Last year, Bustle, a digital magazine for young women, published a list of the most essential young-adult books about sexual assault — there were 13. Where boys have been told that their misbehaviors will be rewarded, girls have been reminded over and over that they are imperiled by virtue of being alive.

What has remained largely constant, in fact, what still follows a direct throughline from the universe of Georgetown Prep in 1983, despite parental delusions to the contrary, are the drinking practices of teenagers growing up surrounded by affluence and outsize expectations.

The calendars Judge Kavanaugh turned over this week clearly illustrate the yin-yang of upper-middle class adolescent existence, the tension between the ambition to achieve and the pursuit of assisted release: there is “Beach Week,’’ and the party at Richie’s and then back-to-back interviews at Brown and Yale and football and more football and basketball and the party at Anne’s and the beach with Donny.

Nationally, alcohol and drug use among 12- to 17-year-olds has been declining for years. In December the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that daily alcohol use and binge drinking fell significantly for all grades from 2012 to 2017. But there are a few gaps in this narrative.

Since the 1990s, Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, has been studying patterns of substance abuse across socioeconomic groups. Early in her career, she discovered, almost by accident, that children from well-off families were essentially worse off than those from poor households in terms of substance abuse, anxiety and depression. Over the years, she has replicated those findings again and again. And other international studies, specifically one conducted in Norway, have come to similar conclusions.

The world of pre-gaming and beer bongs has gone on unabated, Dr. Luthar has observed, even as the paradigm of absentee parenting that distinguished a previous era has been replaced by the model of precision surveillance. Popularity, she also found, still adheres to he who can chug the most.