Emily Witt Discusses Health and Safety
BPL Presents welcomes journalist and author Emily Witt to discuss her latest book, Health and Safety, a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall.
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.
PARTICIPANTS
Emily Witt has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018. She has covered breaking news and politics from around the country, and has written about culture, sexuality, drugs, and night life. She is the author of the books “Future Sex,” “Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire,” and “Health and Safety,” which won the Los Angeles Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical prose. She has reported from many countries and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique.
Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a co-host of the magazine's culture podcast, Critics at Large.
