Liquidity Preference

If your Instagram feed is anything like mine this week, you’re seeing a lot of red-hued cocktails. That’s because this is Negroni Week, an annual event that started small here in Portland and has grown into an international celebration of bitter drinks. The classic Negroni is an excellent cocktail, but what makes it worthy of a week-long event is its amazing versatility: its simple three-ingredient structure lends itself to infinite variation.

I’ve written a few posts in this newsletter alluding to a new project I’ve been working on called Seabird. I’ve been vague about the details, but this week we soft-launched our mobile apps for iOS and Android. It’s an exciting and crowded time in social media, but while most of the new entrants are sticking to a very Twitter-like microblogging format, we’re doing something different.

Hi friends! A brief newsletter today, mainly because I’d like to invite you to the return of Aquavit Week. Started in 2012, this mobile festival grew from a single bar in Portland to a transatlantic event taking place throughout the US, Germany, and Scandinavia at its peak. Then 2020 happened. But now, finally, we are so back. Thanks to Portland’s own Krogstad aquavit coming on as the new sponsor, we will be hosting aquavit events in Portland, Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC.

Welcome, new subscribers! The launch of Substack Notes, Substack’s new competitor to Twitter, has brought in quite a few of you. Thank you for signing up. I’m cautiously optimistic about the Notes platform. In the short-term I expect it will be better than Twitter, in part because that’s a low bar lately, and also because of selection effects: the existing Substack userbase tends toward smart readers and writers.

In 2019, when I published The Rediscovery of Tobacco, I thought I wouldn’t have much more to say on the subject. I was mistaken. As it turns out, the next few years would provide many new reasons to write about smoking and vaping, as well as an acceleration of policies that amount to full prohibition of broad classes of products. That’s why today I’m publishing my latest book, The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control.

Good news first: After a very long wait, Raising the Bar is finally out! My friend Brett Adams and I started work on the proposal for this book back in late 2019. When we sent it off to our agent at the beginning of 2020, we envisioned a fun year of hosting cocktail parties with our friends to test all the recipes. Needless to say, that’s not how things worked out.

Back in April, when the prospect of Elon Musk buying Twitter was taking shape, I wrote a long post about social media, blogging, and the political saturation of everyday life.

I have a new op-ed up at the Oregonian. Here’s the opening: Multnomah County, which includes the city of Portland, first tried to ban flavored e-cigarettes in 2019. It was somewhat understandable then: teen use of e-cigarettes was going up and there was a scary outbreak of lung illnesses that sickened thousands and killed nearly 70 people. I testified against the ban and fortunately it didn’t pass. The idea makes even less sense now than it did then.

If you follow nicotine and tobacco policy in the United States, the big news recently is that Juul was made illegal… until it wasn’t. The FDA’s Juul ban lasted less than two weeks. A federal court first granted an emergency stay against enforcing the marketing denial order, then the agency itself brought Juul products back under review. What happens next is anyone’s guess and Juul may still end up on the chopping block, especially given the political pressure the FDA faces to ban the products.

You know when would have been a great time to publish a book about making cocktails at home? 2020. Instead, that’s when my friend Brett Adams and I started pitching a book on the subject. Publishers were looking at our proposal right around the same time that the reality of the pandemic was setting in. We knew we had a good idea, but we also knew that the world was changing and the global economy crashing down.