DESCRIPTION

From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered breaking news and politics from around the country, and has written about culture, sexuality, drugs, and night life. She is the author of the books Future Sex and Nollywood. Her journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in n+1, the Times, GQ, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books.

REVIEWS

A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NEW YORKER, PITCHFORK, LITHUB, AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"There are moments in this book when Witt elevates writing about altered states of consciousness to something akin to the most brilliant art criticism I’ve ever read in my life. With shocking precision and honesty, she maps zones of transcendence and devastation, freedom and repression, both in the individual mind and in the collective experience of America. Health and  Safety is a tribute to the profound and radical potential in substances that insist on bringing another world into being, and an acute, heartbroken reckoning with their limits, too."
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

"Brilliant . . . self-eviscerating, honest, often painful—a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"An arresting memoir . . . Witt’s well-honed prose makes her gut-wrenching portrait of 2010s boom-and-bust hedonism feel like the sharp observations of a trusted friend. This intense portrait of one woman’s wild years deserves a wide audience."
—Publishers Weekly

"Astonishing . . . I could not stop reading."
—Ezra Klein, The Bulwark podcast