Health and Safety: A Breakdown

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE • A NEW YORKER, TIME, AND PITCHFORK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City "The first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency"—Emily Gould, The Cut 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, where she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future, and all during an era of American delirium and dissolution. Sparing no one—least of all Witt herself—Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall.