Cops, coronavirus, and coffee cocktails
I’ve got two new articles for you this week, and as promised in the previous issue, one of them is about cocktails. My barely concealed long-term plan with this newsletter is to harness the allure of cocktail recipes to make you also read my political opinions. So first, I have an op/ed in the Oregonian today on the unexpected success of the Black Lives Matter movement rapidly changing public opinion in the midst of a pandemic, as well as the failure of conservatives and Republicans to contend with the violent culture of American policing. It’s a lot to squeeze into 700 words, but I gave it a shot. Read it here.
Unbundle the police
As an example of a conservative perspective that approaches this the right way, I recommend this long piece by Theodore Johnson at National Review.
Tyler Cowen’s “Conversations with Tyler” series is consistently worth reading (or watching/listening to). In the newest, he interviews Amy Harmon on why it’s empirically hard to find simple solutions to the problems in policing. (Harmon also models how to be an expert in a subject matter while admitting how difficult it is to know everything with certainty. We need more of this!)
Jonathan Blanks, a friend from my DC think tank days, takes a broad look at the options for reforming or abolishing police, and explains why it’s imperative for police forces to change if they’re to restore legitimacy in their communities.
It’s perhaps a less compelling slogan than “defund the police” or “abolish the police,” but “unbundle the police” captures a lot of what defunding entails. What if we simply relied on police to do fewer things? Derek Thompson unpacks what this might mean in practice.
Covering COVID
The search for a vaccine is proceeding at an unprecedented pace, but we’re still likely more than a year away. This New York Times panel with Siddhartha Mukherjee and other experts looks into the prospects so far and the additional challenges a vaccine will face once it’s approved. High among these is the infrastructure needed to produce and deliver vaccines in sufficient quantities. The competence of the government response to COVID thus far doesn’t inspire confidence that this will be handled well!
On that note, Matt Novak has a look back at how Dr. Fauci’s statements discouraging mask use early in the pandemic are making it worse in the long-run by delaying preventive measures and sowing doubts about their effectiveness. (To be clear: Wearing masks in public is one of the easiest and most effective things you can do!)
The Narrow Corridor, recommended in a previous newsletter, remains the most thought-provoking book I’ve read this year. Co-author Daron Acemoglu has a new piece in Foreign Affairs about how the rot in American government — not just related to COVID — threatens our institutions.
In the early days of the pandemic, COVID skeptics often argued that the virus was just another flu. (A few people still say this, but the position is considerably more fringe now.) Smriti Mallapaty has an update in Nature on the latest estimates of COVID’s infection fatality rate, which may be narrowing in at .5-1%. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to a lot of deaths when spread through a large population. It’s up to ten times the rate of a typical flu, and of course rates are much higher among older persons.
Lastly, on the all-important question of how COVID will affect cocktail culture, you should read this interview with Wayne Curtis and Daniel Okrent on how the shock of the pandemic parallels that of Prohibition.
Social distancing
To cook: I bought an aebleskiver pan a few weeks ago and it might be the best purchase I’ve made during quarantine. Aebleskiver are basically little spherical pancakes from Denmark. I can’t resist ordering them whenever I go to Broder, a small group of Scandinavian restaurants here in Portland, but since they’re completely closed right now I had to take things into my own hands. You can find recipes online, and for selecting the right pan for your type of stove, check out this video with Chef Arne from Solvang, California.
To drink: And finally, the cocktails. The editors at Inside Hook asked me to write up a piece on Irish Coffee, specifically how to adapt the drink to other spirits and ingredients. It covers how to make it the traditional way, plus how to change up the liquor, coffee, cream, and sugar to take the drink in slightly different directions. I rarely add anything to coffee, but time means nothing anymore, so mix your caffeine and alcohol if you feel like it. (Pictured here with my Irish grandmother’s Irish coffee glasses, I’m guessing from the 1960s.)
Newsletter details and obligatory self-promotion
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