Health and Safety: A Breakdown

From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex, 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 came to 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.