‘It’s hard not to feel for the distillers’

‘Has the world really lost its thirst for Scotch whiskey?’

James Moore at The Independent

Scotch is “one of Scotland’s most iconic products,” but “it is not in a happy place,” says James Moore. Scotch distillers have been “caught in a perfect storm, with taxes and tariffs battering both domestic and international consumption.” The “real enthusiasts may choose to swallow higher prices. But casual drinkers? That’s a different matter altogether.” Those “involved in producing Scotch could be forgiven for pouring themselves a stiff drink to help drown their sorrows.”

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‘The Sydney Hanukkah attack didn’t come out of nowhere’

Aviva Klompas at Newsweek

The “Jewish families who gathered at Bondi Beach in Sydney to celebrate Hanukkah were targeted for doing exactly what the holiday represents: showing up openly as Jews,” says Aviva Klompas. They were “not caught in a geopolitical dispute.” This “was not the result of a policy disagreement or a misunderstanding about Israel.” The attack was “also not sudden or inexplicable. It was the foreseeable result of a sustained failure to take antisemitism seriously before it turned lethal.”

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‘Olivia Nuzzi, Karine Jean-Pierre and Eric Trump have all written the same book’

Carlos Lozada at The New York Times

Political memoirs “tend to fall into recognizable categories,” says Carlos Lozada. A “recent spate of books highlights the presence of a new category, one well suited to our time: the grievance memoir.” The books of Eric Trump, Karine Jean-Pierre and Olivia Nuzzi are “all outraged by affronts real and imagined, fixated on nefarious, often unspecified enemies.” They are “animated, above all, by a certainty that they’ve been wronged not just by people or institutions but also by broader forces.”

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‘Will Ford’s $19.5 billion EV charge be another dead end?’

Liam Denning at Bloomberg

For “years after General Motors took a bailout from Washington, it was scorned in some quarters of the population as ‘Government Motors,’” and while “Ford Motor Co. lacks the requisite initials, the same epithet could be applied to its latest pivot on electric vehicles,” says Liam Denning. Ford is “reconfiguring for changed political realities given that the environmental benefits of EVs, lower emissions, aren’t rewarded in the market but instead incented by regulation.” But Ford “isn’t an innocent bystander.”

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