RAVING THROUGH THE TRUMP YEARS
The New Yorker's Emily Witt on reclaiming your mind from the political machine
I was at a smoke-filled literary party at a writer’s Chelsea apartment the other night, lying on the host’s bed and coming up on acid when Kamala Harris’ speechwriter, perched on the pillow next to me, started rhapsodizing about how much she loves Emily Witt’s latest book. The New Yorker staff writer’s new memoir, ironically titled Health and Safety, chronicles her descent into the druggie depths of Brooklyn’s techno scene during Trump’s first presidency, and is a cooly precise post-mortem of an era marked by both mental and political breakdown.
As Emily roves from right-wing rallies and school shootings to foggy warehouse raves, the whiplash becomes disorienting. A scene describing a scraggly morning at a Bushwick rave called Fourth World—when the “tiny plastic bags had been ripped open to get the last bits of powder [and] the ground scores had all been discovered”—bleeds into Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the narrative held together by Emily’s kaleidoscopic lens.
Health and Safety has been the talk of the town during my trip to New York City, where I’ve spent the last few weeks hanging around after hosting a (very cute!!) film screening on Asian nightlife culture. Many DJs and nightlife operators who brought up her book expressed shy disbelief and gratitude that this underground scene, which felt like a secret undertaking in the 2010s, was finally getting historicized by a reporter of this caliber; reading about parties thrown by our friends in a hardcover book published by Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House—with a gemstone-colored cover photo of a Sustain-Release dancefloor, no less—is a very strange trip.
Still, I was surprised to hear Health & Safety had been devoured overnight by this put-together professional, who told me that she’d never partied in Bushwick but now wants to check out Bossa Nova Civic Club, a techno bar at the center of the scene. The book had opened her eyes to another world.
“Emily makes a distinction between Park Slope literary parties where everyone is standing around talking, and parties where the energy is focused more around dancing,” the speechwriter said. “Once you realize this divide, you get curious about the other side.”
Perhaps this is the power of Emily’s writing: she’s managed to convince skeptics who prefer to go to bed by midnight that raving is a subject worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. You could call her the Michael Pollan of raving—although that would be an insult, because she’s much cooler than Pollan (and definitely has done more drugs). I actually think Emily is one of the sharpest cultural critics of our generation, the sober precision of her perspective often cutting through both the myopic navel-gaze of many subcultural dwellers and hand-wringing hysteria of the neoliberal intelligentsia.
Emily’s also one of my besties, so when she asked me to moderate a conversation for her book launch at Skylight Books in Los Angeles last month, I decided to capitalize on our intimacy to go in on some questions that I knew she would have perceptive takes on. I’m dropping the interview now because it feels especially relevant post-election—you can check it out below.
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Michelle: Everyone comes into raving through a different gateway. Yours was a nerdy fascination with drugs, reading Terence McKenna, going to Burning Man, doing ayahuasca. How did those interests inform the ways you later came to understand raving?
Emily: I came late to psychedelics. I started experimenting with them in my 30s after reading an article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker. They became an intellectual obsession, and trying them means interacting with social scenes that organize themselves around them. So in New York at the time, it was the New Age ayahuasca circle, Burning Man, and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ conference called Horizons. None of it quite worked for me. It was either trying to put the drugs in the model of therapy, or it was people I didn't quite respect because they had fallen in spiritually. The hypocrisies of Burning Man have been widely documented. So I was just looking for something that didn’t have all of that.
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