On Saturday, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced the indefinite suspension of an extradition bill that, during the past week, had brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets—where they faced water cannons, pepper spray, and, for the first time in decades, rubber bullets—in perhaps the territory’s largest demonstrations since the former British colony was returned to China, in 1997. But a suspension wasn’t enough, and, on Sunday, by some estimates as many as two million people staged another march, demanding a withdrawal of the bill and Lam’s resignation.

The push for the bill, which would enable China to extradite criminal suspects to the mainland (with rare exceptions, law-enforcement officials from the mainland are not allowed to operate in Hong Kong), came after the murder, in February of 2018, of a young woman from Hong Kong who was on vacation with her boyfriend in Taiwan. The man, a Hong Kong resident, confessed to the crime, but he can only be tried for it in Taiwan, with which Hong Kong has no extradition agreement. Instead, he was sentenced to prison on lesser charges of money laundering.

When the government of Hong Kong proposed the bill, in February of this year, its supporters, including Lam, argued that it would close a legal loophole and enable suspected criminals to be sent to jurisdictions with which the territory has no transfer agreement, and thus protect it from becoming a haven for criminals. The government claimed that suspects would not be extradited for political offenses, but many in Hong Kong felt that the murder case was only a pretext for an overhaul of the city’s legal framework, which, along with its law-enforcement agencies, has been independent of Beijing’s. Activists—perhaps, say, those involved in political demonstrations—fear that they could be arrested on trumped-up charges, and then tried under Beijing’s judicial system. (Those fears were heightened after the government described the march on Wednesday, which saw some violent clashes with the police, as “rioting,” a crime punishable by a long prison sentence.) “Even if only a few people will actually be extradited, removing the ‘firewall’ separating Hong Kong from the judicial system in China will undermine Hong Kong’s civil liberties and the world’s confidence in Hong Kong as an international hub,” Margaret Ng, a former lawmaker, wrote to me in an e-mail. “Hong Kong will not be the same.”

Anson Chan, a former chief secretary of Hong Kong, wrote to me in an e-mail that “the proposals will, among other things, enable the rendition to mainland China, not just of Hong Kong residents but also foreign residents, and even visitors passing through the city.” She added, “The enactment of these legislative changes will leave no one feeling safe.” Many Hong Kongers, from local judges to business executives, housewives, and recent migrants, shared that sentiment. Martin Lee, the founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party and a retired legislator, told me that, in his twenty-two years as a member of the territory’s Legislative Council, he’d never seen the government try to push such a controversial bill through so swiftly. “If it was about the murder alone, they could have chosen to judge extradition on a case-by-case basis,” Lee said. “This bill aligns with Beijing’s interests.”

Hong Kong’s Legislative Council is a hybrid, in which half of the seventy seats are directly elected and half are mostly selected by industry and business groups. Beijing loyalists in the Election Committee, a separate group comprising twelve hundred representatives from various sectors, made Lam, who is sixty-two, the chief executive, in 2017. She is the first woman to hold the job. Beijing’s supporters now hold forty-three seats (several pro-democracy elected legislators were disqualified), meaning that, if the bill were put to a vote, it would almost certainly pass. Lee told me, “The government has not been representative of the Hong Kong people’s will for a long time. Now, it is openly betraying the will of its citizenry.”

The terms for the administration of Hong Kong, after it was handed back to China, were set in the 1984 Joint Declaration, signed by Britain and China, and were to be maintained for fifty years after the transfer, until 2047. At the core of the declaration were promises of autonomy—including the freedom of expression and guarantees of judicial independence—under the principle of “one country, two systems.” In recent years, however, Hong Kongers have been increasingly worried about the gradual erosion of civil liberties. In 2003, half a million people took to the streets to protest a proposed national-security law that would ban subversion, sedition, and secession. In the fall of 2014, in response to government proposals to change the electoral system, students, carrying yellow umbrellas to protect themselves from pepper spray, led weeks of mass protests in what became known as the Umbrella Movement.

More recently, in addition to disqualifying lawmakers, the government has banned a fringe pro-independence political party, jailed pro-democracy protest leaders, and expelled a veteran Financial Times journalist. Residents have been unsettled, as well, by the disappearance, beginning in 2015, of five booksellers who, it was later revealed, were in custody on the mainland, and the kidnapping, in 2017, of a billionaire named Xiao Jianhua, who was taken to the mainland, some observers believe, as part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown. Albert Ho, a pro-democracy activist and politician, characterized the mood of the city today as a “mixture of anger, anxiety, frustration and disappointment.” Ng told me, “For the first time after the Umbrella Movement, young people are roused to stand up for Hong Kong because of their deep sense of identity. . . .I think this deep sense of identity worries Beijing, and greater and greater pressure will be brought to bear to stamp it out.”

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on Denise Ho, the Hong Kong singer and pro-democracy activist. I learned then that Beijing’s favorite metaphor for Hong Kong is as a child born tongbao, “of the same womb.” Using the language of familial bonds is a powerful way to instill political fealty in a culture that enshrines filial piety. On Chinese social media, a heady narrative, fuelled by nationalism, has emerged of the Communist Party as a magnanimous matriarch beset by circumstances to give up her child and Hong Kong as its pampered ingrate. (The search terms “anti-extradition to China” and “Go, Hong Kong!” are blocked.) “Hong Kong youth are spoiled! They have no ethnic pride! Don’t blame them! Our country has spoiled them rotten. Letting Hong Kong people rule Hong Kong is the biggest mistake!,” a twenty-nine-year-old man posted on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. “Our economic policy has done nothing but to support them. But the youngsters reward us with their naïve, know-nothing ignorance. It’s too ironic. It’s high time we manage their universities!”

Tongbao was recently the focus of an article by Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Global Times, a daily tabloid that is a subsidiary of the Party’s People’s Daily newspaper. Hong Kong is China’s child, Hu wrote, but it has been “adopted” for many years by the United Kingdom and the West. When the child is returned to her biological parents, he asked, what is the responsibility of the adoptive parents? “If the foster parents truly love the child, they will counsel her to get along with her biological parents and adjust to her new environment,” and not meddle. Hu concluded, “Only the fates of the mainland and HK are truly connected, because, after all, Hong Kong is as dear to China as a piece of flesh of the mainland’s own body.”

Last week, when Lam was interviewed on a local Hong Kong TV station, she, too, invoked tongbao to explain her unwillingness to withdraw the bill. “I’m a mother, too. I have two sons,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “If I let him have his way every time my son acted like that, such as when he didn’t want to study, things might be O.K. between us in the short term. But if I indulge his wayward behavior, he might regret it when he grows up. He will then ask me, ‘Mum, why didn’t you call me up on that back then?’ ” More than forty thousand Hong Kong mothers signed an open letter to her, letting her know that they, unlike her, would not use tear gas and rubber bullets on their children. But, unlike the protests in 2014, these demonstrations have involved Hong Kongers of all generations, none of whom are willing to submit to Beijing’s narrative.

Denise Ho told me over Whatsapp that she doesn’t think Lam’s suspension of the bill is enough. “Our demand is very clear, we want her to withdraw the bill,” she said. The delay is a tactic that the government uses to defuse the anger. Anson Chan told me that the suspension is nothing more than a “face-saving” measure. Talking about the protests last week, she said, “Will those who were arrested be charged, given that the Chief Executive has described the incident as a riot? Who should be held responsible?”

On Sunday, the hundreds of thousands of people who filled the streets, from Victoria Park downtown to the government district, were parents and children, students and retirees. Most of them wore black; some carried flowers. So far, more than seventy people have been injured in the protests, and a thirty-five-year-old man fell to his death after unfurling a banner denouncing the extradition bill on a shopping mall. One man was arrested after police monitored a smartphone app used to direct protesters where to go and what tactics to use; he is now out on bail. The government issued an apology for the way that the bill was handled, which had caused, it said, “substantial controversies and disputes in society, causing disappointment and grief among the people.” The statement continued, “The Chief Executive apologizes to Hong Kong citizens for this, and promises that she will take on criticisms in the most sincere and humble way, striving to improve and serve the general public.” The apologies were not accepted by the protesters, and labor unions called for strikes. On Lion Rock, a hill that overlooks the city, a large yellow banner appeared, reading “Fight for Hong Kong.” On Monday morning, the police announced that they wanted to clear the streets.

Last Friday, mothers of young protesters staged a candlelight vigil that was reminiscent of the vigils that Hong Kongers hold every June to commemorate the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. The women held up signs reading “Protect the Next Generation,” “Give Back to our Children a Hong Kong Worth Loving,” and “I Will Walk with the Young.” Helen Siu, a Chinese-American professor at Yale who also teaches at the University of Hong Kong, told me that she was most moved by the participation of a middle-aged woman she met who had moved to Hong Kong from the mainland a couple of decades ago with her husband, and had raised their daughter there. The woman works as a cleaning lady, and her daughter is now a medical student at a Hong Kong university. “She told me she was marching for them both,” Siu said of the woman. “Because, in the larger story of Hong Kong, the protests and the hope they inspired felt like the beginning of something new, not the end.”

One afternoon a little over a year ago, I got a brief and mysterious e-mail from a man named Jackson Taylor. It was sent from a personal Gmail account. “I am heading up a new literary fellowship here in New York,” he wrote. “You have been secretly nominated for a spot in the inaugural group—and I was wondering if I might have a moment of your time to speak by phone? The fellowship begins in April but won’t be publicly announced until June.” Before I had a chance to respond, my cell phone rang: it was Jackson. He said he was travelling and sounded out of breath, but I heard something about a “congress of writers” that would teach skills and speak truth to power. If I showed up for twice-weekly sessions for two semesters, I would receive ten thousand dollars. The program’s benefactor, Jackson told me, was the family foundation of Leonard Riggio, the executive chairman of Barnes & Noble. They had “deep pockets,” he said.

I had recently moved to New York after five years of reporting, mostly as a freelancer, in Boston and Berlin. I was working a full-time job that I regretted taking, and writing on the side. My apartment had a bedroom too small to fit a desk or even a dresser, and its single window faced an air shaft the color of dryer lint. I was a journalist, not a novelist or a poet, and, in New York, writers seemed to sprout from every sidewalk. I had no idea why Jackson and this foundation had singled me out.

I turned to Google. Leonard Riggio, I learned, had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars as the man who turned Barnes & Noble—which had one location when he bought the company—into a nationwide chain. His blend of cutthroat competitiveness and generous philanthropy had led New York magazine to call him, in a profile published in 1999, “Barnes & Noble’s Jekyll and Hyde.” I searched for Jackson, too. After scrolling past results about a country singer with the same name, I found a writer who had directed the Prison Writing Program at PEN America, which provides resources and mentorship to incarcerated writers. He had taught at the New School and published a novel, about a white woman in Depression-era Pennsylvania who is arrested for helping a black doctor perform abortions, a story apparently based on the life of his grandmother. It had a 3.8 rating on Goodreads.

I replied to Jackson and asked whether he could tell me who the other participants were. He gave me a few names, including those of a début novelist and a poet who had been published in The New Yorker. I noticed that they were all writers of color, which seemed in keeping with the progressive ideals that Jackson had talked about on the phone—speaking truth to power and so on. In his response, Jackson asked me to be discreet, and he mentioned, again, the deep pockets of the Riggios. “In a year or two we aim for this prize to be synonymous with excellence, intellectual rigor, and artfulness… in short—the very best,” he wrote. I accepted the offer.

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The first session was on a Wednesday in April, in an old building in Chelsea. I was late because I was riding the subway from work and got off at the wrong stop. When I arrived, overheated from running up Tenth Avenue, I took the elevator to the fifth floor, then wandered a narrow hallway looking for Suite 513. I walked the length of the floor several times before noticing that someone had papered over No. 514 and replaced it with a handwritten “513.” Inside, about a dozen people were sitting on wooden chairs and two uncomfortable couches, writing in red notebooks. They had all written their first names on pieces of white printer paper.

Other than the handful of people Jackson had mentioned to me, I didn’t know anyone’s full name. A few days before the session, Jackson had e-mailed the fellows as a group, but he had blind-copied us on the message. There were reasons for this secrecy, he insisted. “We prefer to minimize the social pressure of social media on our congress,” he informed us. “Yes… this is another cryptic email… but one that takes seriously the question of how do we as writers circumvent the fashions of the day… and recast what others tell us is necessary or expected?” Also, because of “copyright diligence,” he was still unable to share the name of the program, he wrote. He did introduce us to two colleagues—Tim, who would lead class sessions on Thursdays, and Antonio, the program’s administrative director.

In the far corner of Room 513, or 514, Jackson, a large man with fair skin and a fondness for wearing vests over T-shirts, sat in a leather reading chair. It was hot, and the windows were difficult to open. The air-conditioning unit sputtered too loudly to use during class. Jackson told me to write my first name on a piece of paper, and to complete a writing exercise. I was to create an original fable, complete with talking animals and a moral. After we’d all written our fables, we took turns reading them—but we were only supposed to listen to one another’s pieces, not to comment on them. Jackson called this “the pedagogy.”

What it produced was a series of awkward silences. At the end, Jackson launched into a lecture on literary structure. Pausing frequently for effect, he spoke about constructing fables, discerning between the abstract and the concrete, and “kicking the tires of aphoristic writing.” Somewhere in the middle, without any warning, he began to speak angrily about PEN America, its hiring processes, and its executive director. Then he handed out copies of “Springing,” a poem by Marie Ponsot about a leisurely day of boating and swimming. (“Swimming aimlessly is luxury just as walking / loudly up a shallow stream is.”) The poem prompted a debate among the fellows about privilege, which, Jackson said, was an aspect of the poem that he had not considered. He said that the fellowship would likely be called Springing, after the poem.

In subsequent sessions with Jackson, we discussed a range of writers and theorists, from Henry David Thoreau to Northrop Frye. Most of the fellows were women, and about half were writers of color. (My mother was born in Singapore, to Chinese parents, and my father is Jewish; I’m often taken for white.) In our discussions of the readings, fellows brought up questions of race and gender, but Jackson said that these subjects were distracting. One fellow suggested that we read “Citizen,” Claudia Rankine’s book of poetry about anti-black racism in American life. A week later, we read a passage from Rankine’s book in which the speaker describes a conversation with the head of an academic department: “He tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. / Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?”

After the reading, Jackson told us that he had once run into difficulties firing a writer because the writer was black. He looked for excellence rather than diversity, he said, and he lamented the difficulty of recruiting and retaining staff members of color. (Tim and Antonio were both, like Jackson, white men.) He asked a black fellow whether she would want to be hired because of her race. She said no. “Thank you!” he exclaimed.

Soon after the sessions began, a few of us started gathering after class, in the hall or in front of the building, to talk about what was going on. The neighborhood was crowded with warehouses that had been converted into art studios; during the day, it was noisy with construction. But by evening it grew quiet, and we lingered on the sidewalk in the dark, talking about how strange everything seemed. Some of us traded phone numbers; a couple of times, we walked to bars in Chelsea, making quips about needing a drink.

Many of the fellows were growing frustrated with Jackson and his methods, but there were a handful who defended him from time to time, and two who consistently took his side. Stephanie, a writer in her thirties, often complained when fellows brought up race or gender or privilege. They were interfering with the pedagogy, she said. Tom, the only visual artist in the program, said that we should trust Jackson, that he knew what he was doing. (Both Stephanie and Tom were white.)

One evening, walking to the subway after class, one of the fellows, a black poet named Hafizah Geter, told me that she had been searching for details about the others. By this point, all the participants had exchanged e-mail addresses, and Hafizah said that she had come across Stephanie’s maiden name online. It was Riggio. Stephanie, who had been attending the sessions and reciting her work like the rest of us, was the daughter of the fellowship’s funders. That’s odd, I thought. Was this the reason that Jackson had never shared our full names?

At a session in early May, one of the fellows, a black poet, brought in a poem that he had written which alluded to Wallace Stevens’s “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” and reflected on Stevens’s use of the racist slur in his poetry. We broke from the pedagogy and took turns talking about the poem. When it was Jackson’s turn, he accused the writer of “baiting” the group, and, in the course of sharing these thoughts, he repeated the slur several times. Another black writer asked him, as calmly as though she were asking for a glass of water, to stop saying the word. Jackson compared her request to censorship—and if the word were off limits, he said, we would also need to ban words that are derogatory to white people, such as “whitey.” Hafizah told Jackson that his desire to use the word as a white man was outrageous. But black people say the word on the street, Jackson replied, using the word several more times as he made his point, and gesturing at Hafizah. Maybe we should disband the fellowship, he said, raising his voice. She told him that the classroom did not feel safe. Stephanie seemed upset. Tom said that we should get back on topic.

We took an afternoon break. I joined Hafizah in the hall. Antonio, a short and soft-spoken man in sneakers, came out to talk to us. Quietly, he asked us to e-mail him our concerns, so that he would have them on record. After a moment, Tom came out and invited us back into the class. Hafizah and I decided to leave early.

That night, Hafizah texted me a link to Tom’s Web site, which she had found in her continued Internet sleuthing. I clicked on the link, and photographs of Jackson appeared, along with art works that I recognized from the space in Chelsea. “Guess who he is to Jackson,” Hafizah wrote. “His fucking boyfriend.” I eventually learned that the artist’s studio in which we met was in the same building, and on the same floor, as Tom’s previous studio. Jackson had recommended it to the Riggios for the fellowship, and it had been renovated to Tom and Jackson’s specifications. The Riggios approved a lease, and Tom moved his art works into the fellowship space.

Later, I talked to Hafizah about that day. We met at her apartment, in Brooklyn, which was stuffed from floor to ceiling with books. “It was a nightmare,” she told me. “You felt trapped, you felt like you were suffocating in all this.” She told me that she went home and cried for a long time. Hafizah is one of the writers Jackson mentioned to me when I first asked him who the other fellows were; she’s won several awards and fellowships for her poetry, which has been published in The New Yorker and Tin House and many other places. Her confrontations with Jackson convinced her that she had been recruited to the program, and then marginalized, for the same reason: that she was a black woman. During the session, she had said to him, “If every person of color left this room and didn’t come back, this room would be irrelevant. It would just be another white room talking about white power.”

The day after that session, I e-mailed Antonio to say that I was disturbed by what had happened, and we made plans to talk over coffee. Hafizah e-mailed Jackson to say that she was quitting. She was the second to leave: one of the fellows, who was commuting a long way from out of state, had quit at the end of the first week. “You can’t come back from the N-word,” Hafizah told me. She regarded his use of the word in class, spoken in her direction, as a threat. She was careful, in her e-mail to Jackson, not to say that she had left because of him. She was worried about her career, she said. Could the Riggios, or their employees, hold this against her, she wondered? Would they tell their friends not to hire her, not to publish her? She didn’t know what to think, and she didn’t want to risk it.

At his next session, Jackson said that Antonio was no longer working at the Springing Center. (We never did get that coffee.) According to the Springing Center, Jackson fired Antonio without consulting the organization. Antonio told several people that Jackson threatened to keep his work out of Barnes & Noble stores if he made a fuss.

Jackson also announced that he was banning class discussion. If we had questions or concerns, we could write them down and save them for the end of each class. Several of us raised objections, saying that restricting conversation would only increase tensions, but we didn’t get anywhere with him.

Shortly afterward, another fellow, a woman of color, e-mailed the group to announce that she was quitting, too. A fourth fellow, who was also a woman of color, did the same the next day. I had thought a lot about quitting myself. I had visions of waiting until the official announcement and publicly refusing the award, like a disgruntled actor at the Oscars. I also thought that maybe someone should stay and write about what happened. We had joked to one another while out for drinks in Chelsea that we were all getting a lot of material.

I called my editor at The New Yorker. I had already figured out that he was the person who’d suggested me for the fellowship—Antonio and Jackson, it turned out, were former colleagues of his, at PEN America. Antonio had e-mailed him, asking for recommendations, and he’d written a little blurb making the case for my abilities. That was pretty much the extent of the selection process. Now I told him the fellowship might be worth writing about. He seemed skeptical, but said to keep him posted.

After the fourth fellow quit, Jackson e-mailed those of us who were left. The week’s sessions had been cancelled due to “an electrical emergency,” he said. Two days later, Tim wrote to explain that Jackson had a family emergency. The remaining spring classes were cancelled, and we were told that we would “regroup in the fall.”

Weeks passed without any updates. At last, in June, when the fellowship was supposed to be announced to the world, we received an unsigned e-mail from “Springing accounting.” “Earlier this year, the corporation retained an outside consultant to evaluate the corporation’s mission and programs,” the e-mail read. “The fellowship program is now terminated.” We would receive five thousand dollars. The check arrived a few weeks later, and I felt grimy when I cashed it. “Stay tuned for information about our new programs,” the e-mail concluded. “We wish you a fruitful and fulfilling summer of writing.”

The early years of a writing career are often full of an unsteady kind of optimism. You hope that someone will notice you, or, more grandly, that someone will become a champion of your work. And, particularly if you’re a writer of color, or a queer writer, or a woman, you may learn that entrusting your work to would-be champions is a fraught endeavor. I remember more experienced writers telling me that I should say yes to every opportunity until I had earned the privilege to say no. But hope is both a strength and a weakness; it takes time to learn the difference between those who feed it and those who feed off of it. I wish someone had told me that early-career writers are the cheap gas on which much of the writing business runs.

Shortly after the fellowship was discontinued, I returned to Google in earnest, trying to understand what had happened. I was a reporter, after all, and this seemed like a story. I learned from nonprofit filings that, between 2003 and 2011, the Riggio Foundation had donated millions of dollars to the New School and its creative-writing program, where Jackson taught. In 2008, two years after she graduated from college, Stephanie enrolled in the New School’s creative-writing program, and Jackson became her thesis adviser. Later, I learned from Stephanie that, in 2012, after she graduated, Jackson encouraged a friend who worked at St. Joseph’s College, in Brooklyn, to offer her teaching work. Jackson was hired to direct St. Joseph’s creative-writing master’s program shortly afterward. His method drew on the writings of Marie Ponsot, a St. Joseph’s alumna and the author of the “Springing” poem that we had read in class, who is now in her late nineties.

Between 2013 and 2016, while Jackson and Stephanie worked at St. Joseph’s, the Riggios donated at least $187,500 to the college. The gifts funded a scholarship that Jackson oversaw, and it also endowed the Marie Ponsot Chair, which was awarded to Jackson. (The Riggio Foundation said it was unaware that he had received the chair.) Tim joined the faculty, and, in 2015, Jackson’s partner, Tom, was, according to his résumé, offered a residency at St. Joseph’s.

In 2017, Jackson was abruptly dismissed from his position at the school. Ponsot joined a protest on the sidewalk outside St. Joseph’s. A story about the protest in the Brooklyn Paper referred to Jackson as “the beloved founder and director” of the school’s creative-writing program. The story quoted a school spokesperson, who said that St. Joseph’s had “determined the need for new leadership” after a “thorough assessment process.” One of the organizers of the protest, a second-year student named Alexa Wilding, told the paper, “The value of our degree will go down. In the literary world, it’s who you work with, that’s your value.” That year, the Riggios were not listed as donors to the school. (St. Joseph’s College declined to comment on Jackson’s dismissal or any other aspect of this story. When I e-mailed Wilding, and told her about the Springing Fellowship, she replied, “I have had only positive experiences with Jackson as a teacher.”) Around this time, the Riggios decided to fund a charitable corporation in New York that Stephanie would oversee.

I thought about Jackson’s references to the Riggios’ deep pockets. “The resources are vast,” Jackson had written in his third e-mail to me. Since the nineties, the Riggio Foundation has reported donations of more than a hundred million dollars to hundreds of tax-exempt institutions, including public schools, private universities, equestrian organizations, art museums, Italian-American cultural organizations, and religious institutions. Several of the contributions, to institutions such as Spelman College and the National Council of Negro Women, specifically support women of color. The donations often seem scattershot in their aims and amounts: twenty dollars for a breast-cancer nonprofit, five thousand for a dog shelter, a hundred thousand for the Utah Film Center. There is, one imagines, a story behind each of these contributions, though they might be personal or even impulsive. Meanwhile, for those on the receiving end, the money could be life-changing. (Most notably, the Riggio Foundation spent millions building homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, an effort that eventually became a separate nonprofit.) Most of the foundation’s assets originally came in the form of Barnes & Noble stock. This month, after going through four chief executives in a five-year span, Barnes & Noble was sold to the hedge fund Elliott Advisors, for six hundred and thirty-eight million dollars, including debt. Before the sale, the Riggio Foundation reportedly owned 4.3 per cent of the company.

Around the time that Stephanie enrolled in Columbia University as an undergraduate, the foundation donated a hundred thousand dollars to the school; after she earned an art-history degree there, the Riggios donated five million dollars to the art-history and archaeology department. (The Riggios are also major art collectors.) Four universities that have received major donations from the Riggio Foundation have awarded Leonard Riggio honorary doctorates. Riggio and his wife have each contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic political candidates; two of the recipients of their generosity, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, were New York gubernatorial candidates who had previously settled lawsuits against Barnes & Noble while serving as the state’s attorney general.

For someone of Leonard Riggio’s personal resources and political commitments—he grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the son of a dressmaker and a boxer who became a taxi-driver, and is a long-standing supporter of liberal causes—none of this is particularly unusual. But it did help me understand how a program like the Springing Fellowship could suddenly materialize, and then vanish, without so much as a public announcement or an explanation for the participants. The Riggios are rich enough to move on to their next philanthropic endeavor without worrying too much. They seem to know the difference between money, which one spends, and wealth, which one wields.

In the fall, after I had decided to write this essay, Stephanie, to my surprise, agreed to a phone interview. “It was horribly uncomfortable, and just offensive in every way,” she said, referring to the fellowship; I had not yet asked any questions. “It was not what I wanted it to be in any way, shape, or form, which is why it is no longer in existence.” The Springing Center was supposed to offer a range of cultural programs, she said, and Jackson only oversaw one part of it. “I’ve been on a lot of boards, I’ve done this work before, so I know what it takes to get a foundation off the ground,” she said. (She previously chaired the board of the Equestrian Aid Foundation, which is funded in part by donations from the Riggio Foundation. Last year, the organization gave Stephanie an award for the work she’s done for it.)

The nonprofit was set up in a hurry, without independent oversight, and the board of trustees included five people: Stephanie, Stephanie’s mother, their family lawyer, Antonio, and Jackson. There was no formal selection process for fellows. According to Stephanie, Jackson sent offers to friends and former students before notifying the Riggios, then pressured her to start the program six months earlier than she had planned. He claimed, she said, that one fellow had already left a job, and another had moved from Portugal, in order to accept his offers. Stephanie also blamed Jackson for the decision not to share her identity with participants, and criticized his conduct in class.

I pointed out to Stephanie that she was Jackson’s boss. While she was attending the sessions, as though she were a writing fellow, she and her family could have disciplined or overruled him. “It’s true,” she said. “I could have, and I should have, and I didn’t.” She fired Jackson and Tim in late June, she said, and ended the fellowship. Antonio took legal action against the Springing Center. Multiple people told me that he received a settlement that barred him from speaking freely about his employment there. Tom moved his art works into a different studio in the same building, one floor up.

I e-mailed Jackson, asking if he would speak with me, but he didn’t reply to that message or another I sent later, following up. Eventually, I sent him detailed questions about the accusations that the Springing Center had made against him, and about things that had happened during the fellowship, and what I had learned since. I repeated my request to speak with him in a text message. He never responded to me, or to a fact checker for this magazine. Tom, too, did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment or to a list of written questions.

I talked to people who had worked with Jackson in the past, trying to make sense of his role in everything. The people I spoke to generally reacted with surprise. One former colleague, who requested anonymity for fear of losing a job, noted that he could be capricious, and often seemed to speak without a filter. “He has always viewed himself as the person who speaks truth to power,” the former colleague said, and that attitude persisted, the colleague went on, even in situations where he was the more powerful person. I remembered something Jackson had said in class, about feeling misinterpreted as someone with privilege, when he did not see himself that way. I found an interview that Jackson gave after his novel was published, where he said, of the black doctor at the center of the book, “I didn’t want to appropriate someone else’s history as if I understood it fully, because I don’t. A white person will never know what a black person experiences, despite the empathy they may have.”

After speaking to Stephanie, I e-mailed her to ask what kinds of programs the Springing Center might offer in the future. She told me that she was unable to share any details, and that if I had other questions I should direct them to the senior vice-president of communications at Barnes & Noble, Inc. Included in her e-mail was a short mission statement. “At the Springing Center, we believe that there is a way to unlock every door,” the statement read. “The heart of this conviction lies in our unwavering dedication to allowing suppressed voices to be heard, to helping traumatized psyches heal, and to including marginalized voices into the global conversation.” Recently, the Barnes & Noble spokesperson sent an update. Around the time that I talked with Stephanie, she said, the Springing Center closed permanently.

My father died nearly twenty-five years ago. Still, I can conjure that time as if it were yesterday: the bewildering, quiet ride to the hospital, with the ambulance lights flashing but no siren, early on Christmas Eve, 1995; his week of decline; his funeral procession, inching past the farm in a swirl of snow. Somewhere deep in that December storm, the barn roof, which had been standing for more than a century, half collapsed. I had to look, then look again, to comprehend what had happened. I hadn’t a clue what to do next. It was then that I realized that all my father owned and everything that had been in his care—his farm, in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, where he’d spent his entire life, his house, my mother and her failing memory—had become the province of others.

There were many large things to sort out in the wake of his passing—repairing the roof was the least of it. But, after all this time, I remember just as vividly the small portions of grief. Going through my father’s possessions, I found that objects that had barely registered while he was alive seemed just as precious, if not more so, than the ones I’d imagined treasuring. His own father’s watch, which he kept in his desk drawer; a wooden bowl he’d carved in his teens; his notebooks and textbooks from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, one of which contained a chapter on chestnut trees, for he’d come of age as the blight was ravaging nearly every one of them —these held just as much resonance as his work jacket and boots, which I saw almost daily, and which seemed to define him.

As I sifted through his possession, I began to think about my own. I felt how freighted and cumbersome inheritance could be. And so, after the obligations to his estate had begun to lift, I went to a lawyer to make my will. I thought it would be simple enough. I was single and without children; I owned a modest house and the items that filled it. For nearly two decades, I’d been accreting, carrying things with me as I moved from an island, to a city, and then back to the farm where I’d been raised. Each time, I’d unpack my possessions from my hatchback—books and photographs, ceramics from Italy, an old cream bottle from the family dairy, my grandmother’s afghan, arrowheads I’d chanced upon—and settle into life among the mosaic of my belongings. I told my lawyer that I wanted to leave the house itself to my niece and nephew. The contents, I thought, could go to my brother and sister.

“Oh, don’t do that!” he said. “Nobody wants to inherit the contents of a house!”

I was taken aback at first. Then I couldn’t help but laugh at the realization that almost every object that held my affections would mean little to anyone else. Still, in spite of that recognition, my things lost none of their attraction. In fact, they seemed to mean all the more to me when, a decade later, I moved to an even older house, in Maine, where I still live, and where I imagine I’ll die. By then, I’d acquired chairs and tables and dishes, and I needed to rent a U-Haul.

Do I think these things keep me tied to earth? All I know is that, together, they provide an unquantifiable comfort. Every once in a while, I wonder whether they could be calcifying around me like a shell.

Today, enough people feel weighed down by their possessions to make “decluttering” a social phenomenon. It’s a word that came into use only in the middle of the twentieth century. Almost certainly, I possess more things than everyone else who’s inhabited my approximately hundred-and-fifty-year-old Cape Cod. It was built by a blacksmith, and most of what he and his family owned probably had a practical use: chairs and pots and tables and cooking utensils, a bread bowl and canning jars. This place must have meant a lot to them; it stayed in their family for nearly a century. Surely, they felt a sense of comfort here equal to or greater than my own.

I often think that everything I own now—a mix of the essential and the desired—wouldn’t be capable of making me feel comfortable in the house as they inhabited it. They kept winter at bay with wood heat alone, through stoves and fireplaces on the first floor. There were fewer windows then, so the house would have been darker in winter—darker always, with just the small and wavering flames of kerosene lamps to illuminate it at night. My father would have known that kind of darkness. He was the son of Lebanese immigrants, born not long after the Wright brothers lifted off from Kitty Hawk. As a boy, he slept in the same bed as some of his siblings, and in winter they’d place hot bricks at its foot to keep warm. I have no doubt that the cold, the closeness, and the dark had something to do with the loyalty they felt to one another all their lives.

When I think about the way that even humble possessions can give us comfort, because we invest our feelings in them, I recall a passage from “The End: Hamburg 1943,” by the German writer Hans Erich Nossack. He describes returning to his bombed-out city. In some neighborhoods, little more than chimneys remained standing. There were few discernible streets; people created paths through the rubble and glass. When refugees encountered the intact possessions of others—even of those who had taken them in and fed them—the objects had no resonance at all. “They would walk through strange rooms, touch an object, hold it, and look at it absently,” Nossack writes. “The unspoken question would fill the room: What is the use of still having such things?” Even so, when they discovered that their own possession—a faded photograph, a childhood doll—had been destroyed, they were overcome. “These things have their life from us, because at some time we bestowed our affection on them; they absorbed our warmth and harbored it gratefully in order to enrich us with it again in meager hours,” Nossack explains. “We were responsible for them; they could only die with us. And now they stood on the other side of the abyss.”

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After my father died, it was hard to let the merest thing go. Dropping off a box at the Salvation Army felt like a betrayal. His favorite viyella shirt, his desk blotter, his household hammer, anything written in his hand: it took a force of will to do what was required of me. Now that his passing is so much further away in time, it’s not his things that I cling to the most. It’s memories. I’ve watched helplessly as my mother and all of my father’s siblings have died; now there’s no one on earth who remembers him as a child, or as the young man who, caught in a photograph, walked across the farmyard with a fox slung over his shoulder. Soon enough, his middle age will disappear. After my siblings and I are gone, all that will be left will be his grandchildren’s dim recollections of his old age.

Every once in a while, a fragment of my father rises unbidden—I see him dropping off a basket of dark, shining eggplant and ripe tomatoes on the porch, or wading into the cornfield to pick a dozen ears for dinner—and I imagine such fragments must be authentic for being spontaneous. More often, I consciously conjure him: the way, for instance, he would put a basket of apples in the back of the car when we took a family trip. As we moved westward and northward across New England, he’d give his Macs and Baldwins and Cortlands to gas-station owners and innkeepers along the way.

As much as I tell myself that I can still see him and hear his voice in my head, the man he was may already have disappeared. Memory, with its faults and uncertainties, has made him my own creation, and I’ve changed him as desired. The father I have been shaping out of air for nearly twenty-five years is a man more of his later years. I’ve softened some things. What I conjure often feels companionable and comfortable, and I try not to think that, when I myself die, such memories will slip away in an instant—possessions no one can inherit. Of all the things we ever talked about, all the things he ever said to me in our nearly forty years together on this same earth, out of the drift of the decades since, I recall most often a bright, clear May morning in the apple orchard. The Northern Spies are coming into bloom. The finch’s song, the soft breeze, his voice: “Don’t you just like to watch things grow?”

Attempts to know the soul of the new generation always tremble with the fetishes and the embarrassments of aging ones. In this week’s Newsweek, for instance, a group of smiling, multiethnic students are trotted out as representatives of the post-millennial cohort that’s become known as Gen Z. Graduates in the college class of 2019, they have been “raised by cynics,” the magazine tells us, and have reacted by becoming “clear-eyed, economic pragmatists.” They will avoid the mistakes of their sinner predecessors—the gig economy and the Internet’s irony-poisoning, climate-change ambivalence, and millennial listlessness. Stern and chivalrous and goal-oriented, new-age patriots and effective workers, they will pull the planet back into orbit.

“Euphoria,” a new teen drama from HBO and A24’s television company, is here to denude us of such naïve thinking. It styles itself as a punishing Gen Z exposé, channelling the spirit of movies like “Kids” and “Gummo,” here to make “Skins” seem basic. Last week the president of the Parents Television Council warned that the show “appears to be overtly, intentionally, marketing extremely graphic adult content—sex, violence, profanity and drug use—to teens and preteens.” But “Euphoria,” which is interestingly naïve itself, will destroy the innocence only of adults who wish to maintain the illusion that sex, violence, profanity, and drug use, not to mention revenge porn, are not in the province of high-school life.

That said, I shouldn’t undersell the bleakness of “Euphoria.” There are dead-eyed, graphic sex scenes, nonconsensual-sex tapes, beatings, underage camming, and chronic male nudity. In the pilot episode, our protagonist, Rue Bennett (Zendaya), her narration heavy like medicinal syrup, explains that she was born only days before 9/11; the planes crashing on loop on television was her generation’s first film, their primal political event. Seventeen years later, Rue is an addict. Her sister Gia (Storm Reid) found her overdosed in her bedroom. Her drug of choice is pills, mostly, that she buys (on credit) from a regretful dealer and his face-tattooed partner. When Rue consumes them, she is overcome with a rush of the opposite of the show’s title: nothingness, a pitch blackness, a silence that is like, she hopes, being dead. Rue’s habit is self-medication, an overcorrection to the stifling regimen she was put on as a young child to help manage O.C.D., anxiety, and a personality disorder. At the beginning of the show, she has just returned from rehab, where she didn’t so much get clean as get cunning. The urine of friends, kept warm in little pharmaceutical bottles strapped to her thigh, tricks her mother’s at-home drug tests.

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Our omniscient storyteller, Rue gives us the backstory of the show’s three other major characters: her best friend, Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), a repressed jock named Nate (Jacob Elordi), and Kat (Barbie Ferreira), a smart-aleck who hides a secret Internet life. The portrayal of this hot-girl friend group is cannily sensitive to how teen-aged society has progressed; when Kat tells her friends that she’s a virgin, they scold her warmheartedly. “Bitch, this isn’t the eighties. You need to catch a dick!” Zendaya, a twenty-two-year-old actor and singer, is the best part of “Euphoria.” It becomes difficult, and then absolutely silly, to recall the pink outlines of her early career on the Disney Channel, so grandly does she inhabit this dark new role. She understands the neediness of her character: that Rue, at heart, wants nothing more than to be loved; that her chemical cravings work in service of a spiritual one.

The second-best part of “Euphoria” is Schafer as Jules—a young trans woman playing a young trans woman. A high femme newcomer in town, Jules marks her introduction like a spirited combatant, picking up a knife and drawing her own blood. (It’s a callback to a history of self-harm, we’ll later learn.) Jules is a drug for Rue, but a good one. Their noses touch in bed at night, and what courses between them is platonic, romantic, filial all at once. They trip on pills with happy faces stamped on them; while high, Rue thinks that they are both crying glitter. The electric stirrings we felt as young girls, reading best-friend adventures that we so desperately wished would rise into romance, emerge again seeing these two.

Rue and Jules’s relationship is the jewel of “Euphoria.” I’ll keep watching because I desperately want to protect them. Otherwise, the show so far (I’ve seen four episodes) is a highly self-conscious study of ennui, overfull with fancy camera tricks and thousand-dollar designer getups. Drake lends his name as executive producer, and the episodes glow like music videos. As in “Assassination Nation,” Sam Levinson, who has done most of the writing and directing of “Euphoria,” which is based on an Israeli show, creates a glamorously trippy suburbia that distracts us from the story’s thinness, its reliance on vintage tropes on the subject of teen-aged self-abasement. Rue’s highs are diegetic: the camera spins as her head spins; she walks on walls and we are upside-down. There is a stunning long sequence in Episode 4 that takes place at the town carnival, featuring Rue, Jules, and a closeted family man whom Jules has met on Grindr.

Like Rue, you will hate what that man has done to Jules in a dark motel. And Jules, painfully sophisticated, will tell Rue, who is occasionally a proxy for the horrified audience, that there are experiences she must abide in order to feel desired. That man ends up pleading with Jules, but another man, a teen-aged peer, physically threatens her just moments later. Here and throughout, “Euphoria” overcorrects in its strain against wokeness and didactic optimism. You think Generation Z is sexually liberated, politically engaged, emotionally self-aware? Think again, “Euphoria” retorts, shoving a dick pic in your face. Like a surly teen-ager, it wallows, refusing to let itself or anyone feel good. The show forgets to be funny at all until the third episode, which focusses on the sardonic and insecure Kat, played by the influencer model Ferreira. She wears glasses—the universal sign, onscreen, that a woman isn’t seen as attractive—and writes One Direction fan fiction in which (ripping from a real-life Tumblr theory) two of the boy-band members are secretly fucking; she might be the only character that thinks of sex as a creative force. (A spoiler: you might not be able to stomach the swerve of a sixteen-year-old deciding to work as a cam girl, but you have to respect the resolute realism of it.) Often, “Euphoria” feels like two different shows: one that coolly epitomizes sexual fluidity and contemporary teen angst and modern addiction, and another that is relentlessly stylized and pornographically sad.

Still, I happen to prefer “Euphoria” ’s melancholy over the gooey liberalism of a film like the recent teen-girl comedy “Booksmart.” How you like your Gen Z prophesying is, ultimately, I suppose, a matter of taste. Levinson, who is thirty, is a recovering addict, and he’s said that he has written “Euphoria” partly from personal experience. The affection he has for fuck-ups like Rue, and for romantics like Jules, shines through his show’s peacocking. So does Levinson’s sincere fondness for those kids whom he imagines need a show like “Euphoria,” to reflect back to them an image of their lives that defers to their pessimism, that treats them like the sinners they are, or, maybe, want to be. But the show’s opening, with its indictment of a damaged nation repressing the instincts of its children, sets us up for a return I’m not sure is coming. “Euphoria” is a love letter that hasn’t figured out a coherent love language.