Author: jacob (Page 4 of 7)

It’s a week to publication day, so I should probably mention on my blog that I have a new book coming out? It’s true! Back in late 2019, my friend Brett Adams and I mapped out a proposal for a book on home bartending. Three years later, it’s finally coming into print from Chronicle. Here’s the cover:

The book is intended for home bartenders but with more than 200 cocktail recipes, we’re confident there’s something in it for everyone. We’ve also organized it in a unique way, guiding the reader through stocking their home bar one bottle at a time. This means that rather than calling for one-off ingredients that will end up gathering dust on the shelf, every bottle we feature gets an entire chapter dedicated to putting it to use. I wrote a longer post on Substack about what to expect from the book, so check that out for more detail. It was a really fun project to work on and we’re excited to have it out in the world!

If you pre-order the book now, you’ll have it by publication day. Find it wherever good books are sold, including: Powell’s, Amazon, IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Bookshop.

We also have a few promotional events lined up with more to come. On release day, November 29th, Brett and I will be at the legendary Powell’s City of Books for a talk and signing at 7:00 pm. Following that, we’ve arranged for a celebratory cocktail party at Teardrop Lounge with a special menu of drinks from the book. We also have a members-only signing lined up at the Multnomah Whiskey Library on December 8th; currently just nine seats left!

For those not in Portland, we’ll be doing a virtual class with Milk Street on December 7th. Get your tickets for that here with code “THEBAR15” for 15% off.

It’s hard to believe that it’s mid-2022 and I’m still writing about the FDA’s COVID emergency hand sanitizer regulations, but here we are. Today at Reason I take a look at the seemingly never-ending regulatory drama distillers who made sanitizer are putting up with.

My biggest feature recently is a shared cover story for the May issue of Reason magazine on the new era of nicotine prohibition:

As tobacco, e-cigarettes, and e-liquids transition from legal to illicit, law enforcement agencies will more aggressively interfere with production, distribution, retail sales, and in some cases even individual use. Every such interaction carries with it the possibility of freedom lost, perhaps violently. There is a real risk that American tobacco policy will open a regressive new front in the war on drugs, just as the previous crackdown on psychoactive substances begins to wind down.

Relatedly, I have another piece at Reason covering some ongoing cases related to nicotine and tobacco prohibitions, asking the question, “Who will be the first person to go to prison for selling flavored tobacco or e-cigarettes?” At Liberal Currents, I look at this risk particularly how it applies to a federal ban on menthol cigarettes. And finally, at Slate I critique the FDA’s decision (now temporarily reversed) to ban Juul throughout the United States. Prefer video to text? We also cover a lot of this in a new video from Reason with myself, Natalie Dowzicky, and Ethan Nadelmann.

Over at my Substack, I offer up a longish essay on how how I’m currently thinking about belief polarization and social media, explaining why I no longer post about politics on Facebook, and dropping some hints about Seabird, a new project that I’m very excited about.

On a lighter note, I have a more book reviews up at the Examiner. My recent recommendations include Joshua Jay’s How Magicians Think, Alex Segura’s Secret Identity, and Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers.

One unexpected development this year is how much I’m writing about non-alcoholic drinks. For Inside Hook I wrote-up a tasting panel of non-alcoholic stouts and porters, a summery low-or-no ABV beer cocktail, and a new non-alcoholic spirit going big in Austin.

For the Washington Examiner, I reviewed Mark Shrad’s excellent new book on the global history of Prohibition and temperance movements:

Chapter one of Mark Schrad’s new book opens with a gut-wrenching episode of state brutality. It’s 1859 in Spassk, Russia, and the tsar himself has dispatched the military to put down a protest of rebellious serfs. Gen. Yegor Petrovich Tolstoy responds ruthlessly, ordering imprisonment, court-martial, hourslong beatings, running of the gantlet, forced labor, and exile to Siberia for the noncompliant. This violent abuse of serfs in the Russian empire is not surprising, but for modern readers, the motivation for their protest likely is. The act of civil disobedience that brought the wrath of the state upon them was their refusal to drink alcohol.

The incident is smartly chosen by Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, to startle readers out of their preconceptions about Prohibition. In Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, he seeks to change the way we think about temperance movements by recognizing that they were neither exclusively American nor only the work of rural, white, busybody Protestants. Schrad reveals temperance as a global phenomenon and attempts to reclaim Prohibition, for better or worse, as a fundamentally progressive cause.

At Liberal Currents, reflecting on the policy disaster of the FDA banning or failing to authorize for sale nearly all e-cigarettes, I made a liberal case for respecting the agency of smokers:

Now that the fights over smoking bans have been won and given way to debates over harm reduction, I find that advocates of the latter don’t much like to talk about the former. They’d rather focus on the present and the deep divide in tobacco control between those who support harm reduction and those who pursue a more prohibitionist approach. But this divide didn’t arise by chance; it’s the inheritance of decades in which the field tolerated the publication of bad science, punishment of dissent, and stigmatization of the very people it supposedly sought to help, so long as doing so advanced its political aims. Unfortunately, those strategies were wildly successful. Thus today, when smokers and vapers desperately need someone to defend their liberties, their allies are unequipped to offer effective support.

I covered the FDA’s mishandling of this for Reason as well:

It should be obvious that this is an irrational way to regulate vaping given that the relevant comparison is to lethally dangerous cigarettes, which remain widely available and essentially unchanged after 12 years of FDA regulation. Yet because the anti-smoking lobby has spent years encouraging moral panic about vaping and decades denigrating the rights of tobacco and nicotine consumers to make their own decisions, the pointless prohibition of a wide swath of far safer nicotine products will likely proceed without much protest from anyone but the small minority of vapers themselves.

Also at Reason, I covered a fight about direct shipment of spirits in California, which turned out (at least in the short-run) in favor of consumers and distillers.

For the European magazine Cigar Journal, I explained the complicated challenges facing American cigar regulation (oddly missing paragraph breaks in the online version). Also on the topic of cigars, I visited Ybor City in Tampa for Inside Hook:

If you’ve been smoking cigars for a couple decades, chances are you’ve noticed that finding a place to light up is increasingly difficult. The first statewide smoking ban in bars arrived in California in 1998, and the trend has accelerated ever since. Twenty-eight states now have comprehensive indoor smoking bans on the books. So do more than a thousand American cities and counties. Want to smoke on an outdoor patio instead? There are more than 500 places that restrict that, too. What’s a leisurely cigar smoker to do? We don’t have the technology to travel back in time, but we do have the next best thing: a vacation to Tampa, Florida, where the atavistic pleasures of cigar culture live on.

Finally, I was fortunate to take a trip to the Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland this fall, which I also wrote about for Inside Hook.

Here’s my annual list of the best books I read in the past year. A few themes that stand out are concern about threats to liberalism and democracy, ambivalence about social media and alcohol, and interest in the Nordic region. As always, this post is about books I read during the previous year, not the year in which they were published.

Children of Ash and Elm, Neil Price — Price’s history of the Vikings is vivid and beautifully written, smartly forgoing a strictly chronological ordering of events for conceptual chapters exploring the mindsets and experiences of Viking life: spirit, gender, death, freedom, and much more. Highly recommended.

Smashing the Liquor Machine, Mark Schrad — I’m planning to write more about this soon, but for now I’ll just say that this history recasting prohibition as a progressive cause is one of the best books I read all year (and that’s coming from a libertarian cocktail enthusiast). Schrad coincidentally has a piece in the Atlantic today summarizing the thesis, but get the book.

The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel — Virginia is one of the writers whose books I’ll pick up regardless of topic; her interdisciplinary look at the history and innovation of textiles is fascinating throughout.

Sustaining Democracy, Robert Talisse — Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy made my list last year and the two books are best read as a pair. I may write more about these too, but for now I’ll say that I find his diagnosis of people’s increasing tendencies toward polarization and political “mega-identities” as threats to democracy more and more convincing.

The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch — Thoughtful analysis of the liberal epistemic order, particularly insightful with regard to attacks from the Trump era right.

Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tufekci — The Portland protests, January 6 insurrection, and some personal projects put Zeynep’s book on technology and protest movements on my radar. Insightful on the uses of social media and the unintended consequences of attempting to control it.

Love and Trouble, Claire Dederer — This arrived in my stack a few years ago but I didn’t pick it up until recently. Sharp, funny, biting, sexy, a fantastic midlife memoir.

How Magicians Think, Joshua Jay — 52 short essays on magic, each framed as an answer to a question magicians are often asked or ask amongst themselves. There’s little discussion of specific methods here, as one would expect in a book for a lay audience, but if you’re interested in magic at an abstract level I think you’ll enjoy this.

How Iceland Changed the World, Egill Bjarnason — Very fun, journalistic take on Iceland’s history and the nation’s often surprising role in world affairs.

My Father Left Me Ireland, Michael Brendan Dougherty — I bought this when it came out for my Irish grandmother, who loved it, but didn’t pick it up myself until an unexpected trip to Ireland this fall. I often disagree with Michael politically, but I appreciate knowing where he’s coming from, and the man can write.

Pandemics, Christian W. McMillen — Part of Oxford’s “very short introduction” series, 121 pages on the history of pandemics. From 2016 but obviously relevant! “For very often history is forgotten or rediscovered only when we confront contemporary epidemics and pandemics, and thus patterns from the past are repeated thoughtlessly.”

Drink?, David Nutt — Nutt makes a case for approaching alcohol less as an inevitable feature of the social landscape and more as a drug to be used (or not used) responsibly. Recommended for background on the health effects of alcohol and for how to drink more mindfully.

The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich and Noah Rothbaum — I’ve just begun to browse this mammoth 800-page beast, but I’d remiss not to mention it. It’s going to be an incredibly valuable resource if you’re interested in the subject. You’ll also find a few entries from me in here, on aquavit, Batavia-arrack, Scandinavia, and Indonesia.

Brief notes on fiction: I didn’t read a ton of fiction this year, in part because I tend to read novels more when traveling or on vacation, both of which were still cut back considerably from pre-COVID levels. I started the year with the last three books of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which were perfect for becoming engrossed in during an isolated post-break-up, pre-vaccine winter. I coincidentally began Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? before leaving for Ireland, and loved her stylistic adventures and portrait of millennial anxiety. Frank Herbert’s Dune never grabbed me in the past, despite enthusiasm for epic sci-fi, but I gave it another try in anticipation of the movie and can’t imagine why I didn’t love it before; I couldn’t put it down this time around. I enjoyed Dune Messiah too, but will likely end my reading in the series there absent a compelling case for continuing further. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, a story of a kind-natured AI seeking to understand the complexities of human loss and growth, is the novel that will stay with me most.

Have recommendations for me to read in the coming year? Leave them in the comments!

Whoa, I’ve fallen behind on keeping this site updated. Here’s a round-up of what I’ve been writing for the past few months…

Most recently, my latest Substack features an essay on how my sense of what to emphasize and whom to ally with in politics has changed during the Trump years. It’s been well-received by other thoughtful libertarians alarmed by the anti-democratic tendencies taking hold on the right:

Personally, this isn’t a renunciation of the libertarian label so much as it is a change in emphasis. Emphasizing a libertarian identity as a contrast to mainstream Democrats and Republicans makes sense when the worst that can happen is ending up with someone like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as president. Right now it feels more important to emphasize the longer, wider tradition of liberalism relative to the narrower libertarian movement, even though I situate my own views within both of them. For now, I’m putting liberalism first.

For Arc Digital, I made the liberal case against expansive smoking bans:

While defending bodily autonomy and personal choice in many other contexts, much of the progressive left has adopted an insufferably illiberal prudishness when it comes to tobacco. Their attitude brings to mind judge Robert Bork’s defense of laws forbidding sexual behaviors: “Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.”

For Reason, I explained why bans on menthol cigarettes are likely to lead to more confrontations with police:

Ban advocates gloss over these concerns by emphasizing that the law would be enforced against sellers, not consumers, of menthol cigarettes. But big tobacco companies have too much on the line to defy the FDA; illicit markets for menthol cigarettes would most likely be run by people within the communities the ban is intended to protect.

For Slate, I looked at what we do and don’t know about vaping and COVID, and how activists and media have pushed an alarmist narrative unjustified by the evidence:

Did you hear about the big new study on vaping and COVID-19? If you didn’t, that’s not surprising. The study didn’t find any association between the two—that is, it found no evidence suggesting that people who vape are more likely to be diagnosed with the disease. Research that leads to null results rarely gets much coverage in the media. In this instance, however, it upends the flood of stories throughout the pandemic that reported that vapers are at greater risk. 

Also for Reason, I examined how rigid adherence to COVID metrics can lead to absurd policy outcomes, like air conditioned restaurants in Portland being forced to turn away patrons in our historic heatwave two days before the state fully reopened:

That’s hotter than has ever been recorded in Atlanta or Houston, cities where buildings are designed for that kind of heat. The handful of Portland bars and restaurants with air conditioning up to the task would have been rewarded with booming business on these days if not for one thing: the state’s COVID restrictions, due to expire today, were still limiting their indoor spaces to half capacity. Few industries have been as hard hit by rigid and often-nonsensical pandemic policies over the last year as the service sector. This week’s failure to adjust at a time when it might have helped both businesses and patrons is just one more blow to the state’s struggling bar and restaurant scene.

Finally, I have a whole bunch of new lifestyle writing, mostly at Inside Hook. Click through for an introduction to genever, an interview about Texas whiskey, an exploration of spirits made with animal dung, an investigation into why non-alcoholic spirits cost so much, and the first cocktail sold as an NFT.

That’s the topic of my newest column for Exponents, the online magazine of the Center for New Liberalism:

On Saturday, a group of 40-60 anti-vaccine protesters temporarily shut down a vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The disruption lasted for only about an hour, but the protesters were rightfully condemned for the outrageous presumption to stand between vulnerable people and the lifesaving drug they’d lined up to receive.

Meanwhile, there’s another group blocking access to vaccines far more effectively. Its delays last for months, take place on a national scale, and are far more damaging, potentially costing tens of thousands of lives. That group? The Food and Drug Administration.

Americans have protested all kinds of restrictions during the pandemic, from polite requests to wear masks to substantial social distancing restrictions that have contributed to the closure of tens of thousands of businesses. Yet one of the most consequential limitations on our freedom has sparked virtually no public protest at all: the denial of access to vaccines that can finally bring life back to normal, including one that has already been authorized for use in Europe and injected into millions of arms in the United Kingdom. When the FDA delays the authorization of vaccines, most of us just passively accept that we have to wait.

Read the whole thing here.

I have a big new piece up at Arc Digital on libertarianism and the pandemic:

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. […]

But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID. The “no libertarians in a pandemic” line was soon taken up by libertarians themselves as a sardonic response to numerous instances of government failure. In fact, libertarian criticism of the regulatory state has been frequently vindicated. Libertarians have developed ideas for how to compensate those affected by business closures, take better advantage of testing, and develop and distribute vaccines more rapidly. Libertarians can also rightly condemn some of the worst actors in the pandemic, from anti-maskers violating private property rights to the prison system’s oversight of the nation’s largest outbreaks.

There are libertarians in a pandemic, and it turns out they have some good ideas and insightful critiques.

I’ve also written a couple articles about Oregon’s vaccine rollout. A few weeks ago I covered the state’s lagging performance and a lack of flexibility that’s likely to result in wasted doses:

According to the COVID vaccine tracker maintained by Bloomberg, Oregon has administered only about a quarter of its vaccine inventory. That puts us near the very bottom of the country, ahead of only four other states. This week, the Oregonian also reported that one of Oregon’s health providers had allowed twenty-seven of those doses to go to waste because it was unable to find eligible healthcare workers to receive them. Twenty-seven doses is a tiny fraction of the state’s allocation, but every expired vaccine that goes into the trash instead of someone’s arm is a potential policy failure, so I was curious about how this happened and whether it’s likely to occur in the future.

And yesterday for Reason, I wrote about a legally dubious proposal from Oregon’s vaccine advisory committee to allocate vaccines explicitly by race:

The committee appears poised to prioritize allocation based on race, perhaps even ahead of those with chronic medical conditions. The Oregonian reports that when some members suggested prioritizing residents with relevant health conditions, a committee member representing a Native American group alleged that the committee was “dealing with our own conditioning of white supremacy as it is showing up in our decision making.” Black, indigenous, and other people of color (often abbreviated “BIPOC”) made the committee’s tentative list, with their priority vis-a-vis Oregonians at risk from chronic medical conditions to be determined later.

Also for Reason, I have a follow-up to my article on the FDA’s surprise fees on distilleries that produced hand sanitizer. That story went ridiculously viral, which thankfully brought about a happy ending: the agency was forced to reverse itself within a day.

Lastly, a reminder that you can receive regular updates and cocktail recipes from me in my Substack newsletter. It’s free and comes out semi-regularly. The latest revisits the Sloe Gin Fizz, legally permitted for the first time ever in Portland, Oregon, in a pitcher to go.

I feel like I should have read more books this year, given that I spent most of it underemployed and stuck at home. Then again, I typically do much of my reading in coffee shops and airplanes, neither of which I’ve had occasion to spend time in for the past nine months. I also wrote another book, which is rather time-consuming. Below is my annual post of books that stood out for me in 2020. (That’s when I read them, not necessarily when they were published.)

The Narrow Corridor, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson — If there was an apt year for diving deep into the relationship of liberty and state capacity, it was certainly this one. Recommended for its wide-ranging exploration of state and society, economic development, and the fragility of liberalism.

Apollo’s Arrow, Nicholas Christakis — An impressively good book to get out in such a short period of time, providing a broad overview of this strange pandemic year and situating it in historical context.

Spillover, David Quammen — This was a re-read for me, but a worthwhile one as we found ourselves in the midst of a zoonotic outbreak of the type predicted in this book in 2012. I revisited it in a blog post back in March.

The Seabird’s Cry, Adam Nicolson — After the long election, I desperately needed a break from politics and picked up this book about seabirds, a lovingly informative look into the lives of ten different species. It’s exceptionally good nature writing.

Something Deeply Hidden, Sean Carroll — This was the first book in a long time that brought back the wonder and excitement of reading speculative physics books like Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe back in high school. This one makes a tantalizing case for the many-worlds hypothesis to explain quantum weirdness.

Weird, Olga Khazan — Speaking of weird, I enjoyed Atlantic writer Olga Khazan’s blend of first-hand reporting on people who turned their weirdness into a superpower and her own recollections of growing up as a Russian outsider in Texas. (As a weird Texan adolescent myself, I could relate .)

Calling Bullshit, Carl Bergstrom and Jevon West — This is a fun and informative book about misleading statistics, bad science, and biased news. The examples and illustrations are smartly chosen and it never gets too technical while remaining a very smart read. As a science journalist without formal statistical training, I appreciated the defense of treating some statistical work as a black box that you don’t necessarily need to know the inner workings of. (Bonus surprise: Finding my friend’s research on workplace wellness programs discussed in the chapter on selection bias.)

Lakota America, Pekka Hämäläinen — I have no excuse for not knowing more about Native American history and read this comprehensive new book on the Lakotas to begin addressing that. Highly recommended.

Overdoing Democracy, Robert Talisse — From one of my undergraduate philosophy professors, Overdoing Democracy contends that part of what ails American democracy is that we’re simply doing too much of it, losing our capacity to relate to each other outside of our political roles. Especially relevant as we can hopefully turn down the temperature post-Trump.

History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães — I just finished this and its mode of analysis is so different from what I’m used to that I don’t quite know what to make of it yet. That said, its discussion of Trump, COVID, and American politics’ venture into unreality is engaging and thought-provoking.

The United States of Cocktails, Brian Bartels — More than a book about cocktails, this love letter to American bar and drinking culture is an especially welcome escape in this year that we’ve all been stuck at home.

Brief notes on fiction: I started the year with Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s indescribably weird and gritty Gould’s Book of Fish, set mostly in a fantastical and cruel nineteenth century Australian prison; recommended but I’d suggest The Narrow Road to the Deep North first. Giovanni’s Room was my long overdue introduction to James Baldwin. Jumping on bandwagons, I loved Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, with the rest of the Neapolitan novels now next on my to-read list. Daniel Mueenuddin’s short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, set in Pakistan, is excellent. I really liked Emily St. John Mandel’s new book The Glass Hotel, very loosely inspired by Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble is funny, surprising, and brilliantly constructed as its perspective shifts from the titular character to that of the novel’s women.

What should I add to my list for next year? Recommendations welcome!

I thought I was done publishing for the year, but never underestimate the American government’s capacity to surprise. Over at Reason, I have an infuriating story about how distillers who pivoted from spirits to hand sanitizer during the early days of the pandemic are getting hit with unexpected fees of more than $14,000 by the FDA. It looks like this is my most widely-read piece of the year and I didn’t even know I was going to write it when I woke up yesterday. Go check it out!

I’ve been closing out the year with a few topical pieces at Inside Hook. First up, evaluating the safety of various outdoor dining set-ups with regard to COVID transmission:

With temperatures dropping and rain and snow on the horizon, many businesses have been putting up more substantial structures to shelter diners from the elements. These range from simple umbrellas and heaters to massive communal tents, the latter often so thoroughly enclosed as to raise the question of whether they meaningfully count as being outdoors at all. Some cities have issued guidance about how to adapt outdoor dining for cold weather, while for others it’s a free-for-all. 

Those of us who love bars and restaurants are thus faced with a dilemma. The seemingly carefree ease of al fresco dining in the summer has been replaced by difficult tradeoffs between comfort and safety. We want to help our favorite places survive the winter, but we’re on our own when it comes to evaluating the risks of various outdoor dining set-ups. Where is one to begin?

Next, a look at how the pandemic is affecting the craft segment of the distilling industry:

The popular perception is that consumers have compensated for lost bar and restaurant sales by purchasing more liquor to drink at home. While there’s some truth to that, aggregate statistics obscure the fact that the gains have not been evenly distributed. Established liquor brands are reaping the benefits of increased retail sales, but craft distillers are getting crushed.

Finally, on a lighter note, a guide to making and aging your own eggnog:

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

So goes an old proverb that one could adapt for other things that take time to reach maturity. Eggnog, for example. The best time to make your Christmas eggnog is before Thanksgiving. The second-best time is now.