For the Washington Examiner, I reviewed Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent new book on Chinese food, Invitation to a Banquet:

At first, I lamented the lack of recipes, but many of these dishes would be wildly impractical to cook at home. Bear’s paw, an archaic dish chosen to illustrate interest in the rare and exotic, is not something you’re going to find in the butcher’s counter at Whole Foods. You could perhaps obtain enough duck tongues to prepare a meal, but cooking them for yourself somewhat misses the point. The appeal of duck tongue lies less in its particular culinary qualities than in the blunt fact that there is only one per duck. To be served the duck’s tongue or the pig’s ears or the goose’s feet is a sign of status. “The frisson of knowing that you are the chosen ones, dining on the finest and scarcest ingredients the restaurant has to offer, is one of the secret pleasures of the Chinese gourmet,” Dunlop writes.

Ungated link here.

At Slate, I warned that a federal menthol ban would be an unwisely risky political move for Biden:

The danger for Biden is that while most voters might not care too strongly about a ban either way, the group of people who actually smoke menthols care very much. This wouldn’t matter if the president were elected by popular vote, relative to which the number of menthol smokers motivated to vote on the issue is likely small. But what counts for 2024 are the margins in swing states. Some of these were extremely narrow in 2020, with Biden winning Georgia and Arizona by fewer than 12,000 votes. In that context, the risk of losing votes from some of the millions of Americans who smoke menthol cigarettes is worth taking seriously.

In this case, the Biden admin appears to agree with me! A couple weeks after I wrote this, they announced that the ban has been indefinitely put on hold.