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A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.

"In many ways, [it] is a romance of two like minds who admired one another greatly; and who I believe completely relied on one another for artistic and emotional help," Oliveira says. "Their relationship is a sort of an elevated, intellectual love affair that tied them to one another for the rest of their lives after they met."

They left behind no diaries, no letters. National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones says it was a passionate but platonic aesthetic attraction. "There's no indication that there was anything romantic between the two of them," Jones says.

So what was the relationship between this American in Paris, and a Frenchman, 10 years her senior, who was known and respected in artistic circles?

"It was all about the art, and that kind of laser focus and 100 percent dedication to the art that they really shared," Jones says.

They met in 1877. At 33, Cassatt was studying painting in Paris. At 43, Degas' work was on view around town. "Even before she actually met him she recounts how she had seen one of his pastels in a storefront window and she pressed her nose up against it and was just dazzled by what he was able to do," Jones says. "She knew his art and was thinking this is the direction I should be going in. So he really did change her path."

Oliveira — who did a tremendous amount of research for her novel — says before the Degas dazzle, Cassatt had been trying to master a more traditional approach.

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If the judicial nomination of Michael Boggs gets derailed, at least one of Georgia's senators says it won't unravel a deal the two senators entered with the White House to select seven nominees for the federal bench in Georgia.

"The deal was we agreed on seven nominees for seven judicial appointments and asked for all of them to get a hearing at the same time, and that was the deal," said Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia. "Everybody lived up to what they said."

Boggs, a Georgia state judge who's been nominated to fill a district court seat, has drawn strong pushback from Democrats in both chambers of Congress, as well as from the civil rights community. During his tenure in Georgia's House of Representatives more than 10 years ago, Boggs supported keeping the Confederate emblem on the old state flag, called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted for legislation to restrict abortion – including one provision to force doctors to publicly disclose how many abortions they perform.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has come out forcefully against Boggs, even saying that he might not allow Boggs a floor vote if his nomination makes it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then House Democrat John Lewis of Georgia – a civil rights icon – added fuel to the fire this week when he released a written statement saying that Boggs' record is "in direct opposition to everything I have stood for during my career."

Boggs' nomination was the result of an agreement between the White House and Georgia's two Republican senators, Isakson and Saxby Chambliss. Under the "blue slip" tradition, prospective judicial nominees must receive the approval of home state senators before the Senate Judiciary Committee will process the nomination. That custom forces the White House to negotiate with home state senators as to whom it will nominate for the federal bench.

White House spokesperson Eric Schultz says Isakson and Chambliss specifically recommended Boggs.

"In the case of Georgia, we have been trying to fill these judicial vacancies for more than three years, but two of the President's nominees were blocked for nearly 11 months and returned at the end of 2011," said Schultz in an email. "Our choice is clear: do we work with Republican senators to find a compromise or should we leave the seats vacant? Four of these vacancies are judicial emergencies, and we believe it would be grossly irresponsible for the president to leave these seats vacant."

If Boggs, whose confirmation hearing was last week, doesn't make it out of committee – or if Senate leaders deny him a floor vote – Isakson said, as far as he's concerned, he won't object to the advancement of the other six Georgia nominations. The deal did not mandate that all seven nominees be treated as one inseparable package.

"We agreed to sign blue slips on all seven, if they'd agree on all seven to get a hearing. So everybody's getting an equal opportunity to get a vote and that's all we asked for," said Isakson.

The mustache and mullet make the man. Or so the man hopes.

In Jim Micke's Cold in July, Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is a small town Texas entrepreneur in 1989, his days spent running a little frame shop on the main strip in town, evenings at home with his wife and slightly annoying little boy. This is a time and place where men are expected to be men, and if you're lacking in the rugged masculinity department, some creative hairstyling and some wispy lip fuzz may be your attempt at a solution. If that fails, having a gun in the bedside drawer can't hurt either.

But actually it can, as one burglar discovers early in the film when Dane catches him snooping, only to quite accidentally shoot the intruder dead in his living room. Suddenly, with an unintended slip of his finger, he's the town's newest and unlikeliest celebrity, admired and congratulated for taking matters into his own shaky hands. But despite what Dane's mailman might believe, killing a man doesn't make you more of one yourself.

On the one hand, the movies hardly need yet more examinations of perceptions of masculinity. On the other, one as well-crafted and constantly surprising as Mickle's adaptation of Joe Lansdale's pulpy crime novel is hard to argue against.

Mickle continues to establish himself as one of the most talented young genre filmmakers working today, an expert at taking stories about vampires, cannibals, and murderers, infusing them with generous helpings of evocative atmosphere, and then diving into the more meaningful subtext just below the lurid, blood-soaked surface. In Lansdale's novel he finds a perfect opportunity to take a break from the horror settings of his last two films, 2010's Stake Land and last year's We Are What We Are, to try his hand at a noir piece that, thanks to Lansdale's thoroughly unpredictable plotting, swings from vengeance thriller to three-way buddy movie to father-and-son morality tale with biblical overtones.

The vengeance comes in when the burglar is identified as the son of Ben Russell, a recently released convict played with grim menace by Sam Shepard. He begins to terrorize Dale and his family with a psychotic verve that suggests a less flamboyant (and therefore even more frightening) version of Cape Fear's Max Cady. But something's not quite right about any of this, and Dane starts to realize that maybe he and Russell have been falsely set up as enemies. The two join up with Russell's old Korean War buddy, a good-old-boy private eye named Jim Bob (Don Johnson, perfectly embodying the character's down-home charisma).

This odd trio – two-thirds grizzled war vets, one-third inept (but determined) shopkeeper – winds up accidentally happening upon some truly disturbing truths, leading to a final act that finds Mickle channeling pleasingly trashy '80s influences. This is a director not shy about explicitly calling out his inspirations: at one point the characters have a meeting at a drive-in screening of Night of the Living Dead, and much of the film lies atop a score from Jeff Grace that self-consciously hearkens back to the synth scores that used to be John Carpenter's calling card.

That final act may find the director having a little too much fun with the genre elements. What's set his past two features apart, particularly the excellent We Are What We Are – an allegory on religious fundamentalism wrapped up in cannibalistic horror – is how well he blends pulp with purpose. Cold in July touches on questions of fathers, sons, and what's passed from one to the other – for good and ill. But at some point, the mechanics of the plot and the pure fun of watching Hall, Shepard, and Johnson playing off one another end up eclipsing those ideas.

That's plenty satisfying on its own, though: a well-executed crime thriller doesn't need many layers to justify its pleasures.

The world of health care, like any, is full of haves and have-nots.

It's not hard to the haves at Sherwin-Williams' corporate headquarters in downtown Cleveland where some 2,500 employees have access to an in-house health and wellness center.

The huge paint company offers comprehensive health coverage to its employees and encourages them to take a break from work for an exercise class, a workout on the elliptical trainer or a run on the treadmill.

Like many other large employers, Sherwin-Williams serves as its own health insurer. Because the company pays for employees' health claims, it has a strong incentive to keep workers healthy. Sherwin-Williams is betting it will be better off bearing those costs directly rather than paying premiums to an insurance company.

"The key is to have healthy, engaged, productive, present employees," says Martha Lanning, the company's director of health and wellness plans.

Sherwin-Williams and its employees aren't likely to use the individual Obamacare marketplaces, but they will help bear part of the cost.

Lanning says it takes time and money for companies like Sherwin-Williams to sorting through the legal and administrative issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act. There are direct costs, too. "We also have to pay that transitional reinsurance fee that totals for us, with some other aspects of the Affordable Care Act, about $4 million in 2014," she says.

The government collects $63 from large self-insured employers and insurance companies for every person covered by a plan — both employees and their dependents. All told, these fees are expected to amount to $25 billion over three years.

The money goes into a fund to reimburse health insurance companies for some extra costs involved in providing coverage to high-risk people on the Obamacare exchanges.

You might think of it as a subsidy from big business for making insurance coverage available to everyone without regard to pre-existing conditions.

The fee will be reduced next year and is set to disappear completely by 2016. Mark Hall, a professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University, says it's a sensible solution to a temporary problem.

"The great feature of the Affordable Care Act is it now makes everyone qualify for coverage, but that means the first people to sign up or to show up are going to be the folks who need it the most," Hall says. "So we expect, particularly at the outset, that there is going to be a heavy load on the insurance pool of high-cost people."

But Helen Darling, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based National Business Group on Health, fears the fee won't go away as planned.

"Once something is in law and somebody's got an idea about a new tax, you're always nervous that that's going to become a way to finance something else and something that is supposed to go away and be sunsetted wouldn't be because they needed the money," Darling says.

For Sherwin-Williams with $10 billion in sales last year, the added cost appears modest, at most.

In fact, human resource executives at companies nationwide said as much in a recent national survey by Mercer, the consulting company. The survey concluded found 55 percent of executives felt the Affordable Care Act was having no effect on business operations and performance apart from benefits.

And to the extent there is a financial burden, employers are shifting some of it to employees. Mercer also found that most large employers are requiring workers to pay part of the ACA fees.

Sherwin-Williams, for its part, is committed to providing insurance to its employees, says Lanning. "It's going to be the differentiating factor for businesses moving forward," she says.

After all, she adds, the key to an engaged and productive workforce is its health.

This story is part of a reporting partnership among NPR, WCPN and Kaiser Health News.