Health and Safety: A Breakdown

"Haunting . . . [Witt] writes with such cool precision."--Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"The first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency"--Emily Gould, The Cut

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF 2024 (SO FAR) - 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.

Author: Emily Witt
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 09/17/2024
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.9lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.20w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780593317648


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2024
Publishers Weekly 09/09/2024

About the Author
Emily Witt has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018. 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, and have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2011, Say What You Mean: the n+1 Anthology, and Meeting the Devil: A Book of Memoir from the London Review of Books.