An introduction

A brief note on what exactly all this is.

Unexpected things can happen at Degenerate Art! But you can count on hearing from me twice a week (or more) on many topics related to those I’ve covered in my books and other writing.

The first post of the week will typically be on politics and history, often about how we can navigate life under an authoritarian-style administration and how to build a world that most of us would rather live in. Along with the print essay early in the week, I’ll be doing an episode that will come out at the end of each week that focuses on the same issues. The series is called “Next Comes What.” You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

The second post of the week will sometimes also cover similar issues, but will also occasionally include writing on climate and the Artic, my research trips reporting from around the world, and essays about my West Virginia childhood (which, tellingly, actually set the stage for a lot of what America is going through now).

A third post each week will cover other peoples’ work I think is worth reading, some updates on what I’m up to, and ideas for what you can do in your own communities, among other fun things.

Each of my books has had a different theme and audience but a common underlying sensibility. Keeping up to date with Degenerate Art is a way of staying in touch with that view on the world. There will be deep dives into the past, with the present day and our collective future still firmly in mind. The subject matter will sometimes be grim, but I will also make terrible jokes.

Given the historic nature of what the US and the world are facing, all posts through the end of November will be free to all, in case it might help readers ponder our current predicament and think of ways to take action. After that, some posts will go behind a paywall.

If you hit the subscribe button, there are free and paid options. I encourage you to become a paid subscriber now, if you want to support my current and future work.

Whose mess is this?

My name is Andrea Pitzer. My reporting, reviews, opinion pieces, comic essays, and poetry have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, Nautilus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Slate, GQ, USA Today, Longreads, McSweeney’s, and Poet Lore, among other outlets.

I’ve written three nonfiction books and done research on four continents in some unusual locations, from Guantanamo to multiple expeditions in the High Arctic.

My most recent book, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, tells the harrowing story of a group of Dutch sailors trying to find a northeastern route to China in the 1590s. The middle book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, followed the birth of the idea of mass civilian detention in camps—how humanity got to Auschwitz and what happened afterward. (I like to refer to it as the biography of a bad idea.) My first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, looked at Nabokov in light of his family history and his exile from Russia, finding lost history tucked in heartbreaking ways inside his most famous novels.

On the journalistic side, I was the person who discovered that Bob Dylan likely cribbed his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech from SparkNotes. I’ve covered climate change at the northernmost town in the world and the long-term dangers of US border policy. Before that, I founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction site for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Prior to working as a freelance journalist, I was a portrait artist.

In another previous life, I spent seven years as a karate instructor, which included launching an international newsletter on interpersonal violence while teaching martial arts and self-defense to people of all ages in Washington, DC. Before that I was a music critic and ran a record store, where I started as a teenage clerk for $3.75 an hour while attending Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. (I still do occasional writing for music labels.)

My mother raised me in the river town of Parkersburg, West Virginia. It was a troubled life in a home we were doomed to lose. But I was lucky enough to have an endless supply of books, mostly from the library and grandparents who ran a small independent bookstore in town.

I firmly believe that we’re the sum of all we’ve been through, and I try to embrace folding these past lives into everything I do. Which means these experiences will inform Degenerate Art, and you’ll have a chance to read more about each of them here, too. You can find me pretty often on Bluesky.

 Why “Degenerate Art”?

The name of this newsletter comes from the Nazis’ derogatory label for creative work they condemned as warped, modern, un-Aryan, or antifascist. Nazis gathered what they saw as the most egregious examples and staged a national show in 1937, with labels that denigrated the artwork and the artists. To their dismay, the Munich Degenerate Art exhibition clocked attendance numbers in the millions and was several times more popular than the nearby exhibition of Nazi-approved art.

I hope to bring you ideas and images that might contain even a spark of the spirit of those banned or disparaged works, and that what I offer up might similarly disappoint metaphorical and literal Nazis among us today.

Welcome to the circus. I hope you like it.