It’s America’s 250th birthday tomorrow. That’s a big deal. So you better celebrate with a good drink. However, if you’re a little bougie like me, and you like fine spirits, you’re probably having a rough time. The teetotaler-in-chief’s tariff policies have driven up the price of imported amaros, sakes, single malts, and vermouths. What can you do? Well, you can buy American-made versions. Which is thematic for the holiday anyway. Find our top picks below. —Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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Even for foreign spirits like sake and amaro, it’s possible to buy American. You may never go back.
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America and alcohol have a complicated relationship. Citizens rioted when George Washington imposed a tax on whiskey to pay war debts. And remember when we tried to break up with booze back in Prohibition? Yeah, that went over well.
Our volatile romance has unfortunately reached another impasse: Donald Doesn’t-Drink Trump. More specifically, this whole will-he-won’t-he tariff business. The booze industry has been in nonstop disarray trying to figure out what the capricious teetotaler will do next. As such, some restaurants and bars have relied on domestic spirits to replace pricey or hard-to-get overseas favorites like French wine, Italian amaro, and Scottish, well, Scotch.
Luckily, our country has always borrowed from cuisines around the world and tweaked them into something altogether American. Think Pennsylvania Dutch, Tex-Mex, Asian fusion. Who could stop us from doing the same with alcohol?
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If there is one quick way to waste a whole lot of money when decorating your home, it’s rushing a room’s completion by buying a matching set of furniture from one brand. A desk, wall cabinet, and accent table all from the same line. A bed with a matching dresser and nightstands. Same colors, same curves—Same! Same! Same! Unfortunately, it feels like men fall into this trap most often. They want their space finished, so they walk into a store they like, buy a coordinating bedroom, living-room, or home-office set, and bam. A lot of money down the drain for your home to look like a showroom.
Well-designed spaces take time. You want pieces to coordinate but not match, feel collected, and layer your textiles, woods, and stones. Some tension between stylistic eras goes a long way in keeping things interesting—it’s a process. One that has been radically improved, though, by one brand that suddenly has us breaking all our own rules.
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Read that headline again: This is not a list of the greatest American songs, nor an attempt to survey the best American musicians. Painful as it is, names like Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and James Brown do not appear. Other giants like Prince and Michael Jackson possessed such otherworldly gifts that they seemed to stand for something beyond their native country.
Instead, this is a collection of songs that are distinctly American, addressing protest and leisure, joy and pain, wisdom and silliness, nostalgia and experimentation. Trying to represent the full, glorious, messy cross section of American song—Black and white, urban and rural, male and female—is ultimately a celebration of the country’s greatest qualities. “There’s no more thrilling history lesson,” Bruce Springsteen recently said, “than that of American music.”
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