In the summer of 2016, a contentious presidential election was underway and a new kind of right-wing anger was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book about sex in the digital age, had recently come off her antidepressants and moved into a wider world of psychedelic experimentation. From her Brooklyn apartment, she was beginning to gain glimpses of the secret nightlife that pulsed around her.
In Health and safety, Witt describes her immersion in New York’s dance music underground scene. Emily led a double life. During the day she worked as a journalist and reported on gun violence, climate disasters and right-wing militia rallies. And at night she went to the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out offices and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could ward off the misery of American politics and the catastrophe of 2020.
Tender, but never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament about a broken relationship, a changing nightlife, and New York City on the brink of collapse. Witt spares no one – least of all herself – and offers her life as a lens on an era of American delirium and decay.
