The third season of Joe Swanberg’s Chicago-based series “Easy,” which dropped on Netflix two weeks ago, is anchored by an idea that’s as much a matter of aesthetic form as of dramatic substance. The nine episodes are centered on crucial conversations on which the very stuff of life—love and money, work and family, long-held dreams and self-images—hangs in the balance and undergoes drastic, painful shifts. Swanberg’s expansive ambitions are reflected in a notable twist of the season’s structure: the first and fifth episodes—which bring back from last season Andi (Elizabeth Reaser) and Kyle (Michael Chernus), a couple pushing forty and married with children, who are experimenting with an open relationship—combine to form a feature film of sorts, running nearly an hour and a half and culminating in a twenty-minute-long sequence in which they voice fears, agonies, stifled conflicts, and new dilemmas. Had it been placed on the big screen, those twenty minutes would be among the most imposing and shattering movie scenes of the year to date.

The big screen lurks behind the series as a crucial source of inspiration; “Easy” ’s scenes from a marriage are haunted by the spirit of Ingmar Bergman—both in their stakes and in their proportions. Just as the embedded featurette threatens to burst its confines in a flood of terrifying tensions, so several of the briefer episodes come off as compressed features, their ample stories truncated by Procrustean twentysomething-minute confines—yet nonetheless involving extended, imaginatively fervent conversations. The most powerful of them include the third episode, featuring Kiersey Clemons and Jacqueline Toboni as a couple undergoing a breakup and pursuing new relationships; it also involves the world of filmmaking and draws dramatic energy from the shared passions of creative endeavors. The fourth episode stars Kate Micucci as a lonely music teacher whose romantic gamesmanship threatens the lyrical and luminous birth of actual romance.

Swanberg is among the most practical-minded of independent filmmakers. He has long made the nuances of the business of art, and of business itself, central to his work, and many of the new episodes pursue these familiar themes in new directions. The seventh is centered on a street vender (played by Kali Skrap) who’s in the employ of another (Anthony Smith) and tries to go out on his own. The eighth involves two families and three businesses, with Dave Franco playing a garage-based beer brewer who wants to continue working as an independent—apart from his estranged brother (Evan Jonigkeit), who runs a major brewpub—and faces trouble from his gentrifying neighborhood, while the two brothers’ wives (Zazie Beetz and Aya Cash, respectively) are planning a risky expansion of their successful pet-treat business.

Swanberg’s independents, with their under-the-radar and unofficial ventures in their various fields, also have to face trouble with the law, and with the ways and wiles of power—including their own. A few men get long-overdue comeuppances and face the limits of their own abilities and self-knowledge. The themes and the passions of the episodes are contained only uncomfortably in the series’s episodic format. The grand ending of the ninth and final one, which is centered on the world of television production, and culminates in the painful, romantic confrontation of an actress (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in a state of professional crisis with an ex (Jake Johnson, Swanberg’s longtime collaborator), suggests that the torrent of experience and emotion that Swanberg has unleashed in his three-season series is now awaiting a different, large-scale spectrum of form that goes beyond the standard dimensions of movies or television.

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The President of the United States is erratic, illiterate, and doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t know. The President has alienated former allies, befriended or courted murderous dictators, and has repeatedly brought the country to the brink of nuclear confrontation. The President lies constantly, knows that he is lying, and demands that Administration officials lie for him, and often they do. The President has waged war on the institutions of government, overseeing the gutting of the State Department and the destruction of other federal agencies by their own leaders, and effectively shut off media access to the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. The President has acted to thwart oversight of the Administration by other branches of government. The President has never made a secret of despising the government itself: he has called it a “swamp” and gleefully shut it down for thirty-five days, during a temper tantrum. The President has not only failed to divest himself of his businesses but has installed his children in and near the White House, openly using his office for personal financial gain. The President has debased political culture and language, using his bully pulpit to spew lies, hate, and personal insults, and to serve fast-food burgers.

These are some of the known facts. The Trump Presidency has been a two-and-a-half-year-long high crime against common decency, good sense, human values, the national interest, and the law. The question is: What constitutes good opposition politics in this situation?

The prevailing wisdom in the Democratic Party seems to be that good opposition politics is a very slow walk to impeachment, as performed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has said that she is opposed to impeachment because it is “divisive,” and because Trump is “just not worth it,” and has reportedly said, behind closed doors, that impeachment is what Trump wants, because he expects to be exonerated by the Senate. Pelosi, the wisdom has it, is building a case for impeachment both in congressional inquiries and in her public feud with Trump: she provokes him in some way—most recently, by saying that he is “engaged in a coverup,” or by hoping aloud that someone close to Trump would stage “an intervention for the good of the country”—and he responds by performing Trump. “In each case,” as Politico put it, “Trump handed Pelosi a huge gift, a priceless moment that helped unify the Democratic Caucus behind her at a crucial time.”

Trump’s performance is repetitive. None of what he has done in his battle of insults with Pelosi is surprising or new: not storming out of a meeting with her and the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, on Wednesday (at least the third such walkout in six months); not the scuttling of an anticipated legislative deal with the Democrats (he does this every time); not his counterfactual assertions that he doesn’t “do coverups” and is a “very stable genius” (he has said this before); not the ugly spectacle of his meltdown; not the vulgar sexism of his insults. All of it is just more Trump.

Still, the premise of the argument that Trump is digging his own grave by doing more Trump is that the amount of Trump we have observed since January, 2017, is not yet enough to take action. Pelosi’s “coverup” comment, which set Trump off on Wednesday, implies that something remaining to be uncovered can make a difference to our understanding of this Presidency—that the known facts are not enough to make Trump’s continued Presidency inconceivable. Similarly, the idea that continued congressional hearings on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings are necessary to build a case for impeachment suggests that a hundred and eighty-two pages documenting the President’s efforts to obstruct the investigation are not enough. The purpose of these congressional hearings is not to systematize the evidence—that can be done in the course of impeachment proceedings—but to give human faces and voices to the Mueller report, and to goad Trump into obstructing oversight in plain view. The pragmatics are creating political momentum that might make it more difficult for Senate Republicans to resist impeachment. But the logic is that the public must be shown how unfit Trump is to be President. As though the public hasn’t seen enough—as though, indeed, what the public has seen so far is a Presidency that we can live with.

Worse, Pelosi’s tactics, apparently designed to expose Trump’s unfitness, affirm the Trumpian style of politics: vulgar, cruel, and value-free. Pelosi has become Trump’s personal troll. She played the part during the State of the Union address, when she applauded Trump the way one might applaud a lying, cheating, attention-hogging teen-ager: arms straight, head cocked, her entire being projecting insincerity. She played the part after she taunted the President following his tantrum, suggesting that he suffered from a “lack of confidence,” and again, on Thursday, with her “intervention” comments. Most of the mainstream media have followed with horse-race-style coverage, calling each step of the feud for Pelosi.

In a world where trolling is politics, Pelosi is winning. Politico praises her for being “so good at infuriating Trump.” CNN delights in Trump “taking Nancy Pelosi’s bait.” The Trumpification of American politics is being perpetrated by bipartisan consensus. Pelosi, and an apparent majority of Democratic Washington, seem to think this is preferable to an attempt at impeachment that is likely to be thwarted by Senate Republicans. Failure, in other words, is unacceptable, but this—the flagrant dysfunction, the trivialization of all that used to be politics, the spectacle of daily national shame—is acceptable. Trump will be gone someday, but the possibilities that Trumpism has created will remain.

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On May 16th, Representative Al Green, as he has many times since 2017, stood on the House floor to implore his colleagues to initiate impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump, this time with a copy of the Mueller report in hand and an American-flag tie on his collar.

“Since [the report’s] release, we have had many persons, many of whom are members of this august body, say that they have concluded that the President has committed impeachable acts,” Green said. “Some have gone so far as to say he should be impeached. I’m one of them. We also have hundreds of lawyers, many of whom are prosecutors and former prosecutors, say that if anyone else committed the offenses outlined in this document, the Mueller report, that person would be arrested and prosecuted.”

“Hence,” he continued, “one can logically conclude that since this document addresses acts by the President, and since the President is not being prosecuted—since the House of Representatives has not moved to impeach the President—one can conclude that the President is, indeed now for some twenty-nine days, above the law.”

Although most Democratic leaders and most House Democrats continue to resist calls for impeachment, more and more prominent Democrats, out of frustration with the Administration’s refusal to coöperate with the House’s investigators, are inching away from the Party line—either in support of impeachment on its own merits or in support of beginning impeachment hearings as a legal strategy to sustain subpoena requests.

In both cases, the Mueller report’s description of ten actions by President Trump that may have constituted obstruction of justice is central to their argument. But there are other arguments for impeaching Trump—ones that Democrats, even those most critical of the President’s conduct in office, are curiously reluctant to make.

“I think the strongest case is his bigotry and policy,” Green told me in a recent conversation. “We shouldn’t allow a bigot to continue to hold the highest office in the land. We hear people daily on television who call him a racist, a bigot, who say he’s unfit—people in his own party have said he’s unfit to be the President. And the people of this country gave Democrats an overwhelming majority.”

“I just don’t see how we can have this overwhelming majority understand that he is a bigot—that he has infused his bigotry into policy—and not at some point decide that there ought to be a vote to impeach him for the bigotry and policy,” Green continued. “And, by the way, you don’t need to conduct hearings on this, because the President does it in plain view! It’s out there!”

In two impeachment resolutions—in December, 2017, and January, 2018—Green gave evidence: Trump’s efforts to block immigration and travel from Muslim-majority countries, his ban on transgender people serving in the military, his remarks about “very fine people” among the white-nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville, and his complaint about immigrants coming from “shithole countries.” “In all of this,” Green’s January resolution closes, “the aforementioned Donald John Trump has, by his statements, brought the high office of President of the United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace and disrepute, has sown discord among the people of the United States, has demonstrated that he is unfit to be President, and has betrayed his trust as President of the United States to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, and has committed a high misdemeanor in office.”

Green’s preferred rationale for impeachment—bigotry—is grounded in the history of the process. The first Presidential impeachment, Andrew Johnson’s, in 1868, centered on Johnson’s violation of a law called the Tenure of Office Act. But the actual impetus for the impeachment effort, as Brenda Wineapple notes in a new book on the episode, “The Impeachers,” was Johnson’s leniency toward Southerners intent on preserving white supremacy and thwarting Reconstruction.

“There were people who wanted that man impeached because they really thought he was hindering and betraying the cause of the war,” Wineapple told me. “They were outraged because he was restoring the country to what it was, and they had a vision of the future—what it could be.”

That moral conflict was sublimated into a fight over the Tenure of Office Act, which Republican majorities in Congress had passed, over Johnson’s veto, in an effort to prevent Johnson from firing the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who was then implementing Reconstruction and supported aggressive measures. Johnson ultimately fired Stanton in early 1868, and most of the articles of impeachment are directly related to this dismissal. But the procedural case that emerged against Johnson was preceded by broader indictments of his conduct.

“One of the so-called Radical Republicans called for Johnson’s impeachment early in 1867, and the actual vote on impeachment didn’t happen for almost a year,” Wineapple said. “So impeachment had been in the minds of several of the Radical Republicans early on precisely because of the way they interpreted the Constitution and the conditions for impeachment. And they interpreted it broadly—the abuse of power. He had obstructed Congress. But there was nothing that was an actual legal misdemeanor or what could be called a high crime or high misdemeanor.”

That changed once Johnson finally dismissed Stanton. But, as Green noted in our conversation, the eleven articles of impeachment passed by the House against Johnson went beyond his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The tenth quoted at length from speeches Johnson that had made in a raucous tour to shore up his Presidency, including one in which he accused Republicans of having provoked the New Orleans Massacre of 1866, in which forty-four African-Americans were killed by white Democrats. “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skins, and they are responsible for it,” Johnson said. With such comments, the tenth article charged that Johnson, “unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof,” had attempted “to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach, the Congress of the United States.”

Johnson was not removed from office. It is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Senate Republicans would ever vote to remove Trump. The Democrats have pursued an intensely legalistic approach to confronting the Trump Administration, in a quixotic hope that enough damning objective evidence might be found to force Republican voters and Republicans in Congress to acknowledge the President’s wrongdoing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as much in March: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that, unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.”

But the fact that an impeachment absent Republican support would be divisive and lead to Trump’s acquittal does not mean that impeachment would be futile. The ultimate judges of the evidence presented in a trial would be the American people, not the President’s apologists, who would be forced, during an election season, to defend conduct that the majority of the public might find indefensible. We can see impeachment in the way that many Democrats have been framing it—as a legal process analogous to a trial in the criminal-justice system, where the outcomes are respected because the process is considered impartial—or we can see it, instead, for what it really is: a quasi-legal but ultimately political, and perhaps moral, exercise.

Additionally, the fear that impeachment may weary voters and cause a backlash that might ultimately help Trump does not seem to be terribly well founded. Two months ago, before the release of the Barr letter, before the release of the Mueller report, and before triumphant hoots of vindication on the collusion charge from the President and his allies, Trump’s average approval rating in polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight was at just over forty-two per cent. It is now at forty-one per cent. If it was true that constant coverage of Democratic investigations and claims of exoneration from the President would bolster his standing in an impeachment process, one might expect those things to have boosted his numbers somewhat already. They have not.

Politics aside, there is also for Democrats the possibly naïve and certainly quaint question of whether impeaching Trump—a President potentially implicated in obstruction of justice by a special counsel’s investigation, regularly accused of racism and bigotry, and characterized even by conservatives as unfit for the Presidency in various other ways—is the right thing to do, and if it’s worthwhile, even if it seems politically unpopular. That’s a question that historians of our political moment and the generations ahead are sure to take an interest in, even if the Democratic Party does not.

The designer Giorgia Lupi was born in 1981 and believes that she is part of a special bridge generation. “I was raised in a completely analog environment,” she says. “I was a teen-ager when all of the awkward connection and human connection needed to be made in real life. But, at the same time, because I started to use technology as a teen-ager, I’m fluent in both worlds.” This week, Lupi joins the graphic-design firm Pentagram as the only partner who has a focus on information design. Her work, consistent with her upbringing, brings a tactile feel to computer code, and her appointment is an occasion to assess information design—a field located between graphic design and data science—and the possibilities it holds.

Sitting in Pentagram’s crisp quarters, on Park Avenue South, Lupi cuts an extremely organized figure: petite and black-clad, with a looping black necklace and round black glasses, accented by a cap of red hair. Born in Modena, Italy, and trained as an architect, Lupi had her first brush with information design while in college via an exercise in urban mapping, inspired by the planner Kevin Lynch. In his landmark book, “The Image of the City,” published in 1961, Lynch asked people to draw their city for a visitor, paying attention to their own everyday paths and major landmarks, without reference to geography. Of course, each person’s map, both in Lynch’s book and Lupi’s exercise, was different—but that did not mean that one map was more accurate than another. Rather, each person was telling a different story through cartography.

Today, Lupi describes her profession as “telling stories with data,” which sounds like an oxymoron, until you see her work. For the Milan Design Triennial, Lupi and her previous design studio, Accurat, created a so-called data tapestry, made up of horizontal bands crosshatched with vertical lines, that wraps around three sides of a gallery, titled “The Room of Change.” Each horizontal band represents a different data set, ranging from world population to animal extinctions, alcohol consumption, and technology access. Each vertical slice represents a moment in time. The wow factor comes when you step back and realize that all those numbers—all that data—look from afar like the sketch for a Bauhaus tapestry, done in colored pencil. The installation works as both visual art and a narrative of environmental decline.

Lupi calls what she does “data humanism,” a reaction against the computer-generated, harsh-toned bar graphs, pie charts, and rows of tiny humans that leapt from corporate reports into mainstream media in the nineties. In a manifesto of sorts that was published in Print magazine, Lupi writes how “ ‘cool’ infographics promised us the key to master this untamable complexity.” When that did not work out, “we were left with gigabytes of unreadable 3D pie charts and cheap translucent user interfaces full of widgets.” The ostensibly neutral visual language of these graphics suggested authority, but they could easily mislead or be misread. What was needed was a more honest, approachable, graspable way to present data.

Many people outside of the design world first encountered Lupi’s work through a side project: her year-long correspondence with the London-based data designer Stefanie Posavec, “a friendship in 52 weeks of postcards,” collected in the 2016 book “Dear Data.” When Lupi and Posavec met, they realized that they had a common interest in collecting, organizing, and, most of all, drawing. But Lupi lived in New York, and Posavec in London. They decided to get to know each other better through their preferred medium, data. Each week for a year, they set themselves a new research question: How often did they give or receive compliments? How many times did they check their phones daily? How many dresses were in their closets? They logged that information and then drew it on a postcard and sent it across the Atlantic.

There’s really no better evocation of data humanism than a flip through the book. The two women’s data are visualized as carefully drawn flowers, asterisks, and whorls. It’s touchable in a way that the bossy bar chart has rarely been. Lupi believes that collecting and visualizing your own data is a form of empowerment. The corporations and Internet companies that take information from us should be encouraged to share it, so that we, too, can use it. “Ultimately, data is human made,” Lupi says. “Actually, I don’t like to talk about data in singular. To me data is plural.” In Lupi’s hands, data can have personality, shape, warmth. Her increasing prominence (which includes the obligatory stop on the TED stage) has created its own hand-drawn trend in the field of information design. Her work speaks to a generation that is overwhelmed by input, that wants to tame the surveillance state and make it understandable. For a Gen Xer like me, Lupi’s craft aesthetic makes the comprehension of data seem more possible, but I can also see myself being lulled into a false sense of security when my online shopping habits are rendered as pastel flowers.

But my attention snags on the question of power: Who really controls the data and how they get displayed? For example, the Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs is planning a new, smart neighborhood, in Toronto, and critics are concerned about what it will mean, datawise, to walk its sidewalks. The same sensors that tell a smart streetlight that you are waiting to cross are tracking your location. How does one opt in to a neighborhood? Lupi doesn’t really want to touch the question of when data should or shouldn’t be collected. Like most information designers, she works in the space between that collection and the public. Her interest is in levelling understanding, so that we citizens can have access to, and develop an imagination about, all the information that’s already being collected. This could extend even to the gatekeeping: If Apple’s terms of service, say, were more intuitive, more designed, would we actually read them? What if, she suggests, there were tiny visualizations in the wall of text, guiding us through the legal maze?

Two of Lupi’s upcoming projects do, in fact, grapple with the questions of power and how data visualization might help, in different ways. Her next book, currently in the proposal stage, intends to function as a way “to rethink our relationship with the data we consume and produce.” She’s hoping that the book will appeal to the same audience as her TED talk: younger adults who would like to understand both the biases and the potential of information design. She’s also working with The New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman on a database that documents cases of asylum seekers who were deported and then killed upon return to their home countries, building on Stillman’s reporting. “After the piece was published, she received many requests to actually publish a database of these stories,” Lupi says. Through this project,” the general public will understand the human toll that immigration policies will have, but, at the same time, we’re building a searchable database that can be expanded for immigration lawyers or people who need to access all of this information for the greater good.” Data, humanity, shaking hands.

It’s a sad day in America when the most appropriate thing to say is the line often misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” When basic rights are under attack from the government, the arguments that are called for are neither original nor subtle. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that it was charging the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, for his connection to the leak of some seven hundred and fifty thousand confidential military and diplomatic documents, in 2010. The indictment of Assange is an offensive on the First Amendment that is as banal as it is blunt.

Let’s get the “I disapprove” part out of the way first. Assange is a fundamentally unappealing protagonist. He keeps terrible political company. He is, apparently, terrible company himself. In his writing and interviews, he comes across as power-crazed and manipulative. Most important, when he published leaked classified documents, he shared information that exposed people to danger. He is the perfect target precisely because he is unsympathetic. One has to hold one’s nose while defending Assange—and yet one must defend Assange.

The use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Assange is an attack on the First Amendment. Carrie DeCell, an attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, summed up the threat in a Twitter thread on Thursday. “The government argues that Assange violated the Espionage Act by soliciting, obtaining, and then publishing classified information,” she wrote. “That’s exactly what good national security and investigative journalists do every day.”

The government has argued that Assange is not a journalist. Most journalists would probably agree: the indiscriminate publication of classified information (or any other information, for that matter), with neither a narrative nor regard for people’s safety, is not journalism in any conventional understanding of the word. But journalism—unlike, say, medicine, law, or architecture—is a profession that any person can practice. There are no licensing or education requirements, and we journalists generally think that this is a good thing: the public can decide which journalists are worth reading or watching, and the law can intervene in those rare cases when journalism causes harm. The last thing we want the U.S. government, or any government, to do is to start deciding who is and who is not a journalist. “For the most part, the charges against him broadly address the solicitation, receipt, and publication of classified information,” DeCell tweeted. “These charges could be brought against national security and investigative journalists simply for doing their jobs, and doing them well.”

Like many Trumpian attacks on democracy, this one is novel but rooted in a long devolution of American institutions—it is a leap, but from a running start. Government use of law against speech goes back at least to the George W. Bush Administration. Prosecutions ramped up under Barack Obama. Prosecutions, however, focussed on whistleblowers and leakers; journalists, who, like the Times reporter James Risen, could be called up as witnesses, were targeted indirectly. But journalism has not been collateral damage in this battle—it has been the target. The Trump Administration has made that clear by jumping the fence that the Obama Administration had merely approached and charging Assange, under the Espionage Act, for practices typical of journalists.

It stands to reason that an Administration that considers the press an “enemy of the people” would launch this attack. In attacking the media, it is attacking the public. The First Amendment, after all, doesn’t exist to protect the right of Assange, or me, or anyone else to say whatever we want. It exists to protect the public’s access to whatever we have to say, should the public find it of interest.