The biggest surprise of Robert Mueller’s testimony on Capitol Hill on Wednesday will be if it contains any surprises at all. The former special counsel will appear before the House Judiciary Committee for three hours in the morning and then move over to the House Intelligence Committee. In all, sixty-three lawmakers will have the opportunity to question him, and there’s no telling what some of them may ask. But we already have a good idea of what Mueller is going to say, because he has told us.

“There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress,” Mueller said, on May 29th, when he appeared at the Justice Department and read a prepared statement. “Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony. I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.”

Mueller, who has now retired as special counsel, only agreed to testify after he was issued a subpoena. On Monday, Mueller reiterated through a spokesman his intention to stay within the bounds of his report. According to NBC News, the spokesman also said that Mueller will ask to submit the report, which stretches to four hundred and forty-eight pages, as his official statement for the record.

All this doesn’t necessarily mean that the hearings will be duds. As I noted back in April, when the Justice Department released a redacted version of the report, Volume 2 of the Mueller report contained “voluminous evidence that the President repeatedly tried to hamper, and even close down, the Russia investigation,” including ordering Don McGahn, who was then the White House counsel, to fire Mueller, and subsequently asking McGahn to falsify the record to make it look like he never issued such an order. And while Mueller concluded in Volume 1 of the report that he didn’t find enough evidence to charge anybody connected to the Trump campaign with conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election, that volume also contained a great deal of damaging material. For instance, it detailed how Michael Cohen and other members of the Trump Organization pursued plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow deep into the election campaign, briefing Trump on numerous occasions about their progress. All this while Trump was maintaining—at the time and ever since—that he had no business with Russia.

In forcing Mueller to testify, the Democrats’ goal was to focus public attention on these findings and others, which Attorney General, William Barr, overshadowed in his selective and misleading representation of the report’s contents. “We want Robert Mueller to bring it to life,” Adam Schiff, the head of the Intelligence Committee, said, on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” To this end, Democrats will ask Mueller to read out key parts of the report and characterize them. Citing a hypothetical example, Jerry Nadler, the head of the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “Look at page 344, paragraph two, please read it. Does that describe obstruction of justice, and did you find that the President did that?”

While some of the report is written in the dry language of legal briefs, there are a number of passages that would seem to lend themselves to being recited on television. Take this one, from page seventy-eight of the report’s second volume:

Or this passage, from page hundred and seventeen of Volume 2:

In our televisual culture, where a single exchange in a Presidential debate can change a candidate’s prospects overnight, it is hard to predict what the impact will be of having a stiff-backed pillar of rectitude like Mueller reading out passages like these. And, even allowing for the former special counsel’s apparent determination to avoid straying beyond the language contained in the report, there is always the possibility of some unscripted drama, especially if, as expected during the six hours of testimony, the Republican members of the committees press Mueller about the origins of his investigation.

But what we won’t get from Mueller, it is safe to assume, is a straightforward answer to the fundamental question he dodged in his report: Did the President’s behavior detailed in Volume 2 satisfy a prosecutor’s definition of obstruction?

In his report, you will recall, Mueller said that he decided not to reach a prosecutorial judgement, and he pointed to a 2000 memorandum from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Opinion that criminal charges cannot be brought against a sitting President. The report also said “a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would . . . potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct”—an apparent reference to impeachment. Unfortunately, however, Mueller’s argument was shrouded in legalese. This allowed elected Republicans and Fox News hosts to ignore it and parrot Trump’s propaganda line: “No collusion, no obstruction.” Judging by the lack of support for impeachment, this strategy of obfuscation has worked. According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just twenty-one per cent of Americans support starting impeachment hearings now.

In this, ostensibly his last public act, Mueller could theoretically cast aside his constricted view of a special counsel’s role and state the truth of the matter in plain English. At considerable cost to the taxpayer, his team uncovered a good deal of prima-facie evidence of criminality, and it is the constitutional duty of Congress to pursue the matter, because nobody, not even the President, is above the law. Mueller could say something like this. Given the menacing threat that Trump represents, he should say it. But will he? Don’t hold your breath.

It’s a shame that HBO dropped boxing last year, because Sunday’s finale of the second season of “Big Little Lies” should have aired as a pay-per-view event. A pair of legendary fighters entered the ring, a suffocating family courtroom where the matter of the guardianship of traumatized twin brothers would be decided by a sympathetic but inscrutable judge. In suits and ties, the boys are handsome carbon copies of the season’s recurring ghost, their father, Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), the abuser and rapist who died at the end of Season 1. The weaponry of choice for their mother, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), is a severe suit in lifeless blue and a line of lawyerly, hideous questioning. Her adversary, sitting before her on the witness stand, is Mary Louise, the mother of Perry, who is played by Meryl Streep with a set of fake teeth and a bad case of maternal denial.

Our eyes darted from Kidman to Streep, from Kidman to Streep, in the climactic scene, like they do when we watch champion athletes. Celeste, acting as her own lawyer, was the stoic, bringing Mary Louise to heel by invoking Perry’s brother, Raymond, who died in a car accident after Mary Louise lost her temper; according to Perry, Celeste says, Mary Louise blamed him for his brother’s death, emotionally and physically abusing him. Mary Louise, the witchy hysteric, dissolves, but recovers herself enough to counter with her slut-shaming theories of Celeste’s shortcomings as a mother. Then Celeste plays for the courtroom a secret video, recorded by the twins, of Perry savagely beating her. The people in the courtroom grimace; Celeste wins full custody. Intensely choreographed, reminiscent of the interrogation operatics in “The People v. O. J. Simpson,” the scene guarantees the actors their Emmy nominations. On Twitter on Sunday night, I saw a video showing Kidman on the courtroom set bowing to Streep.

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This ended up being the whole point of the seven episodes of Season 2, didn’t it? Flashy glorification of the “Big Little Lies” phenomenon. The electricity of the performances from Kidman, Streep, and Laura Dern (as Renata, the power broker reduced to forsaken wife) pumped into existence a thousand memes and a million GIFs, but the currents were not strong enough to distract us from the weak plot of this encore season, which probably should not have been made, or, rather, recycled from the first.

The initial episodes I watched for review, in June, were promising. The Season 1 murder mystery had been solved in a perfect finale, but I thought the writers were right to dwell on Celeste’s complicated grief, the threatened marriage of Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) and Ed (Adam Scott), and, most importantly, the backstory of Bonnie, (Zoë Kravitz), who pushed Perry to his death and is disintegrating under the weight of the guilt. Quickly, and disappointingly, the scripts thinned, looping back to the same arguments and the same tearful monologues, so much so that the episodes started to give me déjà vu. Forward momentum and psychological surprise were forfeited for Emmy-baiting speeches. How many times would Ed, and Nathan, the ex-husband of Madeline and current husband to Bonnie, sneer at each other on their running path, like yipping puppies? How many times would Renata wail about her stolen wealth? To be clear, I loved the rage of Renata, who, in the finale, like Pipilotti Rist by way of Beyoncé, smashes her husband’s train set with a baseball bat. But I loved it discretely, as it was basically unlinked to the central matters of the plot.

Do the showrunners of “Big Little Lies” know that their soap opera is about whiteness and the toxic effects of keeping up appearances and suffocating the truth? Story-wise, the biggest injustice in Season 2 was done to Bonnie. In the Liane Moriarty novel upon which the series is based, the Bonnie character is almost peripheral, and she’s white, like the other members of the clique. In Season 1, it seemed that the casting of Kravitz in the role was color-blind, not meant to rouse any comment on the monoracial culture around her.

Season 2 nudges Bonnie toward depth but is not capable of explaining what it is on the edge of its tongue: why this young black woman lives in this town. What she thinks of the nouveau riche around her, how she plans to secure the survival of herself and her daughter. She is not truly friends with the others. She does not love her husband, she confesses in the finale. Throughout the second season, we learn that Bonnie is a victim of cruel mothering; when her mother, Elizabeth (Crystal Fox), comes to town, Bonnie is beset by flashbacks of abuse. Her dark-skinned mother, queasily, is revealed to be a mystic; when she shakes the hand of Renata at a disco-themed party, Elizabeth seizes, collapsing on the floor from a stroke. For most of the season, Bonnie is alone, sitting by her mother’s hospital bedside, fantasizing about smothering her mother with a pillow, asking for forgiveness. When she pushed Perry, she was actually pushing her mother, she says. It is so rich, the implications of Bonnie’s life—the passive white father, the besieged black mother, her blank marriage, her woo-woo childhood—but the show doesn’t allow any of these details to penetrate the sanctum of the group.

IndieWire reported, recently, on the creative controversies that plagued the set of Season 2. Andrea Arnold was brought on to direct, but some of her scenes were allegedly reshot or recut by Jean-Marc Vallée, the show’s co-producer and Season 1 director, to unify the styles of the first and second seasons. “Sources describe dailies filled with Arnold’s trademark restless camera searching for grace notes—those gestures, movements, and poetic frames of natural light that added another layer to what is not being said,” according to IndieWire. The rest of us couldn’t see Arnold’s raw footage, but we could detect a palpable sense of interference. The transitions between scenes were jagged, and information shockingly apportioned. The motif of the flashback began to lose its power as a summoner of memory, becoming more like a technical crutch. In the sixth episode, through the private investigations of Mary Louise, we learned that Celeste had been having anonymous sex with men she met at bars. This is a profound bit of character detail, but it arrived so late in the season, and so disconnected from Celeste’s perspective, that it served only as a lurid “gotcha” revelation.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about something you said a while back, about the lie, and that it had a shelf life,” Madeline says to Celeste, during the finale. The same could be said of the series. With its murderer’s row of actors, “Big Little Lies” could plausibly pull us in for many more seasons, but should it? The finale seemed to be weighing this question. Nervously hopeful for a new beginning, Madeline and Ed renew their vows, and Jane (Shailene Woodley) has the first consensual sex of her life, with her sweet co-worker Corey. One way to view the last minutes of the finale is not as a cliffhanger but as an ending. Bonnie, who through her mother’s death has experienced catharsis, texts Madeline, Renata, Jane, and Celeste to meet her at the police station. Wordlessly, they file in; their ordeal has dragged on for far too long.

One day not long ago, I met the photographer Jack Davison at a café in Brooklyn, during the slow hours of the afternoon. He had been beckoned Stateside from his home in London to do a commercial shoot for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s luxury fashion line, the Row, but he had spent that day wandering the streets of Chinatown, where, he informed me, he took a lot of great pictures of hands. He clicked through some of the images on a palm-size point-and-shoot digital camera, which has been his instrument of choice lately. He told me that, because of the machine’s unobtrusiveness, the subjects he’s hired to photograph sometimes think he’s an assistant: “They are, like, ‘When is the actual photographer and the camera coming?’ ”

The misconception might also have something to do with Davison’s startling youth. Twenty-eight years old, baby-faced and affable, he has been shooting editorial work for the likes of the Times Magazine, British Vogue, and various cultish brands (Craig Green, Margaret Howell) since he was barely out of college; his first monograph, titled simply “Photographs,” was released in May. And his work, with its moody chiaroscuro, vintage Kodachrome palette, and Mannerist emotionality, seems to have been ripped out of the pages of glossy magazines from an era when Irving Penn and Richard Avedon were still huddled underneath their dark cloths, and Ralph Gibson and Saul Leiter still prowled the streets.

This anachronistic flavor, Davison explained, is mostly due to his unorthodox photographic education. Raised in rural Essex, in the southeast of England, Davison began making pictures at the age of fifteen. “I just kind of co-opted the family camera, which was a tiny point-and-shoot, and was just, like, ‘I’ll be doing the family photos from now on,’ ” he said. He honed his eye by following his taste, wicking vintage images off of the Internet and into file folders that he keeps on his desktop to this day. They include the canonical photographers of the golden age of editorial photography, though their famous names meant nothing to him at the time. “I would love all those pictures, and I’d look for them in new magazines and not find them anywhere,” he said.

Critics often make a point of the fact that Davison is self-taught—in college, he studied English literature. But he noted that the characterization is not strictly true. As a teen-ager, through the image-sharing site Flickr, he found a mentor, a street photographer named Brett Walker, who ran a ragtag salon out of his London apartment. “I went down and I started to get my ass kicked,” Davison recalled. “Because he was, like, ‘This is shit, this is wrong.’ ” Walker, too, had been a precociously successful professional, and he also gravitated to the work of old-school picture-makers, such as Man Ray. He has been Davison’s lodestar for the past decade, and receives an effusive dedication in the back of his book.

But, whereas Walker’s work skews toward hard-edged realism, Davison’s has drifted into the realm of dreams. A man’s rain-spattered back becomes a looming edifice that we seem beckoned to scale. A hovering dot painted on an alley wall appears transformed into a luminous moon, propped up by a rusted wire trellis and cradled by a shadow hand, and a wild-eyed dog, all Tic Tac white teeth and blurred fur, is a living incarnation of our rapacious anxieties. But, just as in dreams, things are not always what they seem. “This one, which looks terrifying,” Davison said, of the dog picture, “is just a Labrador trying to eat ham.”

This past week I found myself in Stuttgart, an industrial city in southwest Germany. As I usually do in a European city I haven’t visited before, I went to the local history museum to see how the story of the Second World War is presented. Stuttgart’s museum opened just last year, and its handling of the Nazi era is more circumspect than that of older German memorials. The period from 1933 to 1945 comprises a small set of displays, perhaps ten per cent of the entire exhibition. The tone is neutral.

“After 1933, National Socialism pursued Hitler’s anti-Semitic, racist, and imperialistic ends in Shtuttgart, too,” a caption explains in English. “Despite their Social Democratic past, many citizens endorsed and profited from the new policies.” Only a third of Stuttgart’s residents voted for the Nationalist Socialists, but this was enough to make the party dominant in the city. “In 1933 began the marginalization, persecution, and murder of Jews, political opponents (social democrats and communists), and other groups,” another caption states, using an impersonal construction that makes marginalization, persecution, and murder sound like forces of nature rather than acts of man. Members of Hitler’s party defaced the entrances to Jewish shops and then rallied in the town square.

Other captions rehearse a familiar chronology, but I found myself noticing things I hadn’t paid attention to before. The Nuremberg Laws, passed in the name of “protecting German blood and honor,” prohibited sexual relations and marriage between Jews and Aryans and stripped Jews of an array of rights, including the right of Jewish women under the age of forty-five to be employed in a German home. The “marginalization, persecution, and murders” began in 1933, but the laws were passed two years later—by this time, many Germans had been convinced that they were necessary. But what jumped out at me was the age clause in the ban on Jewish domestic workers. It’s the kind of bureaucratic phrase that lends legitimacy to something abhorrent. After all, Jewish women past reproductive age were still allowed to be employed in German homes. In the same way, Russian authorities are forever pointing out that Russian law bans not all “homosexual propaganda” but only “homosexual propaganda to minors.” The Trump Administration presents its war on immigrants as a war on certain groups of immigrants only—only the asylum seekers who cross between points of entry, for example, or those who lied on their citizenship application. It’s the legalistic veneer of fascism.

There was a small display with three cut-crystal goblets. “Pogrom of November 9, 1938,” the caption said, using the Russian word in place of the more familiar Kristallnacht. “Victor Rosenfeld (1884-1966) was in Dachau after the pogrom but released a month later. In 1939, he emigrated. He gave his glassware to a neighbor.” This is the kind of story we never think about. Why was Rosenfeld released after a month in Dachau? How was he able to emigrate at that late date? How many people looked at him after his release and breathed a sigh of relief: Perhaps things weren’t so bad?

Another display informed me that the Second World War began in 1939 and that “Stuttgart underwent 52 air raids. About 4,600 residents lost their lives; 14,000 soldiers from Stuttgart died in the field.” I assume that neither figure includes Stuttgart Jews, who, according to one museum display, numbered forty-six hundred in 1933. I know from other sources that, while some of them managed to emigrate, a majority died at the hands of the Nazis. But they didn’t die here: they were transported to the ghetto and then the killing field in Riga or to concentration and then death camps elsewhere. By the time the war began, they had already been either physically removed or legally defined out of the city—so that, eighty years later, in de-Nazified Germany, Jews are not included in the death tally of the city where they lived. Once an absence has been created, a record is almost impossible to forge.

Like anyone who grew up as an outsider—in my case, a Jew in the Soviet Union—I have always been aware of the shifting definitions of belonging. In the nineteen-nineties, when I returned to live in Russia after ten years in exile, the country had liberalized laws on documents, granting citizens the right to define their own ethnicity. When I applied for my new internal passport (the Soviet Union had stripped my family of citizenship in 1981 and restored it in 1992), I decided to test that rule. The internal passport still contained “ethnicity” as one of the essential characteristics, along with name, surname, date and place of birth, and gender. I asked that my ethnicity be indicated as “citizen of Russia.” I still remember the heavy middle-aged woman bureaucrat who looked at my documents, back at me, and back at my documents in confusion, and finally said, “But it says here that your father is Jewish and your mother was Jewish—what kind of citizen of Russia are you?”

I have often told this anecdote, because it’s a perfect—and amusing—illustration of a disconnect between abstract definitions and visceral understanding. To the bureaucrat, the operative word in the phrase “Russian citizen” was “Russian,” and that, to her, referred exclusively to ethnic Russians. She was a kindly woman and she was even aware of the new law allowing people to self-define, but she couldn’t conceive of any definition of me that did not conform to her understanding of how ethnicity and belonging work.

The Russian bureaucrat’s barely articulated understanding is not that different from the understanding Donald Trump has been expressing with his tweets, his statements at the White House, and the rally chant he incited about Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and especially Ilhan Omar. He tweeted that the congresswomen should “go back” to “the places from which they came,” and his crowd chanted, of Omar, “Send her back,” because it is inconceivable to them that women of color, Muslim women, and especially a Muslim woman born outside this country could be citizens, and elected officials, of the United States.

This understanding is shared by Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway, who asked a reporter, “What’s your ethnicity?” A lot of things happened then. Conway identified herself as ethnically Italian and Irish. Media reports identified the reporter, Andrew Feinberg of Breakfast Media, as Jewish. Feinberg himself wrote an op-ed in which he identified his family as coming from a “mix of Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian stock.” I am pretty sure none of those countries would claim Feinberg’s relatives, who, to them, were Jews and therefore outsiders—like I was to that bureaucrat. On another level, Feinberg was trying to defend his right to be viewed as an American irrespective of his ethnic background (and in part because he is a journalist) while Conway was positioning herself as an American because of her background—because Italian and Irish are, at present, white-American categories (while journalists are the enemies of the people and Jews are, well, always suspect).

The categories of citizenship, ethnicity, and belonging are always in flux, hazy around the edges. If we have to have them at all—and I wish we didn’t, or at least consciously wanted to rid ourselves of them—then they should indeed be in flux. But this means that whoever screams the loudest can force and direct a drastic renegotiation.

Bizarrely, the Trump Administration is forcing a renegotiation of who is Jewish. In a recent piece, the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg documents a pattern of non-Jews accusing Jews of anti-Semitism for, basically, failing to support Trump. The logic is perfectly circular: Trump and congressional Republicans are using the smear of anti-Semitism to attack Omar and Tlaib, which makes Trump’s opponents the enemies of the enemies of anti-Semitism, which makes them anti-Semites. (I know how this one goes. As a secular Jew and opponent of the Israeli policies in Palestine, I have been accused of anti-Semitism. I also regularly get messages telling me to go back to Russia—a country I had to leave in part because, like many other opponents of Vladimir Putin, I was accused of being unpatriotic and “Russophobic.”)

By turning unspoken assumptions into hateful rally chants, Trump is not merely destroying the norms of political speech but weaponizing them. He is cashing in on the easy trick of saying out loud what others barely dare to think. But his supporters are also enforcing the prohibition on his opponents’ taking part in the conversation—as when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reprimanded for calling Trump’s speech “racist” on the House floor. Trump has initiated a radical renegotiation of belonging in this country and then monopolized it. This is what happens first: a political force seizes the power to define themselves as insiders and certain others as intruders. This is done in the name of protection of the motherland, which the newly marginalized are said to hate. Everything else follows.