of Americans voted against Trump. Put aside the fact that even those Americans who did vote for him largely did so in spite of, rather than because of, his crude, sexist outbursts: Exit polls showed that among Americans who prioritized “good judgment,” Clinton beat Trump by 40 points.

For years, Columbia University Professor John McWhorter and Brown University Professor Glenn Loury have conducted frank public conversations on Bloggingheads.tv where they puzzle through issues facing the United States in real time. Both are original thinkers with heterodox views. I’ve watched them slowly refine their positions on campus activism and identity, sometimes invoking their own experiences as black intellectuals and their respective pasts as black college students.

So I attended with interest Thursday when Professor McWhorter expounded on his views at length during an appearance with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by The Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Both men believe something has gone wrong on college campuses––that a strain of illiberalism advanced by a vocal minority of students  is ascendant; that it is substantively wrong; and that most administrators and faculty are averse to speaking up.

The Senate health-care bill is not definitively dead, but it’s unmistakably ailing—and the prognosis is not promising.

The prognosis was never promising. All the various Republican health-care proposals circulated since 2010 would remove health-insurance coverage from tens of millions of people, many of them the GOP’s most loyal voters. Look for example at the dilemma facing Kentucky’s Rand Paul.

Four hundred and forty thousand Kentuckians have gained coverage under the ACA; Kentucky’s uninsured rate tumbled from 20 percent in 2013 to 7.5 percent in 2015.

Even more strikingly, it is Kentucky’s Appalachian Southeast that has seen the biggest gains from the ACA. And it so happens that southeastern Kentucky voted more staunchly for Paul’s 2016 reelection than did any other section of the state.

Paul won 76.6 percent of the vote in Clay County, where 15.6 percent of the total population has gained coverage via the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. He won 81.5 percent of the vote in Jackson County, where 15.1 percent owe their Medicaid to the ACA. He won 84 percent in Leslie County, where 18 percent would lose Medicaid if Obamacare were repealed.

American culture nurtures many myths about the moral value of hard work. The phrase “by the bootstraps,” still widely used to describe those Americans who have found success through a combination of dogged work and stubborn will, rose from a mis-remembering of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen: In it, the eponymous aristocrat pulls himself from a swamp—not by his bootstraps, but by his hair. And Horatio Alger’s stories, as well, while often remembered collectively as the prototypical tale of American rags to American riches, romanticized not just the social and economic power of hard work, but also the power of old-fashioned good luck. (Ragged Dick, in the Alger story named for him: “I’d like it if some rich man would adopt me, and give me plenty to eat and drink and wear, without my havin’ to look so sharp after it.”)

Climate change will aggravate economic inequality in the United States, essentially transferring wealth from poor counties in the Southeast and the Midwest to well-off communities in the Northeast and on the coasts, according to the most detailed economic assessment of the phenomenon ever conducted.

The study, published Thursday in Science, simulates the costs of global warming in excruciating detail, modeling every day of weather in every U.S. county during the 21st century. It finds enormous disparities in how rising temperatures will affect American communities: Texas, Florida, and the Deep South will bleed income in the broiling heat, while some chillier northern states gain moderate benefits.

Since November’s election, I’ve thought often of my late husband Pat Tillman, who in an act of patriotism walked away from an NFL contract to join the Army after September 11. Pat’s loyalty to American ideals did not mean that he was unquestioning of his country, and his willingness to challenge the status quo makes me wonder what he’d say about it and its leaders today. What would he make of the political divisions splitting Americans apart, and what would he say could mend them?  

While I can’t speak for Pat or how exactly he’d feel, I can speak to the life I lived alongside him. It was in the quiet night hours of the attacks’ aftermath in 2001 that Pat initially mentioned joining the military. At the time, we were young and in love, and we had an idyllic life. It would have been easy to keep on a path of sunshine, roaring stadium crowds, family, and beach vacations. Or to be complacent and cynical about how he could help, or let the fear of harm win and do nothing.

Shortly after the November election, Republican leaders came up with a plan for Obamacare: They would repeal the law quickly upon President Trump taking office, and then delay its enactment so they’d have time to develop a replacement.

The strategy became known as “repeal-and-delay,” and it was catching on with Republican lawmakers, particularly on the right, until it ran into a blockade led by two powerful men: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and soon after, Donald Trump.

“I just spoke to @realDonaldTrump and he fully supports my plan to replace Obamacare the same day we repeal it,” Paul tweeted on January 6. “The time to act is now.” The soon-to-be-president picked up the ball and ran, vowing in tweets and interviews that there would be no gap between repeal and replace; Republicans in Congress, he said, would do the deed in the same week, or the same day. Heck, Trump even suggested repeal-and-replace “could be the same hour.”

A few weeks ago, the Atlantic Monthly Press released Mark Bowden’s excellent book, Hue 1968, A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam. As he did previously in Black Hawk Down, Bowden brings the reader down the deadly streets of a savage urban battle, meticulously describing the action from the points of view the participants. Currently, the roughly yearlong battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul is drawing to a close. Although a half century separates these two classic battles, the similarities in urban combat far outweigh differences. Why is this so and what does it portend for the future?   

After 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers slipped into the poorly guarded city of Hue in February of 1968, it took a month of intense fighting, principally by American Marines, to root them out. One reason was gross negligence by the high command in estimating the enemy’s strength. A deeper reason was the physical reality of urban density, trapped civilians, stout houses, and massive stonewalls. There was no avoiding house-to-house fighting to force back a determined enemy. In terms of total fatalities among friendly and enemy troops and civilians, the result was, to quote Bowden, “well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest [battle] of the Vietnam War.”