An introduction

A brief note on what exactly all this is.

Unexpected things can happen at Degenerate Art! But you can count on me writing twice a week (or more) on many topics related to those I’ve covered in articles, essays, or books in the past. And there are departments to help you sort everything out. They’ll include 

• Politics & History—crises, the nature of collapse, and signs of hope

• Climate & the Arctic—the fraught history of exploration and the planet’s future

• Appalachian Exile—tales about my spectacularly odd childhood and

• Art Matters—thoughts on narrative in every medium, as well as some of my own artwork and other things I want to share with you.

My writing voice isn’t an institutional one, which means I share stories you’re unlikely to find elsewhere. I’ve long had a subset of writing that doesn’t fit cleanly into the newspaper, magazine, or book format, and I’m excited to make a home for those stories here.

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.

There’s so much to discuss ahead of the election on November 5. And given the historic nature of what the US and the world are facing, all posts during this first month of Degenerate Art will be free to all, in case it might help readers ponder our current predicament and think of ways to take action. (Though 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.