The very notion of a director’s first feature is at the core of cinematic modernity, because the first director whose first feature is is synonymous with both his artistic acclaim and a revolution in the art form is Orson Welles, with “Citizen Kane.” Among succeeding generations of innovators, there are many varieties of first features; some, like Welles’s, set the groove that would be deepened and extended, while others made feints and false starts as if getting something out of their system (or even just getting some practice) before finding their style or voice. Film at Lincoln Center’s fascinating new series devoted to first features, “This Is Cinema Now: 21st Century Debuts,” which begins on Friday, offers some of both—but doesn’t quite live up to the lofty promise of its title. The programming of the series reflects two odd tendencies—one toward a consensus of art-house repertory, whether prize winners or festival favorites, and the other toward the narrowly formalist. (It’s also nonfiction-averse.) My own favorite first features of the twenty-first century are teeming and inventive, joyfully cinematic and thrillingly audacious in their frank confrontations with personal demons and the cruelties of politics, family conflicts, and the blunderings of history. Some of them are hard to find, such as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Abouna,” Sara Fattahi’s “Coma,” Matías Piñeiro’s “A Stolen Man,” Oliver Laxe’s “You All Are Captains,” Sophie Letourneur’s “Les Coquillettes,” Khalik Allah’s “Field Niggas,” and Antonin Peretjatko’s “La Fille du 14 juillet.” Fortunately, many others are available to stream. Here are five of them.

“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty”

Terence Nance’s first feature was widely misunderstood and underappreciated at the time of its release, in 2013. A multi-layered, intricately nested, self-commenting blend of live action and animation, the film forged a new mode of personal cinema, relying on second-person address for first-person revelation. Nance’s subsequent work—including the short “Swimming in Your Skin Again” and, above all, his teeming and polyphonic HBO series, “Random Acts of Flyness”—has continued to reveal, and has extended, his visionary reimagination of cinematic subjectivity. In his first feature, he was siphoning off only a trickle of his stream of artistic consciousness, which flows mightily with the currents of history, politics, the multiplicity of identity, and an awareness of the ways in which identity is reduced and abused by the prevailing powers.

Stream “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” on Vudu and iTunes.

“Butter on the Latch”

Along with Nance, Josephine Decker has made the most extreme reinventions of recent cinema. With the cinematographer Ashley Connor, Decker reconfigures such fundamental concepts as framing and focus in order to recover the primal intensity and emotional complexity of even familiar and straightforward stories. Her approach to performance and dialogue, and her emphasis on the scenes and situations from which a story is composed, are no less original—as they were in her very first feature, from 2013, which tells the story of two young women in Brooklyn who flee the tense urban center for a “Balkan camp,” a rustic workshop of the performing arts, deep in the wilds of California, where the ecstatic fusion of nature and culture give rise to sexual rivalry and inner turmoil.

Stream “Butter on the Latch” on Kanopy, Amazon Prime, and iTunes.

“Hamilton”

There’s a Mozartean perfection to Matt Porterfield’s first feature, from 2006, a story of adolescents in slow-burn crisis in a Baltimore neighborhood perched between woods and highways. Porterfield’s sense of composition and movement, of light and color, of the contrapuntal precision of terse dialogue, has an exalted yet serene precision. There’s nothing rigid or confining in its heights of refinement. It seems to breathe intimately with its characters and grandly with the air of its suburban landscapes.

Stream “Hamilton” on YouTube and Google Play.

“Viktoria”

Among the reasons for including the Bulgarian director Maya Vitkova’s first feature, from 2014, on this list is that she hasn’t yet made a second one, which has been the unfortunate fate of many wonderful filmmakers—especially female ones. “Viktoria” is a comedic fantasy that fuses the personal and the political, domestic life and grand historical currents, in sharply intimate strokes of tangled emotion. The story, of a girl born without a belly button who therefore becomes a heroine of Bulgaria’s Communist regime, details that regime’s cruel yet sentimental absurdity, as well as her family’s powerful multigenerational tensions, with a blend of unsparing insight and breathtaking whimsy.

Stream “Viktoria” on Kanopy, Vudu, YouTube, and other services.

“Taking Father Home”

The audaciously analytical style and substance on display in Ying Liang’s films is already on view in his first feature, “Taking Father Home,” from 2005. Ying is now in exile from China, which tried to suppress his fourth feature, “When Night Falls”; his 2018 feature “A Family Tour,” which was screened at last year’s New York Film Festival but still hasn’t been released in the U.S. (it won the National Society of Film Critics award for best film awaiting distribution), dramatizes the state terror that he and his family have endured. In “Taking Father Home,” made for a pittance with a borrowed video camera and nonprofessional actors, he tells the story of a boy who leaves his small town for a big city in search of his estranged father. Ying films on a human scale but with an apocalyptic imagination, showing family relations shattered by a combination of oppressive policy and official indifference, personal relationships coarsened by a cruel social order, and grand-scale destruction resulting from a blend of governmental irresponsibility and impunity.

Stream “Taking Father Home” on Kanopy and Amazon Prime.

“Viva”

It’s amazing that this movie, begun in 2007, completed in 2009, and set in 1972, even exists. Its director, Anna Biller, also stars in it, as a woman caught up in the frenzy of the sexual revolution. With a blend of erotic and decorative exuberance, and a virtuosic display of stylistic imagination, she reveals the liberation in artifice and the alluring masks of natural desire. In the process, she delves deep into the psychology of pop culture to reach a magma that, for most filmmakers, is too hot to touch and too dangerous even to imagine. Biller is one of the most daringly original filmmakers of the time, and this film (no less than her second, “The Love Witch”) should have propelled her into the forefront of an industry that appears, rather, to ignore her presence. (Her version of 007, for instance, would be historic.)

Stream “Viva” on Amazon Prime.

Who is “her,” in the context of a Donald Trump rally? About twenty minutes into a campaign appearance on Wednesday night, in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump told the crowd of eight thousand people that “the leading voices of the Democratic Party are left-wing extremists” who “see our nation as a force of evil.” He tossed out a name—“Ilhan Omar!”—which instantly yielded a chorus of boos and jeers at Representative Omar, of Minnesota. As he laid out supposed evidence of her affinity for terrorists and her disdain for people he claimed to love, the antipathy built. As he said, “And she looks down with contempt at the hardworking Americans, saying, ‘Ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,’ ” scattered shouts of “Send her back!” could be heard. (The actual quote, from Omar, referred specifically to a lack of knowledge about refugees.) The injunction was picked up by more people and turned into a chant, causing the President to pause in his litany: Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!

The next day, when asked about the chant, Trump told White House reporters, “I was not happy with it—I disagree with it.” But it was the President who set the terms here. Just last week, he suggested that a group of recently elected women in Congress (Omar; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York; Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan; and Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts—a.k.a. the Squad) should “go back” to other countries, launching a racist broadside against people of color and immigrants. (A number of my colleagues have written about how sordid and anti-American that comment was.) Trump was also, as he often does, targeting women who have the temerity to disagree with him. Omar is the only member of the Squad who wasn’t born in this country; she is not the only one who Trump claims doesn’t belong. And one of the bases for not belonging, he told the crowd, was dissenting in any way from his jingoistic vision of America.

“Tonight I have a suggestion for the hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down—they never have anything good to say! That’s why I say, Hey, if they don’t like it, let them leave, let them leave, let them leave.” He continued with what sounded like a complaint about elective democracy itself: “They’re always telling us how to run it, how to do this, how—you know what? If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.” It’s tempting to wonder whether Trump imagines America as a giant reality-television show, which people can be escorted off for not listening to him. But that thought might underplay the real danger in what he is saying. Where would people who are Americans—and that includes naturalized citizens, like Omar, as well as those, like Pressley, whose families have been here for generations—“leave” for, or “go back” or be sent to? Where is the place, inside or outside of America, where Trump imagines he wouldn’t hear their voices?

Trump’s goal, at the rally, seemed to be to make his supporters believe that they are the hated ones. He told them that Ocasio-Cortez saw them as “garbage,” and implicitly compared her to Hillary Clinton. (“Remember ‘deplorables’?”) Lock Her Up, Send Her Back—the resentments begin to blur. Speaking of Tlaib, who earlier this year said, of him, “Impeach the motherfucker,” Trump noted, “the big fat vicious F-word, that’s not someone who loves our country”—as if love for him and love for the country were naturally conflated. Indeed, later in the speech, he ended a long anecdote about how very rich, powerful men who once called him “Don” now call him “Mr. President,” because “people have such respect for the office of the President—they have respect for our country again! Our country is respected again.”

And he worked hard to conflate every member of the Democratic Party with the most radical of them. “A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American Dream—frankly, the destruction of our country.” The Democrats, Trump said, are “afflicted with an ideological sickness.” His comments about the Squad are, no doubt, in line with his own bigotry. But they also seem designed to cut short a discussion within the Democratic Party about what its direction ought to be. The Democrats are united in opposition to his attacks, but the differences between, for example, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Squad, have not gone away. Democrats, like members of every party, have been known to make remarks that deserve criticism. (Some of Omar’s remarks on Jews and Israel, including ones she has apologized for, fall into this category.) Trump will, in the course of the campaign, try to goad his opponents into silence not only about him but, occasionally, about their allies.

One of the President’s rhetorical tactics is to quote his opponents’ remarks interspersed with his running commentary, in a way that makes it seem that he is annotating them when he is really defacing and falsifying them. He said that Omar had “laughed that Americans speak of Al Qaeda in a menacing tone, and remarked that ‘You don’t say America with this intensity.’ ” This was a reference to a 2013 interview with Omar on PBS, in which she described how a professor of hers had seemed to change his posture when he spoke of Al Qaeda. Trump, though, added his own gloss, in phrases in which he modulated his tone, alternately mimicking Omar and professing to read her mind: “You say Al Qaeda—makes you proud—Al Qaeda—makes you proud—you don’t speak that way about America.” He added, “At a press conference, when asked whether she supported Al Qaeda, that’s our enemy . . . she refused to answer.” (Actually, she said the question was “ridiculous” and “I will not dignify it with an answer.”)

At the rally, Trump again presented Pelosi as the image of the enemy. At one point, he discussed the recent arrest of twenty-two MS-13 members in California, on particularly gruesome charges of murder and dismemberment. (Trump: “Little pieces, little pieces!”) He said, “These are sick people. When I called them animals, Nancy Pelosi said, ‘How dare he use that name; these are human beings.’ ” (She had said, “We are all God’s children. . . . Calling people animals is not a good thing.”) In case there was any doubt, Trump added, “I don’t think they’re human beings.” At the same time, he lied about the programs that Pelosi and her colleagues have fought for. “You have to remember this, because they give us a bum rap: people with preëxisting conditions are protected by Republicans much more so than they are protected by Democrats,” he said, even as lawyers for his Administration are arguing, in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that those protections are unconstitutional. And the contenders for the Democratic nomination for President came in, as usual, for mockery: Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas”); Bernie Sanders (“He’s screaming, his hair’s all crazy . . . he’s desperate now!”); Joe Biden (“He’s not mentally prepared”). He also wondered if Representative Pressley might be related to Elvis Presley.

“The Democrats are being so violent, so vicious, moving so far left,” Trump said, and politicians in his own party seemed to second his extremism. Several Republican officeholders were in the crowd, and Trump gave two Republican candidates running in special congressional elections in North Carolina this fall a chance to come onstage. Greg Murphy, who is running to fill a seat in the Third District that is open because of the death, earlier this year, of Representative Walter Jones, a Republican, said, “This is Trump Country! And I promise, if elected your congressman, I will be a congressman that has our President’s back.” Dan Bishop, who is running in the Ninth, where the midterm was invalidated because of absentee-ballot fraud linked to the campaign of another Republican candidate, told the crowd that his opponent is supported by Omar.

“I’m just saying, it’s their choice,” Trump told the crowd. “They can come back when they want, but you know they don’t love this country. I think, in some cases, they hate our country.” He added, “And they’re so angry!” The crowd joined in his condemnation of those people, whoever they were, who didn’t share their particular rage—all the hers and hims and thems outside the circle of the rally—whom they wished would go away.

In June, 2001, I took Neil Armstrong and his wife, Carol, to the National Zoo. I love pandas. As it turned out, Neil Armstrong did, too. The visit happened after my neighbor Joe Allen, another early astronaut, called to ask if I could arrange for the Armstrongs to see the young pandas, who’d recently arrived from China with fuss and fanfare rivalling a Presidential Inauguration. The bears had been flown aboard a special FedEx plane dubbed Panda One, which had pictures of them painted on each side. Cable-news shows provided live coverage of the bears’ police escort to the zoo. Like the three Apollo 11 astronauts returning from the moon, the pandas had to be quarantined (for thirty days, longer than the twenty-one days for the astronauts) when they arrived in the United States.

When we met to ride to the zoo, Armstrong introduced himself as if I might not have known who he was. By then, his hair was turning silver. A former test pilot, he wore aviator glasses and was dressed casually, in a blue short-sleeved shirt with a pen clipped to his pocket. He looked like the professor of engineering he had become. At NASA, he had been notoriously modest, unspoiled by the glamour and hoopla that tarnished other astronauts’ reputations. “He was the most gracious and humble person I ever knew,” Allen, who had been at Mission Control for Apollo 11 and was a Yale-educated physicist before he became an astronaut, told me. Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen, recalled that a woman once approached Armstrong at a pro-am golf tournament and asked, “Aren’t you somebody that I should know?” He replied, “Probably not.”

Armstrong was instead consumed with science and its many facets. It certainly wasn’t for the money; the Associated Press calculated that he made about thirty-three dollars for his two-hour-and-forty-minute walk on the moon—in a program that had cost NASA billions to create. “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer,” he said, in a speech at the National Press Club, in February, 2000. It was a rare public appearance after he retired from NASA, in 1971, just two years after the famous flight that made him the first man on the moon. With inspiring scope, he mused in that speech about the great scientific achievements of the twentieth century—he didn’t mention his moon landing—and what lay ahead in the twenty-first.

On the ride to the zoo, he asked me about Iran, a country I had covered for almost three decades. As part of a 1969 world tour after returning from the moon, the Apollo 11 team had visited Tehran, where the three men were fêted by the Shah. Armstrong recalled how Americanized Iran was; he asked me to describe my trips to post-revolutionary Iran and what had changed. He was initially not a big talker, given the space his fame would have allowed him to fill. He asked me more questions, when all I really wanted was to know what the moon felt like. But he never once mentioned his past.

Click Here: cheap pandora Rings

When we got to the zoo, Lucy Spelman, the director at the time, took us to the keepers’ enclosure where the roly-poly bears, youngsters still growing, were weighed and checked daily by veterinary staff. Spelman explained how the pandas were being trained to hold out their arms to have blood drawn. “I remember at first wondering if he was going to enjoy the visit, as he seemed very serious,” she recalled recently. But Armstrong was captivated; he and his wife knelt on the ground to offer carrots and protein biscuits to Mei Xiang, the two-year-old female, and Tian Tian, the three-year-old male, through a mesh fence.

“As soon as he started feeding them, he smiled and asked questions,” Spelman said. Armstrong rattled them off: What was being done to protect the endangered species? (Only about a thousand pandas were left in the wild.) When would these two breed? (The zoo’s previous panda couple had never produced a surviving cub.) How were they trained and cared for? (The two youngsters were still learning English; born at the panda reserve in Wolong, they had known commands only in Chinese.) He listened intently for more than an hour. “I enjoyed how much he enjoyed them,” Spelman said. “I was lucky because I got to watch it.”

You’d have thought Neil Armstrong had never done anything else interesting in his life.

Spelman later took Armstrong and his wife to other behind-the-scenes corners of the zoo, including inside the keepers’ quarters to see Jana, a giraffe calf. I feared that she may have overestimated Armstrong’s interest in zoology when she offered to show him the video of Jana’s birth. (Giraffes fall several feet to the ground from their mothers, who stand while giving birth.) But he was eager to see it; he watched with awe. “They were both over the moon at the zoo,” Allen, who was hosting the Armstrongs in Washington, told me.

At the time, I wondered what deeper sense of existence—of any species—Armstrong had gained on his mission to the moon that the rest of us, confined to Earth, will never experience. Why, otherwise, would someone who represented mankind’s giant leap into space be so enthralled at a zoo? I thought of that question again over the weekend, when the Washington Post reported on a speech that had been drafted for President Richard Nixon to deliver if the moon mission had failed—and Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins didn’t make it back. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” the draft read. Armstrong probably didn’t know about that speech. But, as the commander of Apollo 11, he must certainly have felt the fragility of life—in all its forms—when he lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center.

President Trump’s racist remarks about four progressive Democratic members of Congress—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—have unified the Party against a common adversary. On Tuesday, House Democrats passed a resolution condemning Trump’s “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.” But a divide regarding policy and strategy remains between the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the four freshman Democrats, and other House members calling for the immediate impeachment of the President.

After the vote to condemn Trump, Representative Al Green, of Texas, filed articles of impeachment against the President, a move that will force Pelosi to table Green’s measure, refer it to the House Judiciary Committee, or proceed with a full vote in the House. Next Wednesday, the issue will arise again when the former special counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees about his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and obstruction of justice by Trump. Eighty-two of the House’s two hundred and thirty-five Democrats have said that they currently support impeaching the President.

To discuss the state of the Democratic Party, and Pelosi’s leadership, I spoke by phone on Monday with Barney Frank, the former congressman, who represented his district in Massachusetts for more than three decades in the House before retiring, in 2013. He is best known for his outspokenness and his role in crafting the eponymous Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to regulate the financial industry after the crash last decade. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why he thinks the criticism of Pelosi is unfair, whether there is a divide in the Democratic Party, and his belief that this dispute is not really a generational one.

What have you made of the internal split between Pelosi and some of her members?

I’m disappointed by it. I think the first thing to say is that it is not nearly as big a split as people think. They are a fraction, a splinter. The overwhelming majority of the Democrats agree with [Pelosi]. Frankly, I think there is a conspiracy among Ocasio-Cortez, the media, and the Republican Party to make her look much more influential than she is. Every time I debate a Republican, they want to talk about them. And I think, in fact, that there is not such a big splinter. There have always been, on the Democratic side—Howard Dean, etc.—people who are very passionate and are frustrated because reality isn’t as pliable as they wish. They are people who I think make the fundamental mistake—I often agree with them on substance—but they make the fundamental mistake of thinking the general public is much more in agreement with them than it is, and forget about or just reject the notion of trying to figure out how to get things done.

Click Here: Liverpool FC T Shirts

I agree with you that Ocasio-Cortez represents a minority of the Party, even though I think she is probably fairly similar on politics to [Bernie] Sanders and [Elizabeth] Warren, who I think combined make up a somewhat—

No, here’s the fundamental difference. I said I agree with a lot of them on substance. The issue is not substance. I have worked very closely with Elizabeth Warren. The fundamental difference is that these people—certainly Ocasio-Cortez—they appear to think that the majority is ready to adopt what they want, and it’s a strategic and tactical difference.

Elizabeth Warren would never have had a sit-in protesting Nancy Pelosi. It’s a matter of how you go about things. It is their view that the only reason that their platform isn’t being adopted is the political timidity, maybe the malign influence of money. The notion that there is significant political opposition among many people, including maybe a majority on some issues, they disregard that and denounce other Democrats, saying they don’t have the courage. It’s not the courage. We don’t have the votes sometimes. Sanders did that a little bit more. Elizabeth never does that.

On the financial-reform bill, Elizabeth Warren worked closely with us. For example, when Russ Feingold said he was voting against it because it was not as good as it could be, she called him up and tried to talk him into it, unsuccessfully. On a number of issues when people made what I thought were unrealistic demands, Elizabeth joined in explaining to people why they were unrealistic. I think that’s the difference. It’s not substance. It’s political approach.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I do think some of the critiques of Pelosi in the last few months may have something more to them.

What? I don’t think so at all. I think she—remember the critiques were originally that she was too far to the left. So what critiques do you think make sense?

I understand not wanting to do impeachment, even if you think the President deserves to be impeached. I understand—

By the way, two-thirds of the House Democrats agree with [Pelosi].

Yes. Let me just finish. I think she has seemed bored and uninterested in public about the idea of investigating Trump, and given off a vibe that she is just not even, forget impeachment, just—

Nonsense. Nonsense. It’s nonsense on stilts, as Jeremy Bentham said. The fact is that you have the Democratic House committees working very hard at it. She said he ought to go to prison. She is working very hard on the substance and has done a great job of getting things through, but she has also [been] working closely with the committees, Elijah Cummings and others. Part of the problem is what the TV chooses to run. They like controversy. So she is more often quoted when she is disagreeing on impeachment than when she is making her own critiques.

O.K., well—

If you monitor her statements closely, I find her—she has been very critical of Trump and she has got the Democrats doing oversight.

When she was asked about [the departing Labor Secretary] Alex Acosta being impeached, she said, “It’s up to the President. It’s his Cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people—we need to focus on that.” It’s comments like that which I feel like show—

What do you mean “like that?” That’s one comment on one issue. The fact is that I think, in part, what she’s trying to do is put the blame on him and put the pressure on him. But that was one comment on one issue. It just seems to me she’s had a barrage against him, including now this resolution they’re going to do criticizing him for the comments about “Go back where you came from.” Plus, that’s not been the basis of Ocasio-Cortez’s, that’s not been the basis of the complaints—that she doesn’t seem interested. That’s really reaching.

Look, you must have read her interview with Maureen Dowd. She says, “You can’t impeach everybody.”

Right! And you can’t. And she’s right about that. It’s more important, I believe, to talk about the substance.

O.K., but—

And, again, that happens, though, because she is being pressed by the media to respond to those arguments and she is explaining her answers. But she has certainly been hypercritical of Trump.

Whatever you think of the immigration deal that she agreed to after Senate Democrats cut out the ground from under her, I thought her publicly saying that she was going to rely on Mike Pence to update her on things was embarrassing. And—

It wasn’t embarrassing. She was trying to make the best of a bad situation. I agree with that. I think she did the best she could. The fact is that they couldn’t do better.

Let me just ask you a broader—

What do you think she should have done? I know it’s nice to always just be critical of what other people do, but what do you think she should have done?

I am not sure on the substance, but—

Of course not. Because it is hard and it gets criticized. Whatever.

I was talking about the way she has been acting publicly, but I see your point. But let me—

She said he should go to prison. She has made a lot of other very negative statements. You are just cherry-picking to make a point.

I will bring this back to our current conversation. What have you made of Joe Biden’s comments that, if he were to become President, he would and could work with Mitch McConnell—that you really can reach across the aisle and get things done?

Oh, I think that was a mistake. It reminded me of when [President Barack] Obama said he was going to be post-partisan, and I said he gave me post-partisan depression. I understand the political motive because that is, unfortunately, the message a lot of people say they want to hear. But I don’t think it works. And, by the way, I think it would evanesce very completely. It wouldn’t come to anything.

I’m curious whether you think part of the split we are seeing in the Democratic Party is kind of an age thing—

No, that’s ridiculous. You just cited two seventy-year-olds.

Well—

You just cited two septuagenarians!

Hold on, let me finish.

Jeez.

Wait, hold on. I cited two seventy-year-olds, and you pointed out very interestingly that those two seventy-year-olds have a different way of going about it than their younger ideological allies.

Four. You greatly exaggerate Ocasio-Cortez’s—there’s four of them. There aren’t very many, including many of the younger people. By the way, the Democrats that Pelosi is most concerned about are younger ones. She is working very hard with the thirty- and forty-year-olds who won the marginal seats. The difference is not age. It is your perception of the electorate’s position. If you believe the electorate is raring to go with all this left agenda—as I said, much of which I agree with, the difference I have with them is more strategic—then you take some of their positions. If you believe that it is a much harder sell, then you have a different approach. . . . But if you look at the freshmen, by definition the younger ones, overwhelmingly, they are on Pelosi’s side. But they won Republican or marginal seats.

So you don’t feel that in some of the different ways that different Democrats try to communicate, that people from a different age group sometimes come across differently?

No! Let me reiterate. Frankly, you have to do your homework. What are the age groups of the people she is defending? Sharice Davis, how old is she? [She is thirty-nine.]

I am not saying in all cases.

You are talking about four people. I am talking about forty or thirty . . . I am very clear what I mean. It is not age. It is your perception of the electorate. Your perception of how far left the electorate is and how willing they are to accept things. Do you think you have to do them in steps? Do you think you have to worry about opposition? Or do you think the public is with you and anybody who doesn’t go for the whole thing right away is a coward? That’s why the people who come from the tougher districts overwhelmingly disagree with them.

Are we in a time where you feel like normal political calculations might have to be changed, or maybe it’s worth being more risky or bold?

Yeah, my own view is that there should be more emphasis on substance. I think there are two people who have been forgotten about: James Michael Curley and Adam Clayton Powell. They were both very successful politicians who did very bad things, who violated the law and conventional morality. But the more they did that, the more support they got from their political bases, which consisted of people who thought the whole system was rigged against them. And the more they said “fuck you” to conventional morality, the more they were cheered on.

I think we should stop putting so much emphasis on showing people what bad things [Trump] has done from the legal and ethical standpoint—which is impeachment—and talk more about the fact that the tax bill was so unfair, that there is no infrastructure going forward, that he is attacking health care. The things that were successful in 2018. So I think we should be even tougher and call his bluff on the substantive things. . . . I am not talking about any concessions to him.

When you watch the [Democratic Presidential-primary] debates, do you not think there are ways that the Party is moving left in substantive ways?

Can I tell you for the third time that I agree with much of them on substance? I’m sorry, that’s frustrating to me. I agree with them on much of the substance. I said that several times! The Party is moving to the left and I think that it should move to the left. I just talked about some of these areas. But the point I am making is that the difference is not substantive so much as it is strategic and tactical. So I don’t know why you would ask me that. By the way, I also take exception to you saying that I think they are in the minority. They are overwhelmingly, statistically, clearly in a minority in the House.

For the record, I will state that they are in a minority in the House.

And even more so in the Senate. I mean, the Senate is different.

I don’t know if you remember, but I interviewed you many years ago, back when I was at The New Republic. Do you feel a sense of sentimentality talking to me again?

I honestly remember less and less now. You know, the synapses kick in. But I really urge you to go look at the ages of the members of Congress, because I think it explodes the generational argument.

One striking aspect of the oral arguments, last week, in Texas v. United States, a case that threatens the Affordable Care Act, was the suggestion, from two of the three judges on a Fifth Circuit appeals panel, that what politicians say to or promise the public needn’t be taken seriously—indeed, that it hardly matters if they lie. The case, which I wrote about in this week’s magazine, was brought by states led by Republicans, and in effect argues that, when Congress passed President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it was, unbeknownst to the public, actually invalidating the entire A.C.A. One roadblock to this argument is that this is not what Congress said it was doing. Instead, the law simply set the penalty for not securing health insurance—the “individual mandate”—to zero, and nothing more. But why should anyone believe them?

“How do we know that some members didn’t say, ‘Aha! This is the silver bullet that’s going to undo the A.C.A.’ or ‘Obamacare,’ if you prefer?” Judge Jennifer Elrod asked Samuel Siegel, an attorney defending the law on behalf of a group of twenty-one states, most of them blue. “ ‘So we’re going to vote for this just because we know it’s going to bring it to a halt, because we understand the tax issue’?” (The “tax issue” is the theory that, because Chief Justice John Roberts once argued that defining the financial penalty as a tax made that penalty constitutional, its absence was fatal to the whole law—an argument that lawyers might want to keep secret not out of tactical slyness but out of embarrassment, because it doesn’t make much sense.)

“That would be imputing to Congress the intent to create an unconstitutional law,” Siegel said, though it’s actually more convoluted than that. Indeed, the hypothesis is that members of Congress passed such a law just to be busted—to sabotage a law that they had failed to change legislatively. (At another point, Elrod asked whether Texas, one of the lead plaintiffs, might have been waiting to say, “ ‘Hah—caughtchya! You just did something unconstitutional!’ ”) When the penalty was repealed, Siegel noted, several legislators “specifically came forward and said, ‘We are not repealing the preëxisting conditions, we’re not repealing the subsidies’ ”—elements of the A.C.A. that are widely popular. If they did have a “silver bullet” plan, “that would mean they were misleading the American public and their constituents.” Senator Orrin Hatch, then the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, was among those offering such reassurances in 2017.

“I’m not a fan of using quotes from elected officials, who say a lot of things for a lot of reasons,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said. Engelhardt, whom Trump named to the court, came across as a silver-bullet kind of guy. An issue in the case is “severability”—how much of a large, multi-part law courts should invalidate if one element of it is found unconstitutional. The basic standard is that courts should be cautious and keep what they can. Engelhardt asked why it wouldn’t be easier to just throw out the whole thing and let Congress start over. “I mean, can’t they put together a sort of cafeteria-style package with all of these individual features that are so attractive . . .  They could vote on this tomorrow!” he said to Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, who was also defending the bill. “Couldn’t they put them together and vote on them like that?” Engelhardt asked, snapping his fingers.

“And obviously the President would sign that, right? No, obviously not,” Letter replied, provoking laughter.

Click Here: Liverpool FC T Shirts

In the health-care case, the public reassurances from legislators simply reinforce the most obvious reading of the law, namely that Congress had decided that the mandate could go and the rest of the law could, functionally, survive without it. But an interesting phenomenon, in the jurisprudence of the Trump years, involves attempts by the Administration’s lawyers to get the courts to ignore a disjunction between what the President says in public and the legal justifications that his Administration offers for his actions. In the litigation over the various iterations of Trump’s travel ban, for example, lawyers for the Administration argued that judges should ignore what Trump said on the campaign trail about instituting “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” as well as his tweets disparaging Muslims. Instead, the judges should believe the lawyers’ claims that the ban was not targeted at any religious group and was not at all discriminatory: the ban was just a reflection of concerns about national security. It took a few tries, major revisions, and the inclusion of North Korea on a short list of proscribed countries for the Administration to come up with a limited ban that the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, would accept.

Similarly, the Administration, in its attempts to add a citizenship question to the census, first claimed that the aim was to protect the voting rights of minorities—a rationale laughably at odds with the President’s warnings of an immigrant invasion. The question of how courts should interpret the meaning of legislative and executive actions has always been complicated; Trump’s tendency both to dissemble and to incite, both to deny his motives and to bray about them, all at high volume, can make it trickier still. In the census case, though, the President lost: the Supreme Court found that his Administration had not offered a good-faith explanation for adding the question. The ruling meant, practically, that the question would be omitted; the task of having to justify its actions in an honest manner was apparently too daunting for the Administration to accomplish in the time left before the forms had to be printed. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote (citing an earlier decision), “We are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’ ” The Court wanted the Trump Administration to tell the truth about what it was doing. Or, at least, the Court didn’t want the President to force it to pretend to believe his more obvious lies.

“The Hills: New Beginnings” reconvenes the cast of “The Hills” as if undertaking a case study in the dysfunctions of self-exploitation. It is a haunted sequel to the original series, which aired between 2006 and 2010, and remains both a decadent summit of summertime reality soaps and a glowing ill omen of spiritual rot. “The Hills” was itself a spinoff of “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” and presaged the dramatic methods and presentational styles of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” on Bravo, and of vast tracts of reality programming across basic cable. Most crucially, “The Hills” furthered the profession of reality-TV stardom: the moment when it stopped being a thing one did in the spirit of a gap year, or a turn on “The Price Is Right,” and started becoming a show-business calling and a path to the Presidency.

The dramatis personae of “The Hills: New Beginnings,” legends of the game, were barely adults when we met them. Now they are approaching the cusp of a “Real Housewives” ripeness and “evolving” in their interpersonal lives and entertainment careers. Mostly, they are chatting about attempting to evolve. The new show retains the original’s Warholian purity of inaction and its languid tension: nothing much happens, and it is not happening at a soothing pace, under a glazy gaze. The castmates communicate in lucid plot summaries, upspoken gossip, small-talk complaints about L.A. traffic, passive-aggressive ultimatums, devastatingly accurate behind-the-back analyses of other people’s problems, and exchanges guided by an approach to psychology espoused in group sessions at Passages Malibu. A prelude to the new series caught these people primping in their mirrors, putting on their faces. The camera was up in their pores like a dermatologist’s magnifier.

“Time changes everything,” Audrina Patridge says, and she is only half right. It is true that she is now a divorced woman and an openly terrified single mother, but her taste in men remains deeply unfortunate, as attested by her renewed flirtation with Justin Bobby. “New Beginnings” muses upon the passage of time often. It is a show about kindling old flames and stoking aged beefs. Each of the most dynamic castmates is returning from some sort of exile. They touch down at LAX, speaking about patterns of avoidance and confrontation, wheeling designer baggage copped from gifting suites. They reckon with their past mistakes, which often are plentiful, owing to the producers’ need for dramatic conflict and the players’ personal inventories of chemical and emotional dependencies. Take the moment when the arch-villain Spencer Pratt becomes distraught that his old friend Brody Jenner, of the Calabasas Kardashian-Jenners, is now married and presumed henpecked. Jenner, who has mitigated his partying ways over the years, set Pratt off by declining to join him and a pod of young models in any of several rounds of tequila shots downed around lunchtime on a Tuesday.

Pratt and his wife, Heidi Montag, are a couple whose bond was forged in the crucible of a paparazzo’s flashtube. Pratt is a savant of the reality-TV form, and he was, back in the day, skilled at inhabiting a nasty character, with his muscular tantrums and tremendous ego trips. But it went to his head; seemingly addled by the off-gassing of his notoriety, he became a monstrosity. He looks back at the boom of money and fame and says, “We were living the dream. But it was just a dream. It wasn’t real. That’s the problem.” A montage establishing the flavor of his home décor includes a shot of the saddest chalice in the history of commemorative cups: a trophy honoring Pratt and Montag’s joint entry, under the checkout-line portmanteau “Speidi,” in the Reality TV Awards Hall of Fame, in 2015.

Montag, looking back at her ascent, says that she regrets her impulse purchases of plastic surgeries, but that she is at peace with those regrets. Pratt, too, has mellowed into self-knowledge and moderation, while retaining enough spiciness that he still inspires his closest friends and family to storm out of night clubs. The two of them have a son now. Some of Pratt’s fans will attribute his new stability to the grounding effects of fatherhood, others to his dedicated regimen of crystal healing treatments.

One major plotline concerns whether Pratt will reconcile with his sister, Stephanie, who has returned to California from London, where she plied her craft on “Celebrity Big Brother” and the like. The siblings’ feud—with its snubs and counter-snubs, with its profound energies manifesting as petty spats—combines the substance of an interfamilial Facebook drama with the verbal sparring style found on a bad night at a bar on the weekend of Thanksgiving.

Whitney Port, calm and chic, rolls her round eyes at such drama, but neither Lauren Conrad nor Kristin Cavallari has deigned to grace this revival. In recompense, the new series fills out its cast with faces including the actress Mischa Barton. Here is a twist: Barton—a legitimate actor, derailed It Girl, and erstwhile gossip-column character—settles among the performers who only play themselves. In keeping with the theme of reckoning, “New Beginnings” contrives an opportunity for Barton to speak her mind to Perez Hilton, the erstwhile Walter Winchell of WordPress, who was misogynistically rude to her back in the day. “I think he talked a lot of shit about her weight and stuff,” Port explains to a colleague.

“New Beginnings” also brings us the celebrity scion Brandon Thomas Lee, introduced as the twenty-two-year-old son of Mötley Crüe’s drummer and “Baywatch” ’s undying pinup. His role is to be a wise man and a lucky boy; he is clean and sober and levelheaded, focussed strictly on studying scripts and on hanging out with flocks of Instagram bikini models, whose indistinct chatter fills the back of the soundtrack like an excitement of songbirds. Lee views Pratt and Jenner with detachment: “They’re like bickering exes now.” His mom makes a cameo that puts the show in its proper context. Lee has bought himself a house, and Pamela Anderson has come to see it. She frowns at his pantry briskly. “Lucky Charms,” she says, with a resigned sigh, and burns some sage to bless the space, for the house must be clear of bad energy, especially if it is to be a home studio.