For the past few years I’ve been putting together a summer playlist to highlight recent music I’ve been digging. Here’s this year’s: lots of new music, a few covers, and quite a bit from bands I’ve been fortunate to catch live. Enjoy!
Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 7)
Australia is often lauded as a world leader in mainstream tobacco control. But on the ground, things are descending into chaos. New from me at Reason:
Since March of last year, the Australian state of Victoria has been rocked by a series of arsons and firebombings. Some of the targets are victims of extortion; others are caught in an escalating turf war between rival gangs. Two men with links to organized crime have been publicly murdered, one in a broad-daylight shooting at a shopping mall in a Melbourne suburb. Violent conflict is not unexpected in organized crime, but what is unusual is the drug at the center of this conflict: nicotine.
E-cigarettes are already only legally available with a prescription, though widely sold illicitly. The government is now on the verge of passing a bill to penalize suppliers of e-cigarettes with up to seven years in prison. Deadly cigarettes, meanwhile, remain freely available, if exorbitantly taxed. Read the whole thing.
Brett Adams and I had so much fun writing our first book together that we’ve signed on to do a second! From Publishers Marketplace:
In The Bartender’s Library we’ll be taking a much deeper dive into spirits and cocktails inspired by the Multnomah Whiskey Library, the incredible bar in Portland where we first met and where Brett is now the full-time curator and education manager. Save a spot on your shelf for this one, it’s going to be a big project for us.
In the meantime, pick up our first book Raising the Bar if you haven’t already. If you’re in Portland, you can pick up a signed copy from us personally tomorrow (Thursday, May 23) at Cup of Joe coffee:
We were also on the local news yesterday mixing up some spring cocktails. Check out that segment here.
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.
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.
Last week the Massachusetts Multi-Agency Illegal Tobacco Task Force released its annual report. That probably isn’t exciting reading for most of you, but it’s a really useful document for understanding the impact of prohibitionist tobacco policies. In 2019, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a comprehensive ban on flavored nicotine and tobacco products. Flavor bans are studied by health academics for how they affect consumer behavior, but this annual report is one of the few sources that reveals how these policies affect law enforcement.
Advocates for flavor bans portray them as simple product regulations, dismissing concerns that they will lead to arrests and prosecutions. This year’s report from Massachusetts shows once again that these advocates are wrong. A few excerpts from the section on criminal investigations:
In May of 2023, Mansfield PD and State Police investigators seized untaxed flavored ENDS products (to include THC ENDS products) following an investigation and search of a residence. This case is being prosecuted by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. [Note: “ENDS” refers to electronic nicotine delivery systems, a.k.a. e-cigarettes.]
In June of 2023, the State Police arrested a Lynn man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products, marijuana, and US Currency. This case is being prosecuted by the Essex County District Attorney’s Office.
In June of 2023, the State Police arrested a Boston man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products as well as marijuana. He was charged with tax evasion. The case is being prosecuted by the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office.
In October of 2023, the State Police arrested a Malden man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products as well as Class C and Class D controlled substances. He was charged with tax evasion and motor vehicle offenses. This case is being prosecuted by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office.
In November of 2023, the State Police arrested a Randolph man while in possession of flavored ENDS products. He was charged with Tax Evasion and Motor Vehicle Offenses. This case is being prosecuted out of the Plymouth District Attorney’s Office.
In February of 2024, the State Police along with CIB, the Woburn and Worcester Police Departments, and Homeland Security Investigations executed 29 search warrants on businesses, residences, vehicles, individuals, and bank accounts. Investigators seized approximately 280,000 flavored ENDS products as well as flavored cigars and unstamped cigarettes. Investigators also seized approximately seventy (70) pounds of marijuana packaged for distribution, hundreds of cases of THC and Psylocibin-laced products (Class C Controlled Substances), multiple jars of pure THC oil and THC crystalline, and one unsecured firearm. Investigators also seized over $1 million as proceeds of the illegal sales of these products. State Police arrested a New Hampshire man on two counts of Possession with Intent to Distribute a Class C Substance and Possession with Intent to Distribute a Class D Substance. This investigation, which is being prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Office, remains open and ongoing.
Violating the flavor ban is a misdemeanor, but in Massachusetts as in most other states, selling untaxed tobacco products can rise to the level of felony offense. Flavor bans drive sales of e-cigarettes to the illicit market, putting sellers at risk of being charged with tax evasion. In Massachusetts that can lead to penalties of up to five years in prison.
These cases can take years to resolve in the criminal justice system. A Massachusetts case I highlighted for Reason two years ago, for example, has yet to go to trial. A contraband tobacco case there from 2017 didn’t reach sentencing until last week. But arrests and prosecutions are ongoing, so it’s only a matter of time before someone is sentenced to prison in the United States for selling flavored e-cigarettes to consenting adults, and more cases will surely follow.
Other recent research concludes that flavor bans increase sales of conventional cigarettes, shifting consumption from relatively low-risk vaping to extremely high-risk smoking. So in addition to creating illicit markets and leading to arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonment, the policies likely don’t even benefit public health. Flavor bans are a dumb, illiberal idea that progressives need to move on from.
Previous coverage: I wrote about last year’s report for Reason. And of course, see my recent book The New Prohibition for an in-depth case against illiberal tobacco policy.
What do you call a cocktail with a split base of apple brandy and banana rum? If you grew up with the songs of a certain children’s singer, a tune by Raffi is probably one of the first things to come to mind. The title of this post is a bit long for a cocktail name, but for our February menu at the Multnomah Whiskey Library we went with Raffi’s Daiquiri.
This drink came about from trying the new red banana oleo from Ron Colon. This is my favorite spirit in their line, which I started working with recently in Oregon. In brief, it’s a blend of Salvadoran and Jamaican rums flavored with red banana and lightly sweetened. It marries the funk of Jamaican pot still rum with the sweet aromatics of banana. Even if you’re the kind of person who would be skeptical of a flavored rum, you should try this one. Everyone I’ve tasted it with thinks it’s damn delicious.
While working on a different cocktail project I ended up making this pretty simple shaken drink with the red banana oleo. Give it a shot for your winter imbibing:
- 1 1/4 oz apple brandy
- 1 oz fresh lemon juice
- 3/4 oz Ron Colon red banana oleo
- 3/4 oz orgeat
- 1 dash cinnamon-infused Angostura bitters
- lemon wheel, for garnish
Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, and garnish with a lemon wheel.
Notes on ingredients: Any good apple brandy should work here, but we went with Laird’s bonded. If you can’t find the red banana oleo, you can probably approximate a substitute with some blend of Jamaican rum and good banana liqueur. For the bitters, infuse one 4-ounce bottle of Angostura bitters with two cinnamon sticks for about a week. This idea for making super-cinnamon Angostura bitters comes from my friend Banjo Amberg and appeared in my first book, Cocktails on Tap. If you don’t want to mess with that a dash of regular Ango will work fine.
I’ve published a couple recent articles on new wave nicotine products. First up in Reason, I looked at how heated tobacco (such as IQOS) is transforming the market in Japan:
Japan provides an unlikely model for tobacco policy. The country tends to be more tolerant of smoking than its Western peers; it has high rates of smoking among men, and its government participates directly in the cigarette trade through its partial ownership of Japan Tobacco, the country’s largest manufacturer of cigarettes. It therefore comes as a surprise that Japan is experiencing a dramatic and sustained decline in cigarette sales, a trend that experts credit substantially to heated tobacco products.
And in Slate, I covered the controversy over Zyn nicotine pouches, which have sparked the ire of Chuck Schumer and a vocal “Zynsurrection” among the online right:
Superficially, this might seem like just another dumb culture war among the terminally online, for whom anything from Keurig coffee makers to Taylor Swift can become a symbol of political polarization. But the stakes of tobacco policy matter for the rest of us too, particularly for the health of people who smoke and for the 2024 elections. It deserves to be taken seriously. And as much as liberals and progressives may be loath to admit it, right-wing posters defending the freedom of adults’ right to use Zyn have the better of the argument.
Read ’em both!
I always write an annual post with my favorite books from the past year. Sometimes I even get it done before the year ends. This is not one of those times, but better late than never. As always, these are books I read in 2023, not necessarily ones that were published during the year.
Non-fiction
The Individualists, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi — This is now the first book I’d recommend to anyone seeking to understand libertarianism. While it’s not primarily about elucidating Matt and John’s own views, they also hint at a positive vision of what libertarianism could become. Read my review here.
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, Kerry Howley — You don’t need me to tell you about this one. Just read it!
The Real Work, Adam Gopnik — It’s rare to see magic treated as seriously as other arts, so I was excited to see it featured in this exploration of skills mastery by Adam Gopnik. Well, it turns out that learning how to urinate in public restrooms gets its own chapter too, so read into that what you will. Very enjoyable, review hopefully forthcoming.
Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Lucinda Williams — Memoir from one of the greats of American songwriting, reviewed here.
Amplified, Paul Atkinson — Informative design history of how the Telecaster, Les Paul, and Stratocaster have shaped the electric guitar for 70 years, with forays into their predecessors and modern departures from the form. I bought my first electric (a Strat) in 2023 and this clarified a lot for me.
The Northern Silence, Andrew Mellor — I read this while on a suitably stark and wintry trip to Finland. Niche, recommended if a book on Nordic culture and its uniquely devoted support for classical music appeals to you.
Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia Dunlop — No one has influenced my everyday cooking more than Dunlop, whose cookbooks I adore. No recipes here, but a wonderful exploration of Chinese cuisine.
The Heartbeat of the Wild, David Quammen — David’s recent writing has understandably been focused on COVID, so it’s a pleasure to look back on his nature writing, collected here in essays from National Geographic.
Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson — I cringe at the idea of reading most management books, but this one from Stripe Press is an exception.
Fiction
Whenever I travel to a new country, I pick up novels from there to read while I’m visiting. In 2023 that included Finland and Estonia, which introduced me to two of my favorite novels last year: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aptly described as “Finnish weird,” cleverly weaving Nordic myth into a naturalistic, modern Tampere) and The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirahk (Estonian fantasy with seductive talking bears and loads of violence, set in the magical pre-Christian forests as modernity encroaches).
Other assorted contemporary novel recs: Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (a follow-up to A Visit from the Goon Squad), and White Teeth by Zadie Smith (my first by the author, long overdue).
Obligatory self-promotion
I should also mention my own book that came out in 2023. The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control collects some of my recent essays on how we’re stumbling into a new era of nicotine and tobacco prohibition and the problems that creates. Unfortunately, it appears likely to remain relevant in the year to come too.
It’s almost a new year, so you may be thinking about making a resolution for self-improvement in 2024. Go to the gym. Eat or drink less. Quit smoking. All of these are worthwhile ideas. Unfortunately, they’re also hard. Here’s an easy one: never tweet.
Maybe you already never tweet. Good for you! You are wiser than I was. I kicked a sixteen year habit in October. 21,000 times I opened that little text box, typed something in, and hit post. 1,300 times a year. 3-4 times a day. Then I decided I was done. I thought I would miss it, but I’ve gotta tell you, it’s great. Sometimes I still open the app to see what’s happening and come across something that I would have responded to in the past. But now I’m pre-committed to not responding. People are wrong on the internet and I simply let it go. It’s bliss.
The short case for leaving Twitter — let’s call it X, because Twitter as it used to be is gone — is that X is bad now. You are better than X. You should put your energy elsewhere.
But I’m not here to scold or make a purely negative case against being on X. The positive case is that while X goes down the tubes, other online spaces are coming up that are fun and rewarding.
The decline of X isn’t just about Elon Musk. The platform had plenty of unique pathologies before he acquired Twitter. We called it a “hellsite” for a reason, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. It often brought out the worst in people, especially with the innovation of the quote-tweet, a feature tailor-made for uncharitable dunks. The crowd could be outright abusive. But Musk has made it worse in ways too numerous to recount here, and with which you’re certainly familiar if you follow such things.
Musk insists on being the main character of X in ways that owners of other social media platforms do not. And what a character he is. A small sampling of his recent activity could note this endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, this weird racist meme, telling companies pulling their ads because of antisemitism to fuck themselves, and running a space with himself, Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other lunatics and dumbasses.
It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”
Before Musk took over, there were at least two compelling reasons to be on Twitter despite its many problems and even if you kind of hated it. One was that it was a useful place to link to one’s writing. The other was that despite Twitter’s small size relative to other networks, it was culturally central for journalists, academics, politicians, celebrities, and other influential users.
Neither of those conditions holds as much as they used to. Musk has been capricious with regard to links, temporarily breaking them when they point to Substack or removing headlines, for example. Both decisions were reversed, because they were obviously petty or incredibly dumb. But even now, posts with links in them are apparently downgraded by the algorithm in hopes of keeping users on X rather than clicking out. The site still has some utility for sharing links, but it’s far less than it did as Twitter; in some ways, the platform has been actively hostile to sharing your writing.
Its uselessness is compounded by the fact that so many people have left the platform or substantially reduced their use of it. I never had a huge following on Twitter (about 6,500 followers when I quit posting), but I was connected to influential writers and journalists who did. If I wrote something interesting it might get shared by them, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands more viewers. But that’s much less likely to happen now because 1) my followers are less likely to see my writing in the first place, thanks to the downgrading of posts with links, and 2) a lot of the smart and influential people I was connected to have quit or massively reduced their activity on X.
As a freelance writer myself, I sympathize with anyone struggling to build a following for their work. It’s hard! And it’s even harder with a more fractured internet. But if your goal is getting people to actually click through and read your writing, it should be clear that the usefulness of X has degraded and is unlikely to get better.
The flipside of this is that Musk’s trashing of Twitter has spurred the development of new online communities elsewhere. Personally, I’m finding the closest zeitgeist to the old fun Twitter on Bluesky, which has a smaller userbase but has attracted lots of journalists, academics, and internet weirdos (I mean that in the best possible way). When I log on there, I find smart, interesting people interacting, making jokes, and sharing worthwhile links. There’s some of that when I log onto X, but increasingly my feed there consists of smart people I know arguing with the dumbest people on the internet.
Other writers seem to like Threads, which has greater reach but is kind of boring in my experience. There’s Mastodon too. I’m biased of course, but I’m really enjoying the small but growing community we’re building at Seabird, a platform designed specifically for sharing links online. (Sign up here!)
None of these platforms yet replace the influence of Twitter, but on the whole I think that’s a good thing. The near-term future of the internet is fractured, and that’s probably healthy. As I wrote of Twitter back in April 2022:
We expect too many different things from the site. We want it to be the fun virtual place to watch the Super Bowl, follow breaking news, find smart things to read, learn from experts, keep up with friends, make jokes about the new three-hour Batman movie, look at funny cat memes, share our Wordle scores, go viral, open our thoughts up to comment from millions of strangers, and gather for ritual combat over politics all at the same time while somehow not having the site devolve into Boschian chaos. Maybe that’s just not possible. But if we can’t fix it, we can exit and look elsewhere, at least for some of these purposes.
The old network you had on Twitter is never coming back, but your new networks can be exciting. Yes, it takes time to build up connections on a new platform. But maybe your networks could use some shaking up anyway. I know that after sixteen years on Twitter, mine became a bit rigid as I became reluctant to add too many new people to my feed. But early adopters are more likely to follow each other on a new network and I’m enjoying the freshness of my feeds on other platforms.
The psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris has compared the experience of neural rewiring on a strong trip to “shaking a snowglobe,” disrupting old thought patterns, creating new connections, and making space for more flexibility. That strikes me as an apt analogy for building a network on a new platform too. I’ve lost some of my old connections, but I’ve made lots of new ones. Think of it as a magic mushroom trip for your microblogging feed.
If you’re not yet willing to quit X entirely, there are some half-measures you could try. Some of my friends are now restricting their activity to only sharing their latest articles. (I no longer even do that; my only use of the platform now is to encourage people to leave it, so I’ll make an exception for this post.) Another option is to make X the last place you share things, breaking the habit of making it the first place you go. Or you could try a “dry January” of not tweeting. Pick a new platform or two and commit to exploring them for a month. If by February you’re still pining for X, no one will stop you from going back.
But really, I would encourage you to just quit. My only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner. X is bad. You are better than X. There are plenty of other options now. Find your friends and do your thing somewhere else. New year, new you, no tweets.
Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, so I have a new piece at Reason about the lessons that era holds for contemporary efforts to prohibit tobacco and nicotine. It touches on the proposed generational tobacco ban in the UK, the similar proposal just reversed in New Zealand, vape bans around the world, flavor bans in the US, and the total disaster that is Australia, where mere possession of a vape is a criminal offense and rival gangs are torching tobacco shops in a turf war for the illicit market. Read it here!
Relatedly, the Biden administration is further delaying its long-anticipated ban on menthol cigarettes. As Dan Diamond and David Ovalle report for the Washington Post, this seems to be due at least partly to political considerations. The administration now anticipates an announcement in March of next year. Anti-smoking groups are urging immediate action, while others are raising civil liberties concerns and noting the electoral risks.
As I posted on Bluesky yesterday, I think the risk that a menthol ban could contribute to tipping the 2024 election to Trump is worth seriously considering. A lot of Americans smoke menthol cigarettes. The Post cites a 2019 figure of 18.5 million Americans using them; other estimates suggest about 40% of adult cigarette smokers choosing menthol brands, which would put the figure closer to 12 million. Menthol cigars probably bump the figure higher. Regardless, that’s a significant bloc of adults that would be directly impacted by a menthol ban.
A ban would disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic smokers. The 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that about 80% of the former and 50% of the latter use menthol cigarettes, compared to about a third of white smokers. Notably, these are demographic groups that are crucial to Biden’s re-election and among which he is distressingly losing support.
What do voters think of a menthol ban? There’s quite a bit of variance among surveys, but it’s worth looking at data from a 2018 survey funded by the Truth Initiative. Overall, it finds that a narrow majority (56%) of adults support a menthol ban. Support is greater among African-Americans (60.5%) and Hispanics (69%). On the surface, that seems to signal that announcing a menthol ban might be good politics.
There is one important group, however, among which support for a menthol ban drastically plunges: people who smoke menthols. Only 28.5% of adult smokers who prefer menthol cigarettes want the government to ban them. That shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s very inconvenient for ban advocates and potentially for Biden’s electoral chances if his administration moves forward with the policy.
The big question is which of these survey results is most important: the modest support for a menthol ban among these demographic groups as a whole or the overwhelming opposition among the people who smoke them. I’m personally skeptical that a menthol ban would be a major motivator bringing voters to Biden. Do non-smoking voters care all that much about tobacco policy? A ban would be extremely salient to smokers themselves, however. They would identify Biden directly with banning a product they use everyday and Republicans would quite credibly accuse Democrats of using big government to interfere in adults’ choices.
To be transparent about my own biases, I think a menthol ban is bad policy. I also think it’s vitally important for the future of the United States that Donald Trump does not become president again. So, I’m extremely invested in Biden winning the 2024 election even if that does mean we get a menthol ban. But the timing of that ban matters, and I’d be a whole lot less worried about the FDA announcing it in 2025 than in 2024.
With that in mind, I’m not sure what the Biden administration gains by delaying the announcement just to March, even closer to the election. I’d much prefer that he just bury the issue for now and focus on much more important matters, like not handing the country over to an aspiring dictator.
There are a couple objections to this worth addressing. One is that public health shouldn’t be a matter of politics. This is completely wrong; banning menthol is a political issue. Weighing in on issues like this is exactly what elections are for. If Biden is worried that banning menthol would motivate people to vote against him, then he’s justified not banning menthol.
A second objection is that delaying the menthol ban risks losing the opportunity to implement the policy. There is certainly some truth to this and I’d be fine with that result, but ban advocates should be aware that there’s uncertainty no matter what. Regardless of when the FDA finalizes the policy, it will likely take years to take effect. The most important factor for the prospect of a menthol ban is who is president in 2025. If Biden wins, he’ll have four more years to implement the ban. If Trump wins, well, who the hell knows what will happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if took the opportunity to reverse one of Biden’s signature policies. So, even if you do support a ban on menthol cigarettes, I think there’s a reasonable case for giving Biden the slack to wait until after the election to pursue it.
It’s cliché to say, but this election is far too important to risk on a potentially divisive issue like banning menthol cigarettes, especially if one possible result is that the ban gets scrapped anyway when we end up with Trump back in power. And don’t be complacent; Trump’s prospects for winning are alarmingly real.
I’m not saying that a menthol ban tipping the election to Trump is the most likely outcome or that it wouldn’t be an incredibly stupid outcome, but unlikely and incredibly stupid outcomes are what got Trump elected in the first place. Let’s not do that again.
Update 12/7/23: Publication of the final rule is now officially set for March. Further, the FDA has also scheduled publication of its proposed nicotine standard for April. This is a more preliminary stage of rulemaking but it’s an even more drastic regulation: by capping nicotine in cigarettes at a very low level, it would essentially amount to prohibition. More than 28 million American adults currently smoke cigarettes, so announcing one’s intention to ban them in an election year, with the stakes as high as they are, strikes me as an extremely dangerous strategy.
Some additional links: I wrote a case against a federal menthol ban for Reason back in 2021. For a deeper dive into contemporary tobacco politics, read my book The New Prohibition. And on related issues, I recently reviewed the Netflix docuseries “Big Vape” for the Examiner (ungated link).
Image credit: Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash.
Jacob Grier writes about public policy, lifestyle, and books in Portland, Oregon. His own books are The New Prohibition, Raising the Bar (with Brett Adams), The Rediscovery of Tobacco, and Cocktails on Tap. He has written for a wide spectrum of publications, including Slate, Reason, The Atlantic, The Washington Examiner, Inside Hook, Imbibe, and many others.
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