Chocolate bitters and sweet links
Let’s start with the fun stuff: For my latest piece at Inside Hook, I thought about what my favorite bottle of bitters would be after the trinity of Angostura, orange, and Peychaud’s. My answer was chocolate. It’s a post I’ve considered writing for a while, but the recent release of the new Angostura cocoa bitters made this an ideal time to do it. The article includes four approachable cocktails you can make with them using bourbon, gin, rum, and mezcal.
On the ballot
My previous newsletter featured my libertarian argument for voting for Joe Biden, which turned out to be one of the most widely read things I’ve written this year. Shikha Dalmia is another libertarian voting for Biden, and she makes a compelling case for it in The Week. Related, from Conor Friedersdorf: Trump failed the 3 am test.
Measure 108 in Oregon would drastically raise cigarette taxes and also impose substantial new taxes on nicotine vapor products. I’ll be writing about this soon, but for now I’ll encourage Oregon readers to vote against it for two reasons: the taxes are regressive and the vape tax will undermine the goal of nudging smokers to switch to a safer option. A recent NBER paper concluded that a similar tax in Minnesota discouraged more than 30,000 smokers from quitting. We shouldn’t repeat the mistake here.
Oregon and DC will also have ballot initiatives to liberalize restrictions on psychedelics. Mason Marks explains for Slate why voters should support these measures; Andrew Sullivan makes a very different argument in favor, exploring their use among the ancient Greeks.
On the presidential campaign, Republicans are making a last-ditch effort to focus on corruption. That’s a problem when your candidate is Donald Trump. The New York Times has a deeply researched feature on how the Trump family’s hotels and resorts have created massive conflicts of interest and opportunities to buy influence.
Biden’s record on criminal justice is undoubtedly one of the strongest knocks against him. Abraham Gutman examines the tension between Biden’s roles as hardline drug warrior and loving father of an addict, the changing racial demographics of drug use, and the problems that persist in a kinder, gentler War on Drugs.
Covering COVID
You might be done with the pandemic, but the pandemic isn’t done with you. Every trend in the United States is currently going in the wrong direction; cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all going up. The rolling 7-day average for daily deaths is now above 800. As cold weather drives people indoors and families travel and gather for holidays, some experts project more than 100,000 new cases per day. The winter is looking bleak.
Given the Trump administration’s terrible mishandling of the pandemic, there are obvious political incentives to try to downplay the number of deaths. The data tell a different story: Around 300,000 more Americans have died so far in 2020 than compared to the same time period in previous years. While not all of these excess deaths were caused by COVID, this strongly suggests that official counts understate the toll of the disease.
Another way to consider the toll of COVID is by years of life lost. This is inherently more speculative, but a new pre-print study takes a stab at it and concludes that COVID has shaved more than 2 million years of potential life from Americans, with an average loss of more than a decade per victim. Jacob Sullum puts this in context.
Is it safe to socialize indoors? Risk exists on a continuum, so there’s not one definite answer to the question. Olga Khazan explains some factors to consider.
On the positive side, if you’ve been obsessing over cleaning surfaces, you can probably relax a bit. Gregory Barber revisits the subject of surface transmission for Wired and re-iterates that we’re engaging in a lot of hygiene theater. Make reasonable efforts to wash your hands, but it’s mostly shared air you need to worry about.
One more important question: What is COVID doing to beer? Jeff Alworth explores the economics of why beer drinkers are likely to see less variety for years to come.
Recommended reading
This story has it all. Libertarians. Bears. Well, just libertarians and bears, but what more do you need?
A fun bit of jujutsu from Portland: Facial recognition technology can enable a police state, but an activist here is training software to identify cops who hide their badge numbers while abusing protesters. (Also, consider this further proof that Watchmen is the TV show of the moment.)
The Amazing Randi, a giant in the world of skepticism and magic, died this week. The New York Times obituary is good, but I recommend the magazine’s older profile from 2014.
Social distancing
To read: How often do you read a book that shows you how little you know about your own country? That was my experience with Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America, an illuminating history of the Lakotas and their canny transformations as the United States and European colonial powers expanded westward.
To watch/taste: The Multnomah Whiskey Library is hosting my friend Dragos Axinte, founder of Novo Fogo cachaça, for an online class and tasting this Thursday, October 29th. Tickets include custom jars and a muddler for making the classic Caipirinha, and we have some fun things in store for the Library’s new three-year-old single barrel cachaça. If you’re in or around Portland, you can reserve tickets here.
To drink: I wanted to keep things simple for my Inside Hook article on chocolate bitters, but since that has four accessible recipes I figured we could do something a little more esoteric here. The Dansk the Night Away is a drink I worked on for the Whiskey Library’s Green Room menu last winter. To make it you’ll need to track down a bottle of Gammel Dansk, an intensely bitter Danish spirit that recently returned to the US.
1 1/2 oz gin
3/4 oz cream sherry
1/4 oz Gammel Dansk
1/4 oz green Chartreuse
1 dash chocolate bitters
1 dash orange bitters
orange peel, for garnish
Stir with ice and strain onto a big cube, garnishing with the orange peel.
A favor
If you enjoy this newsletter, whether you read it for the articles or just for the cocktails at the bottom, consider forwarding it on to someone you know who might like it, too.
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