I didn’t intend to cover the protests in Portland, but as they consumed national attention, friends convinced me to write about them as a local observer. The resulting piece for Arc Digital ended up as one of my most popular and controversial recent articles. It explores 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:

For a city under siege, things are surprisingly tranquil. The latest figures from the police bureau suggest that most crime is actually down. Yet the proud weirdness of our mid-sized city has long invited outside observers to read into it what they want to. Not long after I moved here in 2008, Portlandia cemented our role as national hipster punchline, a place where chickens have names, where you can put a bird on something and call it art, where young people go to retire. Now it’s where young people go to light fires, at least in the right-wing imagination. Both depictions are highly fictionalized, but even in bleak 2020, Portlandia remains the truer approximation.

Though it received less attention, my other piece for Arc Digital is my favorite thing I’ve written this year. It’s about a visit to a tiny tobacco farm on a remote island in Denmark where a woman named Janni Bidstrup keeps the tradition of Danish cigarmaking alive:

The morning starts a little later here in Ærøskøbing, a historic trading outpost of fewer than a thousand people that’s so picturesque, so abundantly hygge, that even Danes describe it as a “fairytale town.” I have it to myself as I wander the cobblestone streets waiting for breakfast. Colorful houses exude Scandinavian charm in the bright morning sun, and many of them leave homemade foods and crafts out for sale to passersby: packages of biscotti, knit socks, jars of marmalade made from foraged apriplums. Although the marmalade is tempting, I’ve traveled here for a different kind of produce. Ærø is the unexpected home to one of the world’s rarest cigars, the tobacco planted, harvested, cured, and rolled by hand in a labor of love by one of the last cigarmakers in Denmark.

Photo by David L. Reamer.

I also have the cover story for the latest issue of Reason magazine, now free to read online. A lot has been written about bars and restaurants closing due to the pandemic. I focus instead on how some are finding innovative ways to survive and how the virus will change the hospitality industry for years to come:

When we think of things going back to “normal,” we really mean back to what we may eventually regard as a golden age of restaurant culture. The flourishing of the last decade or so was enabled by travel, immigration, international trade, intricately connected local suppliers, traditional food media, internet communities, and smartphones capable of taking professional quality photographs. Most of all, it was enabled by increasing prosperity and an openness to new experiences.

Prosperity and openness are both threatened now, the former by the economic crash and the latter by the fear that social gatherings will transmit an invisible and potentially deadly virus. The dream is that an effective vaccine will be developed in record time and we can hit a reset button on this year; the restaurant and bar economy, emerging from its deep sleep, will come back to life and pick up right where it left off. The reality is likely to be far more difficult.

I was also happy to contribute to this Esquire collection of home recipes from people laid off from work in bars and restaurants. It’s part of a larger package covering the business. My own suggestion for making drinks at home is the Honeysuckle, a lesser-known relative of the Daiquiri:

Springtime in Portland arrived about a week into our shutdown, and aside from my daily bike ride, I’ve been experiencing it mostly from my window. With everything in bloom, I associate honey cocktails with the season. Honey syrup is easy to make and brings an extra dimension of flavor that you don’t get with standard simple syrup. It’s also extremely versatile in basic three-ingredient cocktails, by combining it with citrus and a base spirit. The most well-known of these is the Bee’s Knees, which mixes gin, honey, and lemon, but it can work with just about any bottle you have on hand. Substitute bourbon for gin and you have a Gold Rush; rum, lime or lemon, and honey makes a Honeysuckle.

Lastly, for Inside Hook, I revisited the topic of my first book, how to make cocktails with beer, with three contemporary ways of using it in cocktails:

Does beer belong in a cocktail? Purists may recoil at the idea, thinking it sounds like a way to ruin a perfectly good beer, or perhaps recalling cheap “beergaritas” and other haphazard concoctions aimed more at maximizing alcohol content than at the harmonious commingling of ingredients. If that sounds like you, I’d urge you to reconsider. Beer is a surprisingly versatile addition to your mixology arsenal, and the secret ingredient for your next favorite summer cocktail may already be lurking in your refrigerator.