Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York

by Jeremiah Moss

The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class—and their controlling influence. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche.”


In public spaces made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss experienced an uncanny time warp. Biking through deserted Manhattan, he encountered the hustlers, eccentrics, and renegades who had been pressed into silence and invisibility by an oppressive, normative gentrification, now reemerging to reclaim the city. For one wild year the streets belonged to wandering nudists and wheelie bikers, mystical vagabonds and performance artists working to disrupt the status quo, passionate activists protesting for Black lives—along with the everyday New Yorkers who had been pushed to the margins for too long. Participating in a historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity, from queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, Moss discovered an intoxicating freedom. Without “hyper-normal” people to constrain it, New York became more creative, connected, humane, and joyful than it had been in years.


Moss braids this captivating narrative with an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, weaving together insights from psychoanalysis, literature, and queer theory. A kaleidoscopic vision of a city transformed, Feral City offers valuable insight into the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and can be set free.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, New York, Queer, Audiobook, LGBT, Biography Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

Published October 4, 2022

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is excellent and Moss is a grand storyteller. He tells an important story about New York and the pandemic and gentrification and who gets left behind during times of crisis. My rating is just my personal reaction to the material not the quality of the book. So much of the book is predicated on an implied heroism for living and staying in NY which is fine. This city has provided a haven for so many queer kids looking for home. But at times, it felt a bit repetitive and I wanted the overall narrative to have more texture and go beyond the primary argument.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

So the author came to NYC in the 90s and wants to…idk, kick the ladder down behind him for other people? He’s right that NYC is corporatized and expensive, but also, NYC has always been a city for the very wealthy and very poor. I think the book would’ve made a great longform essay, but as a book, it meanders and is incoherent at times.

The author is white, and there is only so much hero worship he can do of the unhoused or the BLM protesters before he starts a professing a sort of discomfort when the attacks get too close to his East Village rent stabilized home.

And what’s the goal here? To take NYC back to the 70s, when crime rates were super high? Instead of obsessively navel gazing about the past why not envision a new future city?

The self righteous just got to a bit much at times. I liked Vanishing New York, but that felt more focused than this. (Also thousands of people died every day during the pandemic in NYC, and the optics of pining for that time are a bit weird, even though, as a NYer, I do understand that the streets were transformed in fascinating and unexpected ways then. But we were also seriously fucking traumatized too.)

[Ellen the Herbivore · Rating 1 out of 5]

Giving myself the gift of not finishing this. I picked it up because his Vanishing NY posts are so good. But this is an article’s worth of material (when the rich people left Manhattan for a while, the rest of us took over and felt free to express ourselves) stretched to book form with his musings on being trans and quotes from gender theorists. I made it 85 pages and then remembered that I need not finish books just for the sake of finishing them.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moss's fascinating narrative chronicles an unprecedented time in New York City's history, as COVID-19 drove newcomers out and left misfits and protesters behind. That first spring and summer of the pandemic formed an incendiary time, what with Black Lives Matters protests, rioting, unnecessary arrests and documented instances of police brutality, and the return of Occupy camps. Moss was right in the middle of it. As a psychoanalyst and trans man, he has a unique perspective on events. The book goes more deeply into queer theory and sociology than some lay readers may be up for. There is occasional jargon. That said, Moss's prose can also be effective and moving. This stands out for its own particulars as well as for the light it sheds on recent history.

See my full review at BookBrowse. (See also my related article, a COVID-19 nonfiction reading list.)

[Sarah Schulman]

Jeremiah Moss holds a cranky beauty in his pen, as he reads and rides - grappling with what happens when the private sector left the city at the height of the pandemic, and the people who share public space were left behind. FERAL CITY asks the most complex questions:Who is the center of our culture? Who just owns the apparatus? What confrontations are necessary for our integrity as a collective? This story is a memory, a documentary, a personal journey, a political manifesto, a searing critique, a human embrace.

[Liv Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books I have ever read. Giving it four stars cos it got kinda philosophical in parts and that was too much for me BUT apart from that!!!!! I LOVED IT. Thank you Jeremiah Moss what a wonderful read about transness in the city, resisting gentrification and embracing the grittiness of our urban environments. This book made me think so much about Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington and how white, rich people shit on Manners Street and Courtney Place, just because our house-less community live predominantly along these streets. If only these upper class freaks actually stopped and had a kōrero with house-less folks they would realise that people who live on the streets are the heart of our cities and deserve to have stable housing.

Made me also think about the so called death of Wellington last year that was such a hoax. People don’t go down lambton quay because a) the govt cut all the jobs and b) lambton quay is a capitalist hellscape full of shops that are not personal to Wellington at all. That street could exist anywhere. Streets like Upper Cuba and Courtney genuinely make me feel connected to Wellington and its small business owners.

We must resist gentrification at all costs, be queer in the city, remember we are on stolen land, and embrace the intricacies and flaws of our urban spaces MAURI ORA

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I should have loved this? But I couldn’t get over feeling like even after more than 20 years of living in NYC (and obviously not leaving during the pandemic because where else would I go), Jeremiah Moss would write me off as not being subversive enough to deserve to be here since I’m not an eccentric performance artist :/

[Mary Amper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good if you treat it as one person’s memoir of 2020. It started off strong but then a lot of the book was focused on being out in the streets with protests. Which is fine, but I guess I was hoping for pandemic nonfic that was more broad in scope or internal in experience

[Kellylynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started out liking this one, a lot. But then about 25 pages in I felt like I was being told the same thing over and over again in different ways. Almost like the author thought of another better way to say the same thing and got excited about it. There are moments where I found myself scanning the words instead of reading. At that point I knew I needed to pause and come back.

Feels like a rambling story of New York; where it was, what it was prior to pandemic and descriptions on where it went during the pandemic. All linked in with the authors ideals of what it all supposedly meant. And interspersed with what the city means to him as a transgender person. Too many concepts, too many meanderings. A lot of it felt like a blog post that could have been.

With about 50 pages left I realized what I was struggling with in the book. The judgement. There is just so much judgement. If you aren't deep in a movement then you aren't good enough. At one point the author asked an artist about what their piece meant to them, then the next paragraph stated that sentiment was wrong.

I actually won this one in one of the giveaways.

[Jordan]

DNF @ pg 52. I thought there was going to be some actual insight and theory here, but no. Just a bunch of pretentious quotes and navel gazing.

[Frank Vasquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fierce, important, and true. In a world of debate over facts and subjectivity, Feral City provides a firsthand source as well as a loose chronology of the brief retaking of New York City by New Yorkers. There is a grief communicated here so deeply that it is felt in every turn of the page, as well as a celebration of the connection and aliveness that New Yorkers felt in the midst of so much death and destruction. If Moss could be faulted for anything, it’s for naked optimism for a better future that replaces hypernormativity, neoliberalism and the police state, with a weird and vibrant today (not Tomorrow) that shares space and awareness with Others and with everyone and everything in this city. And you could almost fault Moss for believing in what this city showed us all it was: a safe space for the many that fight and struggle and survive to create and love and endure in wild and brutal expressions of themselves and life. We can have more for witnessing the less and the lack, and feral New York City proved that. They should be scared of us: these are our streets, this is our city, and we will not accept their “normal.” Feral City is a wonderful tribute and testimony to how true this is and how true it will continue to be in the struggles to come.

[Mark Castaneda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those tough books where I agree with most of the central tenets of the book, but the author is so unbearably annoying in his binary characterization of “us” and “them”. The text reeks of bitterness from being outside the dominant narrative, and chooses to further detract from a better social future by villainizing an abstract class of young people without making a compelling class argument.

The best part of this book is what was pulled from other authors and great thinkers. Many well compiled quotes and theses are collected. However, I feel disconnected from this book despite ageeeing with everything he says. Probably something to be said there about the new generation of queer kids who weren’t bullied growing up? Not sure idk, all I know is that this book offers few solutions in lieu of many complaints.

[Ian Hamilton · Rating 1 out of 5]

This could have been a better book on so many levels. The tone is one of overwhelming crotchetiness; Moss is excessively judgmental (even when/where the criticism and ire are deserving), but the tone makes this one so frustrating to read. The author’s personal immersion in the protests, while laudable, is also borderline comical and juvenile, as he’s often trying to ride the wave of this generic f-you against any perceived representation of authority. Lastly, there’s almost no acknowledgement of specifically how people are suffering from COVID. It’s really a swing and a miss.

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I am not the target audience for this book. The synopsis drew me in. Growing up LGBTQ, I understand the draw of a big city. I also understand cities, especially neighborhoods, change with time. We either adjust or find other neighborhoods to our liking. This book referenced the new people extensively. Repeatedly. Over and over. And again in the next chapter. I felt like I went no where. I would have been happier with a shorter, tighter book. A Reader’s Digest if you will.

[Kristi Marshae]

Can’t rate this one, perhaps because I’m too close to the subject matter and my experience of living in nyc during the pandemic in general. I see so much of myself in the grief within this book, it is validating and painful all at once.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I expected was a reasonably balanced report on what New York was like during the pandemic. What I got was a narrow repetitive view from the the prospective of a transsexual psychoanalyst. The author describes how the "ultra-normals" flock from the city and how those who stay take back their city. The author frequently scoffs and criticize the normals. The problem with that is most of us are normal and do not sympathize with most of the author's views. Loud boom boxes, homeless taking over parks, graffiti, destruction of property and intimation of ordinary people are not something that I agree with. Though I am willing to admit the police can be brutal and carry their power too far.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this more than I anticipated and it really took me back to 2020 and what we experienced during the Covid lockdowns. Moss offers his perspective and view of New York in an entertaining and unique style.

[Rob Schorr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring, insightful look from behind the scenes of what NYC was really like during the pandemic. Quite contrary to the media portrayal, the city is very much alive and kicking. F-ing great read!

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Ned Kuczmynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

People watching: the book

[sid graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 — Subversive yet repetitive. I see how the repetition mirrors the “trapped but alive” energy of the pandemic (especially in New York), but it started to feel more like circling than drilling down. I wish there were fewer essays that went deeper. There’s great stuff and then just okay stuff. I really enjoyed the diary-like aspects more than the theorizing. His tone and voice are grounded, biting, and genuinely tender, which made it a more pleasurable read. It felt passively liberating just to read and feel it, a reminder of what it means to exist outside the system for a bit.

What is especially good, though, is the sense of liberation that emerges through community. As the “normals” fled during COVID-19, the “leftovers” banded together. They looked out for each other, shared resources, and felt “part of the fabric of power,” a reality that is deeply affirming and empowering but often suppressed through social conformity, which thrives on profit over connection. Keeping resistance isolated creates powerlessness; together, it suddenly feels possible to change things. It is really refreshing to remember that right now.

———

⛓️‍💥So much forgetting. The minds of the New People are elsewhere. They don't know where they are or what they have… They aren't really here. Caught in the trap of being the New People, they are alienated from here. All that absence makes the city a lonelier place. I miss the New York mind.

⛓️‍💥I break into sobs, clashing joy and grief, because everywhere is death yet it feels so alive.

⛓️‍💥Feeling a certain shame in my joy, I consult the poets. Mary Oliver, what should I do? "If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy," she replies, "don't hesitate." Langston Hughes chimes in, "Sometimes a crumb falls from the tables of joy." Should I grab it? "Joy is not made to be a crumb," Mary counters. But what if that's all I'm allowed? Well, she sighs, "don't be afraid of its plenty."

⛓️‍💥The city's id is shaking loose. Impulses, constrained by the order of civilization, are pushing upward. I'll say it again: We have no stores, no shoppers, no restaurant reviews or fashion trends to incite consumption and competition, no office workers rushing around, no eyes staring at iPhones, no outward signs of bourgeois acquisition and productivity. For over two months, we've been left alone. This is a profound shift. As Herbert Marcuse explained, for the modern capitalist system to dominate, "The individual is not to be left alone."

⛓️‍💥Free-market capitalism doesn't have much use for human tenderness. It isn't profitable.

⛓️‍💥That subtle violence is the element I am trying to excavate. The hyper-normal's disinclination to see the humanness of others—his not thinking, not looking, shutting out—is not just a refusal to engage. It is an act of aggression and control.

⛓️‍💥But the quiet coercion of normativity is harder to see and that makes it harder to resist. Discipline is regulatory, aligned with heteronormativity and capitalism for the purpose of increasing production, and because this system punishes deviance and rewards compliance, the winners are the productive and the reproductive. The more they conform, the more they are rewarded—and the more, I believe, they act as agents of the controlling system, using their power as winners to exert downward control on deviants. Winners or losers, however, we all participate to some extent in this system. We are all docile bodies, because discipline also functions through internalization.

⛓️‍💥”If power is exercised too violently," Foucault explained, "there is the isk of provoking revolts." Don't send in riot cops. Send in cameras. Send in eyes. Power must be exercised quietly and continuously through surveillance, so there is "no need for arms, physical violence, or material restraints. Just an observing gaze that each individual feels weighing on him, and ends up internalizing to the point that he is his own overseer: everyone in this way exercises surveillance over and against himself."

⛓️‍💥When I hear my voice, I am thunderous and wild, like my mother could be thunderous and wild, so the roaring fuck I unleash is a maternal fuck, tracing back through my matriarchal ancestors—Italian grandmother with her strong hands, great-aunties throwing scissors and knives, great-grandmother wielding a meat cleaver to fight off Irish gangs, great-unto great-grandmothers doing god knows what to survive the old peasant country's predations. Mitochondrial, abyssal, this ‘fuck’ is fathoms deep, lifetimes of rage and frustration deep, guttural, from the gutter, covered in muck and motherfuck. I learned young how to wield this word, it was born into me, and it comes with claws. The man knows it, too. He freezes. I have spurned his Sacred Child, the object that carries the seed of his power into the future with a transfer of heritable wealth that ensures domination for generations. The man steps forward with clenched fists. When he tries to follow me inside, I close the door on his face and keep moving, my heart hot with lush defiance.

⛓️‍💥There is possibility in the ruins…

⛓️‍💥We're free to grow sideways. I had forgotten this.

⛓️‍💥The presence of such abundance, this unconditional giving, can interrupt our sense of scarcity. That alone is revolutionary.

⛓️‍💥And it's how relationships that really matter are built, through the incurring of debts that don't—which can't possibly—get paid off. To be preoccupied with paying it back can look like fairness, but it makes it transactional.

⛓️‍💥Why is a trans girl with a Sharpie such a threat to law and order? And what, exactly, is being protected?

⛓️‍💥Back in the park, I talk with an older Black woman, a poet from Harlem, who tells me she walked all the way downtown, six long miles, just to dance at the party. "When I'm dancing," she says, "I really feel free.
This is my private democracy. Dancing outside, by myself, with other people." And then the cops swarmed in. "They were like bees, she says, squeezing her eyes shut, "angry bees in black and yellow shirts." They stopped the music, destroyed the art, and shoved people to the ground. "Then they surrounded us," she says. "It was terrifying. Why did they do that? We just wanted to dance."

⛓️‍💥We call this "holding space," and how different is it from psychoanalytic concepts of the holding environment, potential space, the container-contained? "It is in the space between inner and outer world," wrote
D. W. Winnicott, "which is also the space between people—the transitional space—that intimate relationships and creativity occur."

⛓️‍💥You can hear it, too, purring like a humming-bird, and then it's there at your cheek, so close it feels like a kiss about to land, and brrrr, there it goes, rocketing by, and I am not going to cry, I'm not, but this is flying—I mean, for days, whenever I think of this night, my eyes will burn with salt.

⛓️‍💥Next comes a cluster of thoughts that feel like not-me, thoughts from outside. The constellation first manifests in a sense of scarcity. For the past year, I felt largely satisfied with my life. My apartment, in all its shabbiness, felt cozy. I was comfortable in my body and didn't think about buying "nice" clothes or losing weight. I felt neither deprived nor competitive. But now, as normal returns, my thoughts shift to shopping, exercise, productivity, and I know: I'm back in the grip of internalized capitalism. A social disease, capitalism travels virally from host to host, and while many of us are carriers, the hyper-normals, those successful neoliberal subjects, are super-spreaders, shedding massive doses, exhaling capitalism's viral particles in invisible plumes the rest of us can't avoid breathing. Most don't intend to infect others, but many do. Isn't that what "influencing" is about? Isn't that why they turn themselves into advertisements, to stimulate lack? Sometimes I feel envy for what I don't want. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between what I want and what I've been told to want. My desire has been colonized.

⛓️‍💥I am with my people—seen and met, part of the fabric of power.

⛓️‍💥Restraining the park is about something else—race, class, and the reproduction of capitalism. Using Foucault's concept of illegalisms, we can see that both populations ignore the same rules, but only one is criminalized. The "bourgeois illegalism" of loud music is productive, attracting diners to spend money and enhance New York's competitive image. The music in the park, however, is a "lower-class or popular illegalism," anti-productive, for pleasure and connection. It is a wrench in the works.

⛓️‍💥As I wait between the waves, I console myself with this thought: The defiant soul of the city doesn't die. It stays alive, right below the surface, pressing up against the boot heels, crouched like the life inside an egg, the force that drives the flower, forever reaching for its next breath.

[Gina Notes · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I have lots of thoughts and feelings on this book which are mixed and this review will be all over the place, but I am curious what other NYers think about this. I listened on audio and felt that Moss was a very engaging and intelligent writer. As a white trans man and psychoanalyst, he provided a unique perspective on what it was like being in NYC during the COVID lockdown. I think it’s an important story and I could relate in some ways, as we were in Brooklyn during lockdown, so I’m glad it was documented. That said my experience as well as my entire life experience is also vastly different than his. I was stuck in my 2 bedroom apartment with 3 children, working from home and doing remote school, reading the news and trying to stay safe from the virus. I wasn’t out and about in Washington Square dancing in the park and I did not attend many BLM protests in person out of fear of the virus and said obligation to my children (although I feel I tried to support in other ways). I do agree though that there was a coming together of those who stayed behind and that the majority people who fled had a lot of money and privilege…and yes, I admit we did eventually leave for a period and time in the summer when it got too much for us to be in our apartment after months of living on top of each other, and that our privilege allowed us to do so. He makes some great points about capitalism and gentrification, and also describes the police brutality during that time frame. That said, he is also white and the fact that he got a book deal rather than a black BLM organizer also makes a statement about our current society. I feel like the author is very judgy, which I can understand in some way, as it likely stems from a lifetime of feeling judged himself, but it still kinda irked me, but maybe that just me being defensive, because I feel like he would have judged me personally??? I also feel that he only speaks in extremes when it comes to groups of people. I feel that there is definitely more of a larger “in-between” group of people that are not necessarily “hyper-normal” but also not “deviant.” There were essential workers and those helping the community of Covid sufferers that were not really discussed and I knew plenty of people who stayed in the city and did get out there to protest, but that also lead more “normative” lives. He also continuously describes “new people,” and that felt a little hypocritical considering he was once new to the city as well. And most NYers were new at one time or another. That said, I appreciated how he dove into the sociology of it all and I learned a bit about queer theory as well. I always find it fascinating and interesting to hear different points of view and I learned a lot about the community of NY that he found comfort in. Overall, I felt a theme of wanting to belong…regardless of being “hyper-normal” or “deviant,” as humans we do tend to want to belong to something. And reading this is a also a reminder to hold space for others, to be curious and kind, and to acknowledge others, rather than just taking up space.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trans man who gets heavily involved in BLM protests and Occupy movement in NYC in 2020 and apparently kept meticulous records of it all. Mixes in some discussion of his perspective as a psychoanalytic social worker. Cannot STAND well-to-do white gentrifiers who, in his view, wimpily gave up on NYC during the pandemic and then flocked back to it after vaccines came online. The "New People", the "hyper-normal" etc. come in for a verbal bruising here for 264 pages.

Sharp turns of phrase, and vivid descriptions of street/park protest scenes. What dragged it down for me.........

1. I'm mostly on board with his world view but was not inspired by some of the instantiation of it -- notably his (to me) peculiar (for a 50-year old) fascination with saying or writing F...K over and over. Reminded me of being an angry 15-year old who has just figured out that the adults don't have it all under control and figured out, but maybe that's just me.

2. High level of repetition. The acknowledgements thank someone for having seen something in a "handful of my cranky Facebook posts and helped turn them into an essay for n + 1, improbably setting this book in motion" (p. 265). I'd like to go back to that person and suggest that his contribution was reverse alchemy. Maybe I'll wait a year or so till I've forgotten the book and look up that essay; i bet it's fresh and strong writing with an edgy point of view.....

......but that doesn't mean it needs to be blown up into a book. The extremely detailed descriptions of eccentric, likely mentally ill, characters he meets on the street; the numerous and near-identical replays of hugs (he always "thinks about COVID" but hugs the person anyway) he shared, the litanies of store or brand name insults (J Crew features prominently) leveled at the hyper-normal; the craigslist-worthy detailed descriptions of furniture the New People leave on sidewalk as they abandon NYC; etc. etc. etc. etc. got to be too much by a factor of at least 10.

Should have DNF'ed, but he's a good enough writer that I kept thinking there was going to be a different point to be made just around the corner.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does do plenty of Real New York gatekeeping and contradiction. Complaining that the loud party noise the transplants make in public spaces is bad while celebrating that the loud party noise the og new yorkers make in public spaces is good actually. Ironically, the author posits a firm binary of the hypernormal neoliberal subjects and the Real New Yorkers+the gays+people of color that feels too limiting; I personally am a transplant, have lived here 9 years, did not leave during the pandemic, don’t really plan to ever leave as long as I can swing it bc this is where my community is now. What I loved about this book was that it captured how WEIRD it was to live in New York during the pandemic, the factors that made some parts of the experience oddly massively improved over the monoculture hub this place can be, what it felt like during the summer where the police state said the quiet part out loud and like literally everyone was going to get beaten arrested or killed by state violence, what it feels like to mourn the return to neoliberal business as usual. Then again, does not seem to contain a single sentence about how the main thing I remember from these years was the constant fear I was going to get and spread Covid and kill innocent strangers and/or loved ones, which, odd choice.

Also, as a Brooklynite, enjoyed hearing from someone who actually likes Manhattan. Interesting! I still hate it but interesting!

[Theresa Verhaalen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeremiah has hit it out of the park with Feral City. It’s important to note that he’s trans because I see that being left out of other reviews, just whining on about his assistance to go up against the forces of the new people in Manhattan.

But it’s so much more than that. My mom grew up in the city in the 50s and 60s before she moved to New Jersey. The city that I knew that I would visit in the 80s and 90s has now been homogenized. It’s ridiculous.

Reading about people, complaining about noise, cursing out loud, and dressing, all alive, all the while blindly, unaware of their neighbors that have lived here for years, you would think the setting would be the Midwest, but it’s New York.
My mouth hanging open in shock just realizing that people are like this at this time in the city of all places.

Hearing about the pandemic from an insider within, this city is irresistible to read about. It must’ve been magical to have back the peace and quiet, while the new people left for a time anyway.

Definitely worth a read. I hope Jeremiah doesn’t give up and keeps going forward because I’d love to read about what he experiences.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This caught my eye at the bookstore and I opened it at random to a chapter titled “I Would Prefer Not To”. I then proceeded to read a passage that resonated so deeply with me in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book was full of mean-spirited rants about the people living in New York who are apparently ruining the city for him. I might give him a pass if he was a native, but there was a point in time when he was a newcomer in New York just like the people he’s bitching about. Except he thinks he’s better than them because he’s not rich and has lived the “real New York experience”.

And one more thing, we don’t need any more pandemic books.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. Terrible.

[Danny]

A real NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND for NIMBY clowns. Hated it.

[Jana Viktoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I read Health and Safety I am thinking a lot about my COVID experience and what it was that made me want to leave Berlin. Having lived in (shortly) and fallen for (immediately) NYC I thought Feral City might help me figure this out.

And it somehow does.

I feel the bill I experienced was different from the New York City in 2020, pre-Covid, that Moss describes. The Berlin I lived in, was not yet entirely tamed, but well in the process of becoming so. Also, I’ve never really been part of subculture, neither in Berlin, Noren, NYC, nor anywhere for that matter. In fact, I admit to being scared of some protest moves, sever, disappearance, art that is very much out there in your face. I also admit to white privilege, just as I admit to sis, gender privilege, and hetero privilege. But I do think that I was attracted to cities, because I felt confined in the place where I grew up, or rather like an outcast, someone who didn’t really belong to the norms applicable to and adhere to in that place. I was not, never, the pretty blonde girl with the pearl earrings and the polo shirt. I was not the one who played tennis and danced ballet. I was that tomboy who climbed trees and read books. I wasn’t popular and not part of the party crowd, or at least not part of the popular party crowd. I was happy being outside with horses and dogs, and later found my freedom at hip-hop parties and dancing to some weird alternative bands who hardly knew how to play a guitar. Maybe that does count as subculture in someway or form. It was my own subculture though.

And yes, this thing about having my own subculture drew me to cities, to Berlin, to NYC.

My break with the city, with Berlin that is, probably happened before Covid, when I realized that the freedom I was seeking there, wasn’t happening. Rather than living my own subculture, whatever that would be, I was trying to live up to even more norms applicable to and adhere to and that place. They were different than in the town. I grew up in, but still, they weren’t mine. I’m looking back. I wanna say they were more annoying.

What Moss describes as the new people, the ones who bumped into you on and otherwise empty sidewalk, but don’t even look at you, that thing is very real in Berlin. The influencers posing for selfies and being attached first and foremost to the mirrors, the people who marked themselves such as much as they consume, the new people.

So all the social anxiety that I’ve been carrying all my life, rather than decreasing, increased and at times skyrocketed in Berlin. I don’t wanna say I was miserable, as my insecure ways of dealing with my anxiety include repression, negation, numbing myself. But yeah, I was miserable. And I only realize that with Covid. Because suddenly everything went so quiet. Everything including the norms I never really fit into.

So I didn’t leave Berlin because of Covid, but because I realized that the freedom I had hoped to find there, was an illusion, and that I never really felt free in that place.

I have no idea, simply doesn’t have because I have been there for five years, how I would feel in NYC, or in Philadelphia, a city by the way for which I totally fell.

But moving out of the city, certainly induced by Covid, made me realize that I find my freedom and nature. And much of what Moss right I can totally identify with. Forces of nature, whether they be in the city, as people are allowed to, or at least able to be the unruly selves again, or out here in the countryside, where there are simply are a fewer people.

Long story short I found my freedom. And I know why I left. But I still love New York and I actually still love Berlin but maybe that’s nostalgia.

[Liz DiGennaro]

I have mixed and slightly esoteric feelings on this one. At a high level, Moss is an extremely talented, whimsical writer with a strong sense of voice and purpose. His sentences are poetic in their depiction of New York’s subversive underbelly. As a New Yorker, I loved his both humanization and romanticization of the various characters he encounters - Joker, Crackhead Barney, Sprinkles, and Piggy, to name a few. Many of these individuals are folks I’ve too seen gallivanting around Times Square or Washington Square Park, but never stopped to converse with.

Moss slightly loses me on two points. First, his overall tone is condescending and judgmental. He chastises the “hyper-normal” for their unwillingness to interact with the “feral” explosion of subculture that occurred during the pandemic, but simultaneously turns away from the movement when it becomes inconvenient for him. For instance, he, a trained psychotherapist, declines to treat psychotic patients coalesced with the Occupy City Hall movement because he is afraid. These inconsistencies seem, at times, hypocritical, particularly given that Moss is white and educated.

Second, I wish Moss had offered something in the way of prescriptiveness. Even a chapter or two at the end would have gone a long way to clarifying his objective. Was his goal simply to complain? What does he imagine as the ideal end state? This, for me, is a critical missing element - as a New Yorker, one who Moss would probably qualify as a “hyper-normal”, I want to understand how to better support the artisans and radicals who have shaped the city. It seems as though Moss views himself as completely alienated from broader city culture, but in his writing, I recognized many of his feelings and experiences. By failing to reach out to his audience, Moss missed an opportunity to not just change minds, but change behaviors.

I don’t typically rate non-fiction, but this probably would have been 4 stars, rounded up.