New from me in The UnPopulist on the occasion of making it through one full year of the second Trump presidency.

A positive for my reading life this year is that I’ve been reading more non-fiction than ever, though concentrated online thanks to running the link-sharing platform Seabird and curating our weekly Tidings newsletter of recommended stories. The downside of this is that I read fewer non-fiction books this year than at any time in memory, though I did make time for novels. Writing another of my own books certainly didn’t help either, and I’m excited for that project to be published this fall. I’ll have to do better in the year ahead. That said, here’s this year’s post rounding up the standout books I read in 2025.

Non-fiction:

The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes — Speaking of being distracted from reading, this is the most relevant current events book I read last year, critiquing the all-encompassing pulls for our attention online. I’m sympathetic to the diagnosis, if less so for suggested regulatory fixes. Worth reading alongside recent works by Robert Talisse; I also discussed the book a bit in my recent article about the Portland protests.

The Voltage Effect, John A. List — I rarely read business books, but this one on figuring out how to make good ideas scale is both good and relevant to my work on Seabird.

A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France, Ned Palmer — Picked up for a visit to France this summer. An English cheesemonger takes a trip around the country, highlighting the cheeses of each region and how they were shaped by local history. Very enjoyable!

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail, David Wondrich and Dean Kotz — It’s cocktails, it’s comics, and it’s by David Wondrich, so it’s no surprise that I liked it. I reviewed it here.

Modern Caribbean Rum, Matt Pietrek and Carrie Smith — At 850 pages I’ll confess I didn’t read this one cover-to-cover, but it’s an indispensable resource if you’re interested in rum, and it was invaluable to me in understanding facets of rum production.

Fiction:

Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan — Superb novel about life in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka during the civil war with the Tamil Tigers. So grounded in and reminiscent of actual events that I constantly had to remind myself that it was a work of fiction. If I have to choose, this is the best novel I read all year.

Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior — Immersive magical realism set among the post-slavery but still oppressed tenant farmers of Brazil.

Felony Juggler, Penn Jillette — Autofiction from Penn of Penn and Teller fame. Not quite but almost autobiography, at least up to the part where the felony murder happens and the fictional plot gets properly set in motion, but as close we’ll likely get from him. A fun, comedic noir romp. Reviewed here.

The Magician of Lublin, Isaac Bashevis Singer — Whenever I travel somewhere new, I pick up a novel set there to read during the trip. For a visit to Krakow and Warsaw, this story of a womanizing Polish magician unsurprisingly appealed to me. My first read of Singer, recommended.

The Anomaly, Herve Le Tellier — Similarly for France, I finally got around to this popular, mildly sci-fi novel by a French author. Intriguing premise that takes a while to reveal itself (I suggest not reading the description), hard to put down.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley — My previous visit to Switzerland introduced me to le Carré’s The Night Manager, but this year Shelley’s Frankenstein called out to me, in part due to hype for the new movie adaptation. Of course I knew the beats of the story, but it’s excellent on its own merits and rewards taking the short time to read it to experience how sensational it must have felt when new.

The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving — I was expecting something a bit lighter for this pick for my summer vacation in New Hampshire. Very funny and imaginative in parts; whether it carries the weight of its darker elements is debatable. I’m intrigued enough to try more of Irving’s work.

I’ve been remiss in updating the blog! But for The Unpopulist, I wrote about joining the Portland anti-ICE protests:

This was very much not my typical Wednesday night. Though I live in Portland, where protesting is one of the city’s favorite pastimes, my preferred mode of political activism is sitting in a coffeeshop typing words on a screen. I’m less inclined to assemble in large groups in which my message is limited to what I can convey on a sign or t-shirt, surrounded by other protesters whose views may be at odds with my own. In Portland, the message of late had been reduced to pure absurdity, images of human-sized frogs staring impassively back at lines of federal officers in riot gear. As the protest went viral, I found myself intrigued to join. “What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked. I wanted to know what it’s like to be an inflatable frog.

And for the Examiner, I reviewed David Wondrich’s new Comic Book History of the Cocktail:

Thanks to several decades of comic book saturation at the movies, we all know the plot beats of a superhero epic. An intriguing origin. A rise to power. An unexpected fall followed by a journey in the wilderness. Finally, a heroic victory and return, coming back stronger and wiser than before. 

It’s not too much of a stretch to apply that story arc to the cocktail, the subject of the latest book from drink historian David Wondrich. In The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On, Wondrich teams up with illustrator Dean Kotz to tell the story of the mixed drink, from the hazy origins of the first punches to the dark days of Prohibition and disco-era Harvey Wallbangers, to the contemporary revival of old-school drinks, forgotten ingredients, and culinary prestige in the bar world.

This Saturday, October 18, is the next No Kings protest in the United States and around the world. Millions of people are going to show up for it. You should be one of them. I say this as someone who is not a natural protester. I’m a writer and my default mode of political activism is sitting in a coffeeshop writing words on my laptop, figuring out precisely what I want to say, and putting it out in a magazine or blog to reach whomever wants to read it. (Which is what I’m doing right now actually, greetings from The Madison Place in Cincinnati.) Protesting is messier. You’re in a big group, your message is limited to what you can fit on a sign or t-shirt, and other people around you might be conveying other messages that you don’t agree with at all. That’s OK, you should go anyway.

Right now there is value in simply showing up. The first message is simply numbers, a demonstration that Trump’s anti-constitutional power grabs, corruption, and cruelty are deeply unpopular. The more millions, the clearer the message. Your individual contribution to this is quite small, but if you care about the future of this country, it’s worth going.

The second message of the protests is that the Trump regime is not normal. For Americans who either don’t follow news closely or ensconce themselves in news silos that only reinforce their own views, it may not be obvious that Trump presents a decisive break with normal politics and a genuine threat to Constitutional government and our democracy. One goal of the protest is to raise the alarm and shake such people out of their complacency. This is where you may be positioned to play a more valuable role. The less of a natural protester you are, the louder the signal you send by you taking time out of your Saturday to march and wave a sign.

I live in Portland, Oregon, where protesting is a municipal pastime. Still, some people are more likely to protest than others. We expect to see the young and nonconformist at a protest; we expect to see the friend who never shuts up about politics in his Facebook posts. It’s great that they’re there, but it’s not surprising. You showing up to a protest might be. Are you not particularly vocal about politics? Do you have a comfortable job or home life that’s not directly threatened by Trump in any obvious way? Do you have lots of other things you could be doing instead? Great! That makes you the perfect kind of person to send a message by joining a protest.

The social media era has been terrible for political discourse in many ways, but one good thing to come out of it is that you can instantly broadcast your presence at a protest to a wider audience. Awareness of your attendance isn’t limited to the people who happen to see you, who likely agree with you anyway. With a quick post on social media, you can show your entire online social network that you’re there. And I mean you, specifically. Whoever you are, you presumably have people in that network who respect and admire you. Maybe they’re childhood friends, people from church, people from work, other parents from your kid’s soccer team. By showing up and posting, you send them the message that Trump’s anti-constitutional takeover of the government is genuinely alarming and encourage the norm that they should take part in opposing it too. (Again, all the more the so the less likely they are to perceive you as a natural protester.)

You might even get lucky and amplify your message even more widely. I happened to be traveling in Denver during the big protest in April, but I took a little time out of my day to show up at the local protest and post a photo to Facebook. That led to questions from a reporter and getting quoted in coverage from CBS News. It was a lucky break, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing you can count on, but it definitely would not have happened if I’d gone to brunch instead.

Also, going to a protest can be fun. It’s an opportunity to meet up with friends and walk around your city. The photo at the top of this post was from the first No Kings protest in June, when we happened to be in Prague. (Why am I always traveling on the protest days?) I got to meet a longtime internet friend and then explore the city and attend a Czech beer festival. You can do the same kind of thing wherever you are. If showing up alone seems daunting, make a plan to go with friends. (That said, showing up alone is fine! You’ll likely find plenty of people willing to welcome you in and possibly some signs to carry.)

Republican leaders are absurdly trying to portray these protests as “Hate America” rallies run by the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party. It’s a ridiculous smear. The big protests are fun and positive, attended by all sorts of people genuinely committed to preserving constitutional government from Trump’s dictatorial aspirations. The scenes are people dancing in frog costumes and ukulele bands playing Woodie Guthrie. The atmosphere is often fun and festival-like, and you can contribute to making it even more so.

If you’re reading this, you presumably know how bad things are. You also know that all is not yet lost. Whatever your differences with other protesters, those can be worked out in the course of normal politics, when and if we finally return to that. Now is a time for joining. If you want to look back at this era and know that you took some part in opposing the encroaching evil, the least you can do is show up to a protest near you this Saturday. You might even discover that you’re having fun.

Twice a year or so, I compile a playlist of recent music I’ve been enjoying as a kind of personal time capsule. Here’s the latest, featuring some favorite songs from 2025 so far.

Lots of recent articles I haven’t shared here yet! First up, I’m in the Unpopulist talking about Superman, MAGA, and Grant Morrison:

To start with the obvious—and with a once unobjectionable aspect of the character that the current crop of right-wing commentators find deeply upsetting (more on that below)—Superman wasn’t born here. He is an immigrant, an alien, a refugee, a baby sent via rocketship from a dying planet to come crashing uninvited into the arms of America. His Kryptonian biology and the rays of our yellow sun would eventually make him stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s the benevolence of Smallville farmers Ma and Pa Kent that make him Superman. To take the story literally, America’s most iconic superhero spent his youth as an undocumented farm worker.

From the very beginning, the story of Superman—originally co-written by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both sons of Jewish immigrants—is the promise of America: no matter where you come from there is room for you here to become your greatest self. The fantastical hero they created together in Cleveland may have looked like a corn-fed Kansas farmboy—a Black or Jewish Superman wouldn’t have flown in 1938—but it’s no coincidence that he came from another world.

Also at Unpopulist, I wrote about tariffs as a tax on delight:

We often think about tariffs as merely increasing prices, which is certainly bad enough. But you can also think of them as forcing regression to a less prosperous time. One of the most notable ways American life has improved in recent decades is our abundance of higher quality and more varied food and drink. Tariffs threaten to reverse that progress.

For the Examiner, I reviewed Penn Jillette’s fun new novel Felony Juggler:

“Bob Dylan never really did it, he never hopped a train, but I really did,” writes Poe Legette, the protagonist of Felony Juggler, a new novel from magician, upright bass player, and author Penn Jillette. Or maybe it’s Jillette talking. The line between Poe and Penn is blurry. The book draws heavily on Jillette’s years as a street performing juggler and self-described “carny trash” before he hit it big as the talkative half of the magic duo Penn and Teller. There are no TV shows or glitzy Vegas theaters here; this story takes place on street corners and at Renaissance fairs of the 1970s, any place a loudmouth with three clubs and a dialed-in routine could make a little cash.

For Inside Hook, I reviewed the stellar new mixer from Ooni:

For those of us who are into making pizza, the past decade has been an exciting era of innovation for the final minutes of the process: most notably, the invention of home ovens capable of reaching temperatures in excess of 900 degrees, bringing true Neapolitan-style pizzas right to our backyards. There’s been less innovation aimed at the crucial first few minutes, the time when flour, water, salt and yeast come together to make a dough. That changes with the release of the new Ooni Halo Pro Spiral Mixer, a versatile appliance that’s designed specifically with great pizza in mind.

Lastly, in June I traveled to Warsaw to give a keynote presentation at the Global Forum on Nicotine covering tobacco harm reduction and the media. You can stream it here.

Back in 2022, I wrote a big feature for Reason magazine about how tobacco policies were tipping past mere regulation to enter a new era of actual prohibition. As part of that story, I interviewed drug policy expert Ethan Nadelmann. Here’s what he had to say:

“I think that people in tobacco control, including in the harm reduction community, have become kind of comfortable with how to live with an illicit market,” says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “But I think that they’re not conscious that there can be a tipping point when you keep pushing more and more of the market into the underground, into the prohibitionist market, where it’s entirely unregulated. The more intensive the prohibitions, the higher the profits go.”

[…]

Tight restrictions on tobacco are, as Nadelmann notes, criminogenic: By forcing buyers and suppliers into illicit markets, they create crime where none previously existed. Even if possession of tobacco products remains legal, many small-time dealers likely will be drawn to the illicit trade. That will expose them to harassment by cops, potentially violent confrontations, arrest, and incarceration. Judging from what has happened with the drug war, crackdowns on “loosie” sales, and enforcement of outdoor smoking and vaping bans, the impact of the new restrictions will land most heavily on racial minorities and people of modest means.

Around the same time, I wrote a separate article predicting that the spread of statewide bans on flavored tobacco products would lead in the near future to the incarceration of sellers, pointing to Massachusetts as one of the places where it would likely happen first. Massachusetts banned all flavored products, including menthol cigarettes and non-tobacco flavored e-cigarettes, effective in 2020. While selling forbidden products is itself only a misdemeanor, the move to illicit markets also violates state tax laws. And not paying excise taxes is a felony offense.

Since the Massachusetts flavor ban has encouraged a massive illicit market leading to numerous seizures and arrests, it was only a matter of time before one of those sellers ended up behind bars. This month, it happened. My latest piece for Reason looks at the case of vape shop owner Ashraf Youssef, who is now serving six months in the House of Correction.

As noted in minutes from a local Board of Health meeting, Youssef was frequently selling flavored products:

In December of 2021, for example, a “Tobacco Control Manager stopped at the establishment, witnessed the sale of flavored tobacco products, and found 300 disposable flavored vapes.” And in March of 2022, “The Marlborough Police Department was sent to investigate suspicious activity in the parking lot of AAA Smoke & Vape. They determined the business has a car parked outside where patrons can walk up & purchase flavored vape products for cash.”

These violations led to fines and suspension of his license, which is how tobacco control advocates ideally imagine such enforcement working. But since he was also bringing the products in illicitly from out of state, he simultaneously violated tax laws, leading to a guilty plea for attempted tax evasion and a sentence of six months behind bars.

Although violating the flavor ban is not technically the statute that put him in jail, the outcome is the same. And it’s exactly what many of us — Nadelmann, myself, the ACLU and other organizations — warned will happen when prohibitionist policies force products onto the illicit market. Nor will this case be the last: there are at least two other felony prosecutions underway in Massachusetts arising from the sale of flavored tobacco products, these two even more unambiguously related to the state’s creation of illicit markets.

There are other pragmatic reasons to be skeptical of bans on flavored e-cigarettes, most notably that they appear to result in more people smoking far more dangerous conventional cigarettes. To those reasons we can now add another, which is that by banning voluntary transactions between consenting adults, they create crime where none existed before. It’s a familiar consequence of prohibition, and it shouldn’t be surprising to find that it applies to nicotine and tobacco too.

I have a really fun new feature at Slate digging into some very strange coffees:

The weirdest coffee I’ve ever tasted is one I found at a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, last fall. Like many coffee enthusiasts, I usually buy beans based on the country of origin or the reputation of the roaster, but that day something different beckoned. It was a bag labeled “watermelon co-ferment” from Quindio, Colombia. “Coffee and watermelon flavors eloquently mingle,” promised the label.

I brought the beans home with no idea of what to expect. I’m used to picking up subtle tasting notes in coffee, a hint of cacao, or even blueberry. This was something else entirely. As soon as I opened the bag, aroma of watermelon erupted forth. In the cup, that flavor dominated every other aspect. This was no hint of fruit. This was hyperreal watermelon, amped up to 11. Drinking this coffee felt closer to sucking on a Jolly Rancher candy than sipping a standard cup of joe. I’d never tasted coffee like this. I wasn’t sure coffee should taste like this.

The piece digs into the intriguing and controversial practice of co-fermentation, fermenting coffee beans alongside other fruits and spices. If you’re a coffee lover, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

Over at Liberal Currents, I have a new piece up on Portland, protests, and pardons, defending the city from right-wing stereotypes and making the case that the 2020 protests here in no way justify Trump’s mass pardon of the Capitol rioters:

If one insists on drawing comparisons, it’s also worth emphasizing that the 2020 protests in Portland and the January 6 protest at the Capitol differed in their aims. The former were at bottom a response to the homicide of George Floyd at the hands of police; to the extent that protesters were united by any single aim, it was to demand reform to violent policing. The Portland protests were fundamentally democratic, a visible expression of popular sentiment intended to influence elected officials and raise the salience of the issue.

The January 6 protest, in contrast, was explicitly anti-democratic. The aim was not to influence politics through persuasion but rather to forcefully overturn American voters’ decision to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Every legal avenue for challenging the results, no matter how ludicrous or conspiratorial, had already been tried and rejected, often by judges appointed by Trump himself. All that remained was the threat of violence against Congress and the vice president for carrying out their constitutional duties, which the rioters eagerly undertook with actual violence against Capitol Police and threats of hanging for figures like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

Read the whole thing here, and read Liberal Currents generally. It’s an essential publication right now and Adam Gurri is doing fantastic work publishing it.

My review of Henry Oliver’s new book Second Act is also out:

There’s a joke that goes around on Halloween about dressing up as a gifted child. “What are you supposed to be?” people ask. Punchline: “I was supposed to be a lot of things.” If that joke resonates with you, then you may want to pick up Henry Oliver’s new book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.

Read it here, or here without a paywall.