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Too many men still think a woman who cries is acting hysterical. For some baffling reason, punching a hole in the wall or another person in the face is a more culturally acceptable way to release pain than sobbing into a pillow. And politics is no different. Anger makes you a strong candidate while sadness makes you frail. The result is that many female politicians swallow their emotions in an effort to appear tough.

The stereotype that women are overly emotional, hormonal beings who are unfit to lead still exists. Powerful men like Obama and Biden who embrace their feelings on a public stage help to combat the ridiculous political stigma against sensitivity. Every time these political powerhouses become misty-eyed, they send the message that having human feelings doesn’t equal incompetence.

By being the kind of men who are unafraid to openly love one another and cry in public, they have sent a message to aspiring female politicians that being human doesn’t come with a penalty.

the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.

we should be asking them a different set of questions:

How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.

In the same week that saw outrage over rape victims being forced to hand over mobile phones for evidence, there emerged Hepburn’s WhatsApp messages to Clarke about their sexual conquest scoring game. “Always been me dragging the birds back. You raping them.” “Oi, last night was my 60th.” “Get them blind and then back to mine.” Some might be inclined to shrug this off: just loutish locker-room posturing, from a young braggart – fairly standard, especially these days? But that’s the problem. Youthful bravado is one thing, an entrenched culture of sexual dehumanisation and entitlement is quite another

Look at Hepburn and you see an attractive young guy, doing well, playing the sport he loved. So, what was his excuse for keeping that boorish sexual scoreboard, for thinking he had any right to treat women in such a cold, ruthless, degrading way?

The simple act of wearing a mask to protect others during a pandemic is now a political and cultural flashpoint, underscoring the polarization afflicting every corner of American life.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, stood firm in his recommendation that people wear masks, telling CNN's Jim Scuitto Wednesday morning he wears a mask "for people to see that's the kind of thing you should be doing."

A political storm over a piece of cloth appears even more trivial since it comes at a moment when the United States, after one of the world's most mismanaged coronavirus responses, is on the cusp of passing the threshold of 100,000 deaths with the pandemic worsening in 17 states.