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Health and Safety: A Breakdown
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About This Book
From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex ("introspective and breathtakingly honest"—New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness 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.
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Reviews
"Self-eviscerating, honest, often painful—a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age."
"Witt's directness and sincerity are disarming."
"Making clubbing the subject of literary journalism is no easy task: It can be fraught and self-indulgent, a cool-kid version of the journalist who writes a memoir about an erstwhile hobby ..."
"An entertaining, provocative, first-person reported book about the subcultures surrounding a recreational activity ..."
"It's a testament to Witt's skills as a writer that this book is enhanced, and not diminished, by her refusal to reconcile such contradictions."
"This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it."
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