ARIANA REINES: Last time we spoke, it was over the summer, before Health and Safety (Pantheon, $27) came out. It was compulsive reading for me—at least five books in one. I don’t know how you did it. You wrote an ecstatic account of music, drugs, sex, and expanding consciousness simultaneous to a sober reportage on practically every theater of social collapse of our time, but the book is also the lacerating story of a love imploding and—your subtitle—“a breakdown.” I found it a deeply generous book, in the tradition of Tocqueville or Marco Polo—a traveler’s description of place and places—and some of these places exist inside us. You turn your eye on culturally overdetermined sites—whether it’s Bushwick, domesticity, the toilets at Berghain, or the recent past, which Freud (I think?) said is the hardest and even the most terrifying thing for a human being to look at. By now, you’ve gotten to hear what people are making of the book . . . {read}