Visitors to Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington, D.C., the home of the House Judiciary Committee, may be excused for thinking that they had suffered a kind of whiplash this week. On Monday, when the panel conducted a hearing about the Mueller report, there was a partisan donnybrook. Democrats and Republicans snarled at one another, and at the witnesses, including John Dean, the Watergate figure, in a predictably sour and unenlightening spectacle. But, the next day, the same committee members assembled in the same place and engaged in a civilized and productive discussion. The subject that delivered the good bipartisan karma was the monopoly power of the nation’s tech giants. In other words, what Donald Trump and Robert Mueller have rent asunder, Google and Facebook have joined together.

The second session was chaired by David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who leads the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. Cicilline is a man of ebullient enthusiasm—he kvelled when he announced that one of the witnesses had attended Brown University, his alma mater and the the pride of his home state—and the congressman’s good cheer infected the afternoon’s proceedings. The occasion for the hearing, though, was sombre—the precarious financial state of the nation’s news outlets. The reason for their peril is obvious, according to Cicilline: “Concentration in the digital advertising market has pushed local journalism to the verge of extinction.”

One witness summed up the dire state of affairs. Kevin Reilly, the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, personifies old media; he even looks a little like Perry White, the newspaper editor in the old “Superman” television show. Reilly gave examples of how his paper’s scoops had exposed medical malfeasance and school-district corruption, and he celebrated the public’s continuing interest in the work of the Journal-Constitution. “Our audience has never been larger than it is now,” he said. “We have more people reading the Atlanta Journal-Constitution than at any other point in our history.” But many of those readers weren’t paying for the privilege but were instead viewing Journal-Constitution stories on other sites. “If others repackage our journalism and make money off it, yet none of that money makes its way back to the local paper, then it makes breaking that next story or exposing the next scandal more challenging,” he added in a written statement to the committee. “If that cycle continues indefinitely, quality local journalism will slowly wither, and eventually cease to exist.” In other words, newspaper stories are posted and read on Google and Facebook, and those companies, not the newspapers, reap the advertising revenue.

Cicilline called the hearing to discuss a bill he has introduced specifically to address the problem. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would allow publishers an exemption from antitrust laws, so that they could negotiate as a group with the dominant online platforms. Working collectively, the theory goes, the publishers could extract a larger share of the advertising revenue than they now receive. They certainly need it: as Cicilline pointed out, from 2006 to 2017 advertising revenue in the newspaper industry plummeted from forty-nine billion dollars to $15.6 billion. Notably, the senior Republican on the panel, Doug Collins, of Georgia, supports the bill. “If individual news outlets could count on being able to negotiate fair attribution and advertising-revenue agreements with the online platforms, the bleeding could be stopped. The problem, however, is that smaller news organizations don’t stand a fair negotiating chance when they try to negotiate deals with the platform giants. These giants stand as a bottleneck—a classic antitrust problem—between consumers and the producers of news content.”

The bill hardly seems like a cure-all for what ails the journalism business. As Matthew Schruers, the vice-president of a computer-industry group, pointed out at the hearing, Congress has tried to protect newspapers before, with little to show for it. In 1970, it gave newspapers a different kind of antitrust exemption, in order to prevent monopolies in regional markets, but technology, and also changing tastes, swamped that effort. The Cicilline bill, even if it were to become law, might meet the same fate.

But the hearing, which was the first of several on the power of the big tech companies, exposed a larger point. Google, Facebook, and their cousins Apple and Amazon have grown so vast that they have aroused the ire of the entire political establishment. And they aren’t only transforming journalism but also politics, retail, and virtually all commerce. The regulation, or even the breakup, of these companies is a long way off, and it’s not clear what form it would take. But the journey has begun. As Representative Matt Gaetz, a conservative firebrand from Florida, said at the hearing, “I believe that we are presented with a historic opportunity here—where right-wing populists and left-wing populists have joined together, under Chairman Cicilline’s leadership, to attempt to change the way that consumers interface with major technology platforms. In a committee that so often sees division, it’s nice to be working together toward such an important goal.”

In 1991, Claire Denis made the only movie to date that she has filmed in the United States: a long-form car commercial for Nissan. (The model in question, the Figaro, was sold only in Japan.) In the decades since, the film became so hard to find that Denis herself considered it lost. But earlier this year, the founder of the free streaming site Le Cinéma Club, Marie Louise Khondji, and her co-programmer, Bingham Bryant, found and bought a Japanese VHS version on eBay. As of Friday, the forty-minute featurette, titled “Keep It for Yourself,” is available on Le Cinéma Club in the form of a digital restoration of that copy; what’s more, the movie is no mere rarity but also a major cinematic treasure rescued from oblivion and now available to all.

The movie, done in melancholy black and white, is a minor masterwork of downbeat downtown romanticism. Sophie Simon plays Sophie Koudelka, a French woman from Dijon whose American boyfriend (Michael James), writes to invite her to move in with him in New York. She shows up—the city is first seen from the low-cost majesty of a tram ride, from Roosevelt Island to midtown—but, when she gets to his Tribeca building, he’s not there, and has left her a key to a vacant apartment.

The film, which fuses genres and moods deftly, boldly, and movingly, is as much a portrait of Sophie’s inner life as it is a vision of the city. Working with her longtime cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis renders Sophie’s tangled solitude and loose-ends bewilderment in incisively composed images of randomly sublime street action, including scenes framed by the apartment’s windows. A chance encounter at a deli with another young woman (Sarina Chan) leads to a quick and brief friendship and a lyrical adventure that’s crowned by a simple yet thrilling tracking shot covering multiple city blocks (and by a song).

Then Vincent Gallo—in the first of his performances with Denis—turns up, late at night, at a parking lot (that’s where the car comes in), and all hell breaks loose. “Keep It for Yourself” at that point becomes a giddily comedic crime story, complete with oddball gestures of penance and a hot pursuit by police. The wondrous intersections of seemingly disparate fields of action lead to unexpected and momentous encounters. (Even the title turns out to be a diabolical twist of whimsy.) Denis’s film is a time capsule of New York habits, gestures, and sights; it’s also a political documentary on the wing, featuring a one-word New York Post headline—“WAR!”—and talk-radio bluster about the start of the first Iraq campaign. The grand scope of international conflict meshes with the tense air of ambient violence, both private and official, that’s at the troubled heart of the city—and of the distinctive, passionate, hard, and deep experiences that Denis distills from her American stay.

The Instagram account @preachersnsneakers began to reveal its teachings in the Lenten season. In March, it started pairing photographs of megachurch figures with screenshots documenting the street value of their casual clothing. Scrolling through, we spy a lot of Gucci accessories, a dazzle of Louis Vuitton patterns, and a selection of high-end athletic shoes—a collective document of the giddy extremes of contemporary costume, as practiced in a subculture where all the world is a pulpit, and players flex and strut in their streetwear. @preachersnsneakers is not devoted exclusively to sneakers, but sneakers are the foundation of the fashion culture it studies. And it goes without saying that sneakers are bigger than Jesus.

On May 26th, for example, the account featured a photo of a youth pastor at World Overcomers Christian Church, in Durham, North Carolina, who looked to be rumbling through a sermon in a black leather jacket, biker jeans, and a pair of chunky-soled running shoes produced by Versace, in collaboration with 2 Chainz. The value of the shoes in the secondhand marketplace—the price tag on their clout—was about fifteen hundred dollars, a function of both their scarcity and their modish chunkiness. The silhouette shares a normcore opulence with the Balenciaga Triple S trainers, which @preachersnsneakers spotted, a week earlier, on the praise-music singer Jake Hamilton. Offering social commentary in the form of digital collage, @preachersnsneakers has attracted more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand followers to date and exegeses from outlets as varied as Footwear News and Christianity Today, where a contributor wondered, “Perhaps the excess and superfluity of our present-day leaders’ clothing is a subconscious compensation for not being clothed with power from on high?”

@preachersnsneakers, which is run pseudonymously by an observant Christian who lives in Texas, blew up by probing the sensitive area where the values of the prosperity gospel and the Protestant work ethic intersect with both Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption and Tinker Hatfield’s design work at Nike. The matter of the pastors’ Sunday best touches on questions of temperance and lust. In an interview with the Times, the account’s proprietor explained that he began the project in the spirit of protest, but he soon shifted to self-examination. “This is a pretty slippery slope to be judging people’s hearts behind how they spend,” he said.

Eager to continue the conversation that he sparked, the founder, inevitably, has launched a podcast, titled “Preachers,” with promotional art that pays homage to the typographical design signature of Virgil Abloh—who, as a streetwear eminence, a luxury-house luminary, and a Kanye West collaborator, is a natural favorite of these fabulous shepherds. Last week, joined by a pastor from Fort Worth, Texas, our host spent a pleasant fortyish minutes moseying around the question of “mainstream celebrity Christian culture and how the fashion and brand-name stuff fits in.” Also inevitably, the preachers featured on the account have little interest in the discourse. Discreet to the point of evasive, they have tended to greet press inquiries with silence, or with expressions of sorrow that some observers might damn them as profligates, or with a harrumph of how-did-you-get-this-number disgruntlement. The bold logos and dramatic vamps do the talking for them. The shoes proclaim power but also an eagerness to demonstrate fluency in a specific idiom of youth culture.

In a foundational scene of monotheism, Moses doffs his kicks to approach the burning bush; shoes are, by their pedestrian nature, unfit for holy ground. In the Gospels, when St. John the Baptist proclaims that he is unworthy even to loosen the sandal strap of Christ, he chooses his figure of speech to describe a posture of humility. Since the Byzantine era, the most important footwear in the Catholic faith has been pontifical shoes and papal slippers: two related categories of laceless red shoe worn by the Bishop of Rome. It was once the custom of a pilgrim to kiss the cross embroidered on its vamp. The current pontiff, Pope Francis, a Jesuit cutting a humble air to suit his message, shuns such finery, in contrast to his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI. Keen on the iconography of pairing a steep mitre with a pair of flashy slip-ons, Benedict celebrated the majesty of clerical garments. His preferred shade of red, a kind of succulent tomato, closely approximates the color of the roughly five-thousand-dollar Air Yeezy 2s worn, as @preachersnsneakers shows, by John Gray, formerly a pastor at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, in Houston, Texas.

Gray tends to the soul of Justin Bieber, among many other matters, and has balanced his work in service of the Lord with a film-acting side hustle and a line of collar stays engraved with “Romans: 8:18-19,” which reads, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” But the glory of the Yeezys, which are kissable in their plushness, is his in this life. Gray told the Times that they were a gift from the production company behind his reality-TV show, “The Book of John Gray,” which airs on the Oprah Winfrey Network—an explanation that elegantly combines a defense of the shoes’ expense with a nonchalant demonstration of his clout.

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The Bieber connection is meaningful. Like pop idols hoisted for worship, these pastors aspire toward casual majesty and achieve prefabricated fabulousness. Another of Bieber’s spiritual leaders, Carl Lentz, was among a vanguard of pastors who, in selecting their vestments, aimed to swagger in investment pieces; Lentz is a main character in Sam Schube’s canonical “Hypepriests” piece, which ran in GQ two years ago. “It appears as if the hipster pastor has evolved,” Schube wrote. “It’s no longer enough to no-comment gay marriage while wearing a biker jacket. Instead, you need to do it while wearing skater socks. Aggressive glasses. Very long drawstrings. Bieber merch.” The disparate subjects of @preachersnsneakers all dress in the same key of fashionable garishness. For all its glorification of the self, this way of wearing clothes, as practiced by these people, studiously avoids distinctive personal style. These are basically outfits chosen for Drake to wear to the airport.

Or, put another way, the contempo-clerical look is as regimented as any other religious habit. Laypeople who cannot expect to receive five grand’s worth of Yeezys will be well served by other merchandise from Kanye West, who naturally joins Bieber as the other leading saint of this scene. He has a true heart for gospel; his trend sensors seek heat with great ardor; his talents have risen to the microcultural moment. A choice @preachersnsneakers post featured his merch table at Coachella: in an extension of his Sunday Service gatherings, which are A-list praise-music occasions, West retailed a muted sweatshirt, blazing with the phrase “Holy Spirit,” in a style observers have likened to the cult garb seen in “Wild Wild Country,” at what a fancy department store would call an accessible price point. Meanwhile, preachers, though unworthy to unstrap the sandal of Jesus, are with their private shoppers, browsing for shoes that don’t resemble sandals as much as they do the hobnailed boots of Roman soldiers that were favored by Caligula.

Climate change is the most pressing issue in the world, and the twenty-three Democratic candidates for President have ideas about how to address it. For decades, economists have argued for a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax as the cheapest and most efficient way to reduce CO₂ emissions. Now progressives and climate activists are advocating for a different approach, focussing on renewable energy and creating jobs. Their efforts have resulted in the Green New Deal resolutions before Congress. What do the various proposals entail—and would any of them work?

As divided as House Democrats might be about impeachment—around sixty members, a small but growing minority, are thought to support beginning proceedings now—the caucus is united in support of facilitating the House’s ongoing investigations of President Trump. On Tuesday, the House voted to allow individual committees to sue the Trump Administration without the approval of the full chamber. The vote comes a day after the Justice Department agreed to turn over to the Judiciary Committee some of the documents that informed the special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions on obstruction of justice, in a deal that was evidently reached to avoid a contempt resolution against Attorney General William Barr. It also came amid reports that the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerrold Nadler, is privately pressing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment proceedings. As Pelosi prefers, House Democrats are instead inching along with their investigations.

Monday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, on “Lessons from the Mueller Report,” was, as Nadler said in his opening statement, “the first in a series of hearings designed to unpack the work of the special counsel and related matters.” The witnesses included the former U.S. Attorneys Joyce White Vance, of Alabama’s Northern District, and Barbara McQuade, of Michigan’s Eastern District, who were invited to highlight and reëmphasize some of the Mueller report’s key conclusions on obstruction of justice. John Dean, the White House counsel for the Nixon Administration, was invited to draw parallels between Trump’s conduct and the Watergate scandal, in which Dean acted as both a participant and, later, a critical witness for investigators. The guest list should have signified the seriousness with which Democrats are taking the Mueller report’s findings, even though they have not compelled the Party’s leadership to pursue impeachment. But throughout the day, most of the seats on the Democratic side of the dais were empty, and several of the Democrats who showed up moved in and out of the hearing as it went on.

Republicans, by contrast, mostly stayed put, taking alternating swings at Dean’s reputation and his relevance to the committee’s investigation. In his opening remarks, Doug Collins, the Republican ranking member, jabbed at Dean and Democrats with reference to President Barack Obama’s dismissal of Mitt Romney’s 2012 warnings about Russia. “Just a few years ago, it was brought up by one of our candidates that Russia was a threat, and the former President Obama said that the eighties are asking for their foreign policy back,” he scoffed. “Well, guess what? This committee is now hearing from the seventies, and they want their star witness back.”

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In his testimony, Dean stated what many commentators have surmised since the release of the Mueller report: that the special counsel’s findings were a directive for congressional action. “In many ways,” he said, “the Mueller report is for President Trump what the so-called Watergate roadmap, officially titled the ‘Grand Jury Report and Recommendation Concerning Transmission of Evidence to the House of Representatives,’ was for President Richard Nixon.” The two former U.S. Attorneys reiterated the conclusion shared by hundreds of former federal prosecutors in an open letter last month. “Based on my experience in over twenty-five years as a federal prosecutor,” Joyce Vance told the committee, “I support the conclusion that more than a thousand of my former colleagues came to, and that I co-signed in a public statement last month, saying that if anyone other than a President of the United States committed this conduct, he would be under indictment today for multiple acts of obstruction of justice.”

In defense of the hearing, Dean argued that the committee’s efforts to elevate Mueller’s findings have been meaningful. “I think this committee does have a role and it is adding something that the special counsel could not, and that’s public education,” he said. “This report has not been widely read in the United States. It has not even been widely read in the Congress, from some of my conversations. But I think it’s a very important function that the committee is serving by bringing these matters to public attention.”

It remains to be seen whether the public, apprised of Mueller’s findings, will urge Democrats to do more than hold informational hearings about them.