“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.

"From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a clever and subtly scathing follow-up about love, sex, drugs, and techno in our time of rage Everything shifted for Emily Witt the day she met Andrew. It was the summer of 2016, and her first book would soon enter the world. A tour through alt-sex in the Internet age, it would receive widespread acclaim for its sharp and aloof critical eye. And yet here Emily was, pining for the same monogamous normy life she once questioned-all because of a techno-head programmer from Queens who chain-smoked and showered with Irish Spring. Their future together developed unexpectedly. Over the next four years, they would fall in and out of foggy clubs, take drugs in bathroom stalls, move in together, and build a life. As oceans boiled and wildfires burned, Emily and Andrew retreated deeper into Brooklyn's underground, where illegal parties in hollowed-out offices drowned out the din of a crumbling world. But like even the best calibrated trip, it had an end. Bookended by Donald Trump's election and the summer of George Floyd's murder, Health and Safety recalls these tumultuous years with bracing clarity, offering Witt's own life as a lens onto an American era of dissolution, dissociation, and rage. With her trademark critical eye that spares no one-least of all herself-Witt explores how a generation has endured the indignities of late-stage capitalism, and questions whether we still might be saved"--