I’ve been remiss in updating the blog! But for The Unpopulist, I wrote about joining the Portland anti-ICE protests:

This was very much not my typical Wednesday night. Though I live in Portland, where protesting is one of the city’s favorite pastimes, my preferred mode of political activism is sitting in a coffeeshop typing words on a screen. I’m less inclined to assemble in large groups in which my message is limited to what I can convey on a sign or t-shirt, surrounded by other protesters whose views may be at odds with my own. In Portland, the message of late had been reduced to pure absurdity, images of human-sized frogs staring impassively back at lines of federal officers in riot gear. As the protest went viral, I found myself intrigued to join. “What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked. I wanted to know what it’s like to be an inflatable frog.

And for the Examiner, I reviewed David Wondrich’s new Comic Book History of the Cocktail:

Thanks to several decades of comic book saturation at the movies, we all know the plot beats of a superhero epic. An intriguing origin. A rise to power. An unexpected fall followed by a journey in the wilderness. Finally, a heroic victory and return, coming back stronger and wiser than before. 

It’s not too much of a stretch to apply that story arc to the cocktail, the subject of the latest book from drink historian David Wondrich. In The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On, Wondrich teams up with illustrator Dean Kotz to tell the story of the mixed drink, from the hazy origins of the first punches to the dark days of Prohibition and disco-era Harvey Wallbangers, to the contemporary revival of old-school drinks, forgotten ingredients, and culinary prestige in the bar world.