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.

Some weeks the Trump Presidency is a horror show; some weeks it is slapstick. This week it was both. In the Middle East, tensions with Iran rose alarmingly, while, on the domestic front, Donald Trump got himself into yet another political mess. As of Saturday, it has been three days since Trump told George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, that he would accept damaging information on political opponents from foreign governments, and the White House is still trying to repair the political damage. It isn’t working. Instead, things are only getting worse for the President.

One should never underestimate Trump’s capacity for self-harm, of course. This is the man who, in May, 2017, fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., in a fit of pique, thereby siccing a special counsel on himself and everyone around him for the next two years. This week’s blooper may not compare with that blunder for the ages, but it was epic, nonetheless. To begin with, consider the timing. Just two days before Trump sat down with Stephanopoulos, the House Judiciary Committee began its quest to build a public case against him on the basis of Volume II of the Mueller report, which focusses on possible obstruction of justice. In a hearing devoted to legal experts, John Dean, who was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel and went to prison for his role in the Watergate coverup, compared the special counsel’s report to the grand-jury report to Congress that played a significant role in Nixon’s downfall—the so-called Road Map. Like that document, the Mueller report “conveys findings, with supporting evidence, of potential criminal activity based on the work of federal prosecutors, F.B.I. investigators, and witness testimony before a federal grand jury,” Dean said in his opening statement.

But if Monday’s hearing annoyed the President—he lashed out at Dean in advance of his testimony—it didn’t necessarily represent any new threat to him. Dean and the other witnesses had no news to impart. Nor could they provide any firsthand accounts of the incidents contained in the Mueller report. The hearing produced no blockbuster moment, and there were subsequent reports that some Democrats had questioned the wisdom of calling Dean. So far, so good for Trump, but then came his Rose Garden sitdown with the ABC News anchor.

It all started to go wrong for the White House when Stephanopoulos brought up Donald Trump, Jr.,’s closed-door appearance on Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Stephanopolous asked Trump if his son should have contacted the F.B.I. when, in the summer of 2016, he received an e-mail from the British publicist Rob Goldstone offering him a meeting with some Russians connected to the Russian government who allegedly had the goods on Hillary Clinton. As he has done before, Trump defended Donald, Jr. Then he doubled down and tripled down. By the time he was done, Trump had said that “you don’t” call the F.B.I. in such circumstances; asserted that the current F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, “is wrong” to suggest you do; and vouchsafed that in the 2020 election, if the Chinese or Russians offered him information on his opponents, “I think I’d take it.” (He also said, “If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the F.B.I.—if I thought there was something wrong.”)

“Does the President actually want Congress to impeach him?” my colleague Susan B. Glasser asked in her weekly Letter from Washington. To that question, on balance, it appears that the answer is no. Rather than trying to goad the Democrats, Trump appears to have simply been doing what he always does: running his mouth. His primary argument, which has some substance, is that, these days, virtually everyone in electoral politics uses negative information, or “oppo research,” on their opponents. But it is a long way from uttering this sad truism to suggesting that it’s O.K. for a Presidential candidate to accept favors from foreign governments. “Let me make something 100% clear to the American public or anyone running for public office: It is illegal to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election,” Ellen Weintraub, the head of the Federal Election Commission, the independent body tasked with enforcing campaign-finance laws, said in a statement on Thursday night.

Trump had not only stated that he would willingly break the law. He had also reminded everyone of the contents of Volume I of the Mueller report, which detailed the extensive contacts in 2016 and thereafter between people connected to the Trump campaign and people connected to Vladimir Putin. The report concluded that the Russian government, with its hacking and Internet disinformation efforts, purposefully assisted the Trump campaign, and that some people connected to the campaign were eager to make the most of this assistance. But the report also said, “there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy”—a statement that Trump and his allies seized upon as vindication of the President’s refrain that there was “No collusion,” even though the report said explicitly, “we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’ ” Now here was Trump saying, in effect, that he would gladly collude.

Even the late-night comics, who have been feeding on Trump’s gaffes for years, were stunned, a Vanity Fair article noted. Seth Myers: “The guy who has spent two years scream-tweeting ‘NO COLLUSION!’ is now saying, ‘If anyone’s down to collude, I’m your guy.’ . . . If Trump had been President during Watergate, he would have left a business card at the break-in.” Stephen Colbert: “You’ve got to imagine Robert Mueller is just getting home with all of his boxes after clearing out his office, turns on the TV, and he’s like, ‘Damn it, honey, I’m going back to work. I’ll see you in another two years.’ ”

When the news about Trump’s statements broke, the reflex response of his Republican enablers was to scream “Christopher Steele”—a reference to the former British spy who was paid by a law firm working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and, before it, a conservative newspaper) to dig up dirt on Trump. Politico pointed out that the House Republicans’ own 2018 report on Russian interference in the 2016 election said, “It is not illegal to contract with a foreign person or foreign entity for services, including conducting opposition research on a U.S. campaign, so long as the service was paid for at the market rate.” The full contents of the dossier were also not made public until after the election. It had no impact on the vote.

So much for that comparison. By Friday, a number of Republicans who usually defend Trump were peeling away from him on this one. “I think you have an obligation to pick up the phone and call the F.B.I. if we know this is from a foreign government,” Representative Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, said. “I don’t think that’s going to sit well with most Americans. It shouldn’t. It’s just not an appropriate way to behave in a political campaign.” In a rare acknowledgment that he had erred, Trump was prompted to call into his favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” to try to do some cleanup. He still insisted that he would accept the information from a foreign power—“because if you don’t look at it you won’t know it’s bad,” he said. Then he went on: “But, of course, you give it to the F.B.I. or report it to the Attorney General or somebody like that. But, of course, you do that—you couldn’t have that happen with our country—and everybody understands that, and I thought it was made clear.”

What was made very clear, of course, was Trump’s culpability. Far too clear for Trump’s most ardent defenders. Instead of holding Trump responsible for his statements, Fox News anchors demanded an inquest into how Stephanopoulos, a journalist who once worked in the Clinton White House, received so much access to the President. According to ABC News, Stephanopoulos was in Trump’s company for thirty hours. In addition to carrying out the interview, he flew on Air Force One and sat through a number of White House meetings. Sean Hannity, the primus inter pares of the Trump mouthpieces at Fox, dismissed Stephanopoulos as “Little Georgie,” Erik Wemple, the Washington Post’s press critic, noted. Laura Ingraham said she didn’t know who at the White House had approved the interview. Tucker Carlson said, “I’m not here to defend Trump’s interview with Stephanopoulos. Why would you have given an interview to Stephanopoulos in the first place? It’s a very good question.”

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The most likely explanation is that spending a few days in the company of a network anchorman appealed to the President’s vanity. On Friday, the damage continued. ABC News released another clip of the Stephanopoulos interview, in which Trump accused the former White House counsel, Don McGahn, of lying when he told Mueller that, in the summer of 2017, Trump twice asked him to fire the special counsel.

“I never suggested firing Mueller,” Trump claimed. Stephanopoulos pushed back, asking Trump why McGahn would lie under oath. “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer,” Trump replied. “Or he believed it because I would constantly tell anybody that would listen—including you, including the media—that Robert Mueller was conflicted. Robert Mueller had a total conflict of interest.”

On this vital matter, which goes to the heart of whether Trump sought to obstruct justice, it is Trump’s word against the word of two others: McGahn and his former chief of staff at the White House, Annie Donaldson, who reportedly took detailed notes about her boss’s exchanges with the President. To put it another way, this is an area where great peril may lurk for Trump, and, rather than stepping carefully, he’s just plunged into it head first.