When it comes to the lawmaking process, many say you don’t want to know “how the sausage is made.” Sadly, Minnesota has recently taken this to new heights with one rancid batch of legislative charcuterie. State lawmakers there have cemented…
When you walk into a high-end cocktail bar these days, there’s a good chance you’ll notice something a little different. Many of these mixology havens are now offering drinks that seem to be missing a key ingredient: alcohol. This is…
By this point, any semi-astute political observer has heard of Rahm Emanuel’s oft-repeated quip that one should never let a crisis go to waste. In fact, it’s become something of a theory of governance in Washington, D.C., with policymakers seizing…
One of the most common, if perhaps overdone, media talking points during COVID-19 has been laying out the supposed parallels to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that occurred just over a century ago. Regardless of how one feels about this…
It’s not often one can take several weeks off, pile into a car, and hit the open road without any significant responsibilities piling up (or email inboxes overflowing). I was able to do just that in January, before starting my…
In his recent book, Biting the Hands That Feed Us (Island Press, 2016), food-policy scholar Baylen Linnekin exposes many of America’s nightmare food laws. From the so-called “cheese board rule” that contemplated forbidding cheesemakers from aging their cheese on wooden…
Craft distilling may be undergoing a renaissance, but in the shadow of George Washington’s Mount Vernon (home to one of the nation’s first distilleries), you can barely get a full flight of whiskey. Were Washington, our nation’s original craft distiller,…
Virginia may be for lovers, but the state’s draconian liquor laws make nights out on the town not so lovely. The commonwealth is home to some of America’s worst alcohol laws. Up until 2008 sangria was treated as contraband and…
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