Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the early winners on Tuesday night as voters in a trio of Western states cast their ballots in primaries and caucuses. Both presidential front-runners easily carried Arizona, padding their delegate leads by claiming the biggest prize of the night.

Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders were expected to fare better in the Utah caucuses, yet victories there (and potentially in Idaho for Sanders) are unlikely to change the trajectory of a race that now heavily favors both Trump and Clinton. On the Republican side, Trump benefitted from a strong turnout of supporters who in the nearly four-week early voting period. When the first returns came in, he had 46 percent of the vote, more than twice the total of Cruz, who appeared to be hurt by the fact that Marco Rubio picked up more than 50,000 votes before he withdrew from the race a week ago. Trump appeared poised to take all of Arizona’s 58 delegates.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Utah voters head to caucus sites across the state on Tuesday, where polls show the overwhelmingly Mormon electorate is expected to hand Republican front-runner Donald Trump a resounding defeat. Given Trump’s surprising success at courting evangelicals, some may be puzzled as to why Mormon voters—long thought to be a key component of the Religious Right—would reject Trump's charms. But for many Utahans, the businessman’s attacks on other religious groups, while popular with some, hedge uncomfortably close to the Mormon faith’s own troubled past.

Mormons—like modern-day Muslims—have a long history of being rejected by their fellow Americans because of their beliefs. Throughout the 19th century, followers of Joseph Smith were repeatedly expelled from lands by people who saw them as strange, foreign invaders, with some opponents even declaring them non-white. Angry, anti-Mormon mobs eventually murdered Smith during his short-lived campaign for president, and longstanding tensions between his flock and the U.S. government led to violent clashes and short-lived wars in pockets of the American West. So intense was the American rejection of Mormonism that the U.S. secretary of state once recommended that President Rutherford B. Hayes act to limit Mormon immigration into the country, a moment Utah Governor Gary Herbert saw as eerily reminiscent of Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States last December.

Donald Trump deserves credit for sitting for an interview on Monday with the Washington Post editorial board, “people who have mercilessly attacked him,” according to one of its members, columnist Ruth Marcus. It takes a big man. (More on his size to follow.)

What struck me about the transcript was no single piece of news, because there wasn’t a major breakthrough, but rather what emerged from the whole: a vexing personality and policy profile. (Read the full transcript here.)

Trump has a Clinton-sized victim’s complex

“I’ve been treated very, very badly by The Washington Post,” he whined. “I’ve had stories written about me—by your newspaper and by others—that are so false, that are written with such hatred—I’m not a bad person.” When you read the transcript, you’ll notice that Trump conflates criticism with inaccuracy. Surrounded by yes-men and yes-woman his entire professional life, born into great wealth and ego, Trump doesn’t seem to accept the criticism that comes with public life. If a journalist reports something negative about him, it must be wrong.

“What we feared has happened. We were hit by blind attacks.”

That’s how Belgian Prime Minster Charles Michel described Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels. They point to the paradox at play in the tiny, divided Low Country nation: Ever since the Paris attacks in November 2015, Belgian counterterrorism officials have been on high alert, and yet they correctly worried that deadly violence was inevitable. While the details of the attacks remain to be discovered and reconstructed, there are still some hints of why it was so hard to prevent an attack. Belgium has long been a center for Islamist terrorism, but certain aspects of the state’s structure and relationship with Europe also made it difficult for the government to fight back.

Power is a force that needs an object: To have power, a person has to have it over something, or someone.

One would think that this would be the appeal of power—to be able to control things, to change them to fit your vision of reality. (This can obviously be good or bad, depending on who’s in power and what their vision is.) But a new study suggests that people who desire power are mostly looking to control one thing—themselves.

The study authors, from the University of Cologne, the University of Groningen, and Columbia University, present two different conceptions of power—power as influence and power as autonomy. “Power as influence is expressed in having control over others, which could involve responsibility for others,” they write. “In contrast, power as autonomy is a form of power that allows one person to ignore and resist the influence of others and thus to shape one’s own destiny.” Their question: Which of those things, influence or autonomy, would satisfy people’s desire for power?

Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses. Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That’s probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too.

A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. Although I’m now a U.S. citizen, I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time—at cocktail parties and at panel discussions, in town hall meetings and on the opinion pages. Nordic countries are the way they are, I’m told, because they are small, homogeneous “nanny states” where everyone looks alike, thinks alike, and belongs to a big extended family. This, in turn, makes Nordic citizens willing to sacrifice their own interests to help their neighbors. Americans don’t feel a similar kinship with other Americans, I’m told, and thus will never sacrifice their own interests for the common good. What this is mostly taken to mean is that Americans will never, ever agree to pay higher taxes to provide universal social services, as the Nordics do. Thus Bernie Sanders, and anyone else in the U.S. who brings up Nordic countries as an example for America, is living in la-la land.

To Donald Trump supporters, I pose this question: When you think back on your high school, your platoon during basic training, your frat brothers, men you've dated, or the regulars at your local bar, did the loud guy who boasted about his anatomical endowments strike you as a confident winner, or deeply insecure?

Was he comfortable in his skin and ready to lead others, guided by the needs of the task at hand, or was he desperate to fill a void in his psyche with attention-seeking?

These are not idle questions.

Once again, the Republican frontrunner for the presidential nomination is talking at length about his penis to the national press. His comments came in an interview with the Washington Post’s editorial board. Its editor, Fred Hiatt, harkened back to a GOP debate where Trump went out of his way to assure Americans that “there's no problem” when it comes to his genitals. “You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there talking about your hands and the size of your private parts,” Hiatt said. “Do you regret having engaged in that?”