When the Drugs Stopped Working

New Yorker journalist Emily Witt’s autoethnographic memoir Health & Safety is part elegy for the previous decade’s NYC-Berlin rave scene, and part indictment of America in the years leading up to and including Trump’s first term. The book progresses more or less chronologically with brief allusions to her youth when, having witnessed her druggiest childhood peers succumb to a kind of cyclical “self-generated squalor,” she opted for a sobriety compatible with her ambition. At 31, having established a career in journalism but not lasting love, Witt yielded to an interminable ennui that saw her desire for risk redouble, leading to the very squalor she’d previously avoided as she became a casualty of the long 2010s.