Quasi-monthly celebrations, by James Fallows and friends and cronies, of beers worth noticing.
Continuing the observation of American Craft Beer Week, this somehow seems appropriate:
If you get the joke, you get the joke. I have ordered some, here!
Meanwhile, if you are looking for policy, please check out Elizabeth Warren’s “Second Gilded Age” speech yesterday, which I wrote about here.
I don’t know when it happened, but I’m actually glad that it did. Within the past ten days, four different citrus-infused IPAs, from four well-regarded breweries, have made their way into my awareness. You see them above, starting at the left:
I say that I “actually” enjoyed these beers, because I start out being highly skeptical of any beer you could classify as fruity. But these, which are different but all worthwhile from my POV, make vivid something I’d heard a million times but not really reflected on: that hops themselves, a powerful element of the IPA taste, bring a varying range of citrus flavors and smells to a brew.
And so I find in an authoritative piece on Citrus IPAs (which lists a number of other entries) on CraftBeer.com:
Cascade hops, of course, are redolent of grapefruit pith, and stylish Citra hops live up to their tangy namesake. Increasingly, brewers embellish these already citrusy IPAs with actual zest, peel or juice from grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and/or limes to create complementary flavor profiles ideal for both hopheads and lovers of fruit beer.
Worth checking out. Larger theme: America already becoming great again.
In the previous post I mentioned that the new-to-me wave of citrus-flavored IPAs, which I’d looked on askance on the assumption that they were novelty brews, actually includes some great offerings.
After that appeared, I received a slew of recommendations that I try the one shown above: Grapefruit Sculpin IPA, from Ballast Point in San Diego. I had known and liked BP’s famed regular, non-grapefruit Sculpin, but I found the pink-striped grapefruit version in a local Kwik-E-Mart and checked it out, as you see above.
This is worth trying too; I like it. I can see that formulating beers like this must be tricky, because if they were any heavier on the citrus flavor they might drift into Orangina territory. In its own setting Orangina is just right, but it’s not what I’m looking for in a beer. Fortunately Grapefruit Sculpin (and the others) stay on the right side of the line.
Update Jeff Alworth, author of The Beer Bible, puts these IPA trends into perspective in a good item at AllAboutBeer. He also boldly predicts what the Next Big Thing will be: Trump IPA! No, not really, but he has an interesting other candidate.
A cowardly coup from within the administration threatens to enflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.
Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.
Acts of sabotage against the president are perilous to the American system of government. They're also self-serving.
The title of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, contains a multitude of meanings. For one thing, it describes the attitude of many of President DonaldTrump’s own aides toward his judgment.
It’s not just that many sources were willing to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those in which top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported “senior official in the Trump administration.”
The writer says that senior Trump officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.” The official adds: “We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”
American democracy is imperiled by Republicans enabling the president’s authoritarian impulses, not by self-aggrandizing op-eds from anonymous bureaucrats.
For political observers and reporters, every day since the November 2016 election seems to have contained some sort of absurd twist or development. The pace of the Donald Trump–era news cycle has made it difficult to separate signal from noise—the truly important, like a Supreme Court–nomination battle, from the simply bizarre or dramatic, like anonymous Trump officials testifying to the president’s incompetence.
On Wednesday, The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed from a senior official claiming to be part of the “resistance” inside the Trump administration. The piece sparked a media frenzy, with some commentators, including my colleague David Graham, alleging that government officials are engaged in a kind of coup against the elected president. “If protecting the rules requires tearing down the rules,” Graham writes, “what is there to be gained?”
The sociologist Margaret Hagerman spent two years embedded in upper-middle-class white households, listening in on conversations about race.
When Margaret Hagerman was trying to recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race, one prospective interviewee told her, “I can try to connect you with my colleague at work who is black. She might be more helpful.”
Modern-day segregation in public schools
To Hagerman, that response was helpful in itself. She is a sociologist at Mississippi State University, and her new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America, summarizes the two years of research she did talking to and observing upper-middle-class white families in an unidentified midwestern city and its suburbs. To examine how white children learn about race, she followed 36 of them between the ages of 10 and 13, interviewing them as well as watching them do homework, play video games, and otherwise go about their days.
I grew up in a gun-loving town in Alabama. My grandfather’s store sells firearms. But only after I was shot did I begin to understand America’s complicated relationship with guns.
I was shot on a Sunday. It was late and it was hot and I was 21, on my way home from dinner during summer break. I’d rolled the windows down because the breeze felt good.
I pulled up to a red light, about half a mile from my home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “Yeah!” by Usher was playing on the radio. A silver Toyota Tacoma turned the corner. As it passed me, I heard a pop. Then my left arm was on fire.
If you’d asked me before that night how I might react to being shot, I would have said: I would call 911. I would get myself to the hospital. In fact it never occurred to me to call 911, only to want my dad.
A favorite anecdote about the origins of the vibrator is probably a myth.
It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”—was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hands and wrists.
It’s a disturbing insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the past few years, it has careened around popular culture. It’s given rise to a Tony-nominated play, a rom-com starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and even a line of branded vibrators. Samantha Bee did a skit about it in March. A seemingly endless march of quirky news stories has instructed readers in its surprising but true quality, including in Vice, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today.
Led by Cory Booker, senators are breaking the rules to protest the GOP’s speedy consideration of Brett Kavanaugh. But their effort is likely too little, too late.
Updated on September 6 at 2:57 p.m. ET
As the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh sailed this summer toward a presumed confirmation in the fall, progressive activists implored Democrats in the Senate to escalate their fight—even to abandon the chamber’s cherished norms, if necessary—in a bid to stop it.
On Thursday, they got their wish.
Led by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee released documents from Kavanaugh’s service in the George W. Bush administration that had been labeled as “confidential” and withheld from public view as the federal appellate judge sat for his confirmation hearing. One set of emails, leaked to The New York Times, showed Kavanaugh casting doubt on the Court’s precedent legalizing abortion. And in a contentious moment as the panel reconvened Thursday morning, Booker announced that he would risk expulsion by releasing emails related to Kavanaugh’s views on affirmative action and racial profiling.
A veteran Washington journalist describes the defense secretary as avoiding confrontation and showing respect. But the rest of the book may have blown up that strategy.
James Mattis has long distinguished himself as a canny survivor in Donald Trump’s shape-shifting inner circle, somehow managing to remain firmly entrenched at the Pentagon as fellow advisers such as Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster vanished into the vortex that is Trump’s bad side. Then Bob Woodward wrote a book. Now the defense secretary and retired four-star general has been thrust directly into the political maelstrom he’s so studiously avoided.
Excerpts from the journalist’s forthcoming account of Trump’s White House, first published Tuesday in The Washington Post, portray Mattis as scornful of the president’s intellect and judgment, and, in a boost to an already prominent narrative, as a vital check against the president’s dangerous instincts. Woodward depicts an agitated Mattis explaining to Trump in a meeting that the United States maintains a military presence on the Korean peninsula to “prevent World War III” and later deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward also claims that when Trump called up Mattis and suggested the United States “fucking kill” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2017, Mattis played along but then hung up the phone and told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that,” and instead drew up plans for more limited air strikes that Trump ultimately authorized. (Both Mattis and Trump have denied this account.)
The entrepreneur’s reaction to recent media coverage illustrates a common—and dangerous—misconception of reporting practices.
The earliest known use of the phrase “off the record” in print, according to Merriam-Webster, appears in a November 15, 1918 story in the New York Tribune by Theodore M. Knappen. World War I had been declared over a few days earlier, and Bernard Baruch, a businessman and adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, gave an interview to reporters.
Knappen wrote, “In an informal conversation with the newspaper men, in which nothing was ‘off the record,’ Mr. Baruch, happy in the victorious termination of the war, largely, as he saw it, through the magnificent spirit of American business in standing by the government at any sacrifice, would scarcely admit that there would be even a temporary period of disarticulation and suspension of business.”
Recent images of Croatia’s dramatic landscape, cities, parks, and shorelines
The Republic of Croatia has only been an independent country since 1991, but the region has been inhabited since prehistoric times. More than 4 million people call Croatia home today, living in rural villages, coastal tourist destinations, and modern cities, where Roman ruins can stand side by side with medieval defenses and 21st-century architecture. Croatia’s dramatic coastline along the Adriatic Sea includes more than a thousand islands, and its mountains are riddled with fascinating caves and karst formations. Gathered here: some recent images of Croatia’s landscape, cities, parks, and shorelines.
