Friday, November 21, 2025 |
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You know that saying "the older the better?" Well, that doesn't apply to everything, especially not whisky. When Scotch reaches a geriatric age, say, 60-plus years old, it tends to taste a lot like wet wood. I don't know about you, but that doesn't really whet my appetite. Esquire contributor Jonah Flicker, an expert on all things brown liquor, recently came face-to-face with an absurdly expensive 85-year-old single malt. His experience was equal parts revelatory and ridiculous. Check out his report below. – Chris Hatler, deputy editor Plus: |
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In the world of single-malt Scotch, age doesn't always come before beauty. |
Artistry in Oak, the 85-year-old single-malt Scotch distilled at The Glenlivet and released by independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail, sat on a pedestal covered by a velvet cloth. Behind it, a dramatic video showed storm clouds moving across a darkened sky. When the cloth was whisked off, the room burst into deferential applause. I opened the small box in front of me, which contained a tiny sample of the liquid and an acorn made from reclaimed wood. I felt nervous just handling the glassware. Visions of spilling a small pour of whisky worth thousands of dollars, embarrassing myself, and horrifying my hosts played out in my head. When a person behind me knocked over a glass, I was afraid to turn. But based on the lack of gasps, I assumed they already consumed their whisky. I brushed aside my jitters and ever so carefully emptied the tiny sample bottle into my glass. Though I was enjoying the occasion—one that few will ever get to experience, not to mention afford—I had to wonder: Would a whisky this old taste any good? |
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Sam is autistic. There is still no grounding, medically speaking, on what autism is, no neurological answer that nails it. It is defined by a spectrum of symptoms—thus the common refrain "he's on the spectrum"—and what that means, for any one person, is particular. As Sam says, "If you've met someone with autism, you've met one person with autism." Diagnosed at fifteen with Asperger's, which tends to manifest in social awkwardness and a narrow range of all-absorbing interests, Sam is "high functioning" (the DSM, the widely used American Psychiatric Association guidebook for mental disorders, no longer uses Asperger's as a classification): He is now thirty-six, married with two young sons, a college graduate, gainfully employed as a lab tech at a pharmaceutical company, and his take on the world is adamant and unique, with certain challenges. For example, he doesn't drive, having flunked the test a half-dozen times over the strange angles demanded of parallel parking. Organizing his life, even along the lines of, say, cleaning a bathroom, is largely a mystery to him, still uncracked.
It is still hard for me to hear Sam talk about how alone he felt as a child, but he has changed a great deal, beginning with making a decision, in his mid-twenties, that he was going to start over. That he was going to look at himself as just fine the way he is and that the way he perceives things and functions—from the way he holds a pencil to how he might need a boss at work to deliver instructions one step at a time—must simply be accepted. Such a self-declaration is one thing; learning to fit in ways that others find palatable, in ways that allow him to flourish, another. |
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Alone in the fog, after six days of running through the British mountains, Raf Willems began to speak with the grass and stones. About what, he doesn't know. The air was freezing, but he liked it that way; summer heat made for awful running weather. To be in nature—the thickening precipitation above, the undulating terrain below—pushing his physical limits was a thrilling adventure. Until he saw dead people lying in the snow, calling to him: Help, help, help me! The start of the ultramarathon had been lively. More than one hundred deliriously excited long-distance runners—their faces flushed from the drizzly 35 degree morning, colorful waterproof jackets zipped to the chin with hoods up—all huddled in mass anticipation of the Montane Winter Spine Race. It was January 15, 2023. Some wanted to win. Most, like Willems, simply wanted to finish. But completing the 268-mile course in the allotted time of 168 hours would be no simple feat. Starting in the town of Edale in Derbyshire, the trail ultramarathon threads the Pennine Way, a ragged seam that sews together northern England's east and west halves. It ultimately needles just past the Scottish border. Participants would have to climb mountains that jut from the earth like knobby vertebrae, the highest being the nearly three-thousand-foot Cross Fell. Running the course takes nearly a week, even in the best conditions, and British winters are particularly unkind. |
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 What the hell happened in politics this week? Esquire's legendary blogger Charlie P. Pierce has answers |
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The representative from Louisiana, who has a history of ridiculous behavior, was the only dissenting House member on the Epstein Transparency Act. Back in 2023, he bum-rushed an activist away from a press availability on the sidewalk outside of the Capitol. He was a renegade cop back home in Louisiana, leaving a law-enforcement gig under investigation for beating a Black suspect who was handcuffed. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Higgins is a dangerous nut. |
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Remember Matt Gaetz, the former congresscritter from Florida who had a nice run through the first Trump administration? There was even a brief period in Trump II in which he was rumored to be the nominee for attorney general. Then his star fell like a mackerel onto a dock. There always were rumors about Gaetz's, ah, unconventional social and romantic lives. |
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Bill Donohue has been grinding this ax ever since the scandal within the Church broke in the early years of this century. It's a twofer. He gets to blow squid ink on behalf of the guilty-ass Church hierarchy while, at the same time, exercising his raging homophobia. |
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After some bloviating from the likes of Representative Jim Jordan (R-Van Heusen), and some general bipartisan posturing, the House of Representatives passed the Jeffrey Epstein Transparency Act by a vote of 427–1. The lone vote against it was Representative Clay Higgins, the wing-nut loup-garou from Louisiana. |
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In a completely unexpected move, a Trump-appointed judge blocked Texas gerrymandering ahead of next year's midterms. Then it ruled that the state must conduct its midterm elections next year according to a map drawn in 2021. The opinion was 166 pages long, and it was authored by U.S. judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee who earlier clerked for Abbott when the latter was on the state supreme court. |
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