Greetings from Portland
I spent my week doing typical Portland things like biking to my local coffee shop that’s named after a Shins song, drinking craft IPA on an outdoor patio, and getting tear gassed by unidentified federal cops. You’ve no doubt seen my city in the news this week, though your impression of what’s happening likely depends on the political slant of your news sources. Writing for Arc Digital, I covered what’s going on at the protests, why they offer a lot for a libertarian to love, and how our first reality TV president is using Portland as a prop for his re-election campaign. Read it here.
A few other things worth reading on Portland:
At Ordinary Times, Andrew Donaldson explains that while the federal government is certainly entitled to protect the courthouse, the specific means it has chosen are strategically dumb and raise the odds of a Kent State-like tragedy occurring.
Historian and expert on authoritarianism Anne Applebaum writes about the real purpose of cracking down on Portland: “The attack on demonstrators in Portland is… a performance designed to show just how much Trump dislikes ‘liberal’ Americans, ‘urban’ Americans, ‘Democrat’ Americans. To put it differently… The chaos in Portland is not an accident. The chaos is the point.”
How did we reach a point where a president can assemble his own secretive, militarized police force and unleash it on American cities? Jamelle Bouie makes the case for ditching not only Trump, but also the Department of Homeland Security.
At The Bulwark, Walter Olson examines the legal questions surrounding the feds’ actions here.
If you’d like a comprehensive timeline of protest events in Portland from late May to this week, see this from Robert Evans at Bellingcat.
Social distancing
I have more writing coming out this weekend, so let’s jump right to the fun stuff. Way back in March, when the COVID shutdowns were first going into effect, the editors of Esquire invited me to contribute to a project collecting recipes from laid off bar and restaurant workers. The idea was to keep things simple and easy to make at home, so I wrote about one of my favorite cocktails of the summer, the Honeysuckle. It’s a Daiquiri made with honey syrup instead of sugar, and it’s delicious. Check it out along with fourteen other food and drink recipes from writers in the industry. This was part of a larger package covering the hospitality business during the pandemic, which you can dig into here.
For Inside Hook, I returned to the topic of my first book, how to make cocktails with beer. This was inspired by the Spagett, a low-budget take on the Aperol Spritz that Brett Adams, co-author of our forthcoming home bartending book, introduced me to at one of our patio cocktail testing sessions. Read about it and three other beer cocktails suitable for your summer imbibing.
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