A coastal elite's guide to the drinking class

There have been a pair of stories in the past few weeks that together give you a pretty good idea of how this country thinks about drinking, class, and the damaging realities of both. They are:

• This troubling new report that alcohol-related deaths spiked by 25%+ in the first year of the pandemic

• This profile about former New York Times columnist and disqualified Oregonian gubernatorial candidate Nick Kristof, who is these days making cider and wine in the Beaver State

First, the study. Late last month, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism researchers published a study in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association detailing just how deadly the coincidence of global pandemic and chronic alcoholism has actually been here in the U.S. The TL;DR is “very.” The biggest takeaway from the peer-reviewed paper, surmised here in the NYT (not by Kristof, we’ll get to him in a second; emphasis mine throughout):

“The assumption is that there were lots of people who were in recovery and had reduced access to support that spring and relapsed,” one of the researchers, Aaron White, told the Gray Lady. This is undeniably bad/sad news, even more so when you learn that according to the same study, in the first year of the pandemic the mortality rate amongst drinkers aged 25-34 went from 11.8 to 16.1 per 100,000, or 37.0%. Awful, awful stuff. (We joke around a lot here at the boozeletter, but I sincerely hope everyone in the Fingers Fam is comfortable with their relationship with alcohol. If you aren’t, and you feel like you need help, please get it.)

With those… well, sobering statistics in mind, we turn our attention now to the Pulitzer prize-winning PornHub adversary Kristof, who was the subject of a recent New York Magazine profile by Olivia Nuzzi. The former columnist/public intellectual/bicoastal elite famously left his job at the Times to run for governor of Oregon, only to have his candidacy invalidated by a residency requirement in the state’s constitution that he figured simply wouldn’t apply to him because he has such good ideas. The piece showcases Kristof as painfully earnest and deeply convinced of his own ability to make change, but it also highlights the paternalistic tensions that come with the territory of his sort of technocratic liberalism. Nuzzi reports that he ran for governor of Oregon with no experience whatsoever, and without even bothering to vote in the state’s previous election; she also recaps his (cynical and somewhat notorious) practice of seeking out the bloodiest tragedies abroad in order to sell humanitarian interventionism to readers at home.

For his critics (and even fans), these are classic collisions of Kristof-ian earnestness with Kristof-ian vanity. But for the purposes of this column, the showstopper comes when Kristof—who upon returning to the Beaver State began producing and selling wine and hard cider from his Portland-area farm—holds forth on to Nuzzi on the matter of alcoholism and its victims:

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