Month: October 2025

Few things are more difficult to eradicate in our system of modern governance than a government-sanctioned monopoly or oligopoly. A recently passed bill in Tennessee, which will allow the state’s alcohol wholesalers to take over hemp distribution in the state, shows that these monopolies are not only difficult to eliminate but also often attempt to expand their reach.    

The new law sets up a distribution system for hemp—which was legalized at the federal level in the 2018 Farm Bill—that mirrors the notorious three-tier system for alcohol distribution, which requires producers, wholesalers, and retailers to be legally separate entities. The three-tier system restricts producers and suppliers from selling directly to their customers and mandates that they work through a wholesaler to reach the market. This allows wholesalers to operate as functional monopolies or oligopolies in certain parts of states where only one or two wholesalers operate.

The law, which takes effect on January 1, 2026, also requires all wholesalers and retailers of hemp products to maintain a physical presence within the state. Out-of-state hemp suppliers will be prohibited from engaging in direct-to-consumer shipping to customers in Tennessee, and instead will be forced to work through the state’s wholesaler and retailer tiers. While in-state Tennessee hemp suppliers cannot ship their products to Tennesseans either, they are able to sell on-site directly to their customers, providing a workaround to avoid the three-tier system.

Cornbread Hemp, a Kentucky hemp supplier that recorded $1 million in Tennessee-based sales last year, is challenging the new law in federal court. Cornbread Hemp argues that Tennessee’s law unconstitutionally discriminates against out-of-state competitors in favor of in-state businesses, which is a violation of the Constitution’s Dormant Commerce Clause.

Supreme Court observers will recognize how closely the case mirrors Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas (2019). In the case, the majority struck down Tennessee’s requirement that applicants for alcohol wholesaling or retailing licenses must have resided in the state for over two years, finding it to be unconstitutional discrimination against out-of-state economic interests.

Tennessee’s constitutional rationale for residency requirements in the hemp context is even weaker than with alcohol. The main constitutional defense in support of residency requirements for alcohol is that the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, devolved alcohol regulation back down to the state and local level. States, therefore, argue that the Constitution’s recognition of state power in the alcohol arena should inoculate residency clauses from Dormant Commerce Clause challenges. While some lower courts have continued to buy this argument, the Supreme Court has refused to go along in recent decades.

As liquor attorney Sean O’Leary notes, the 21st Amendment allows a discriminatory state law in the alcohol context to face a lower level of constitutional scrutiny than a non-alcohol law. The argument essentially boils down to: Alcohol is uniquely treated under the U.S. Constitution. Hemp has no corollary to the 21st Amendment, meaning a discriminatory hemp law will face a higher level of constitutional scrutiny.

Now alcohol wholesalers—already a government-sanctioned oligopoly or monopoly in many locales—are trying to expand their control beyond alcohol. The new law makes this power grab particularly blatant, since it moves hemp from under the purview of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture to the state Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

In fact, this change was made “at the behest of the wholesaler lobby,” O’Leary notes. “The wholesaler’s goal is to mandate a three-tier system where they get a piece of the action.” He predicts that, given the power of the alcohol wholesaler lobby in state capitals across America, more state legislatures will be following Tennessee’s lead.

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Shadow Ticket: A Novel, by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 293 pages, $30

My favorite story about Thomas Pynchon, which may or may not be completely true: When Timothy Leary found himself in the hole at Sandstone Federal Prison, the defrocked Harvard doc asked a guard for something to read and the screw tossed a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow into the cell. Would a random prison guard really have that book at the ready? Beats me, but I love the image of someone trapped in a tiny room with Pynchon’s difficult, funny, endlessly digressive novel as his only escape hatch. There’s a photo floating around the internet of Leary’s marked-up copy of the book (sometimes misidentified as Neil Armstrong’s copy, which makes a different sort of crazy sense). Leary’s notes certainly look like things you might scrawl if you’re being driven mad simultaneously by solitary confinement and by Pynchon’s sprawling universe.

There is often a scent of madness around Thomas Pynchon’s fan base, and I say that as someone who has been one of those fans for around 40 years. The man has a reputation in some quarters as an unapproachable writer rarely read outside the academy, but the Pynchon cultists I encounter are more likely to be eccentric autodidacts prone to building elaborately strange mental models of the world. I have run across but cannot find again a small online subculture whose devotees combined the tenets of Marxism-Leninism with esoteric conspiracy theories about elite occultist pedophile rings; they regarded almost every prominent countercultural figure with suspicion but seemed to revere Pynchon as a prophet. They were the purest form of Pynchon fans: the kind who could be Pynchon characters. I imagine him dropping them into a novel as an aside, maybe in the middle of a list of terror cells or of rival gangs of mathematicians.

But now a door has materialized between the author and the mainstream. Paul Thomas Anderson’s impressive film One Battle After Another, based very loosely on Pynchon’s 1990 book Vineland, hit No. 1 at the U.S. box office in late September, giving the writer an opportunity to pick up new readers. Almost immediately afterward, a fresh product appeared for those newcomers to buy: Pynchon’s ninth novel, an acid noir titled Shadow Ticket. This one offers the writer in a relatively accessible mode. There are no dense passages that stretch on for pages, no detours into literal rocket science, no homoerotic encounters with Malcolm X. It’s short, it’s funny, and its core plot—private eye chases runaway dame—is familiar enough to give a cautious reader something to cling to as the book gets stranger.

It does get plenty strange. It is one thing to say the novel is about a strikebreaker turned detective in 1930s Milwaukee who gets hired to track down a cheese heiress and finds himself traveling through central Europe against a backdrop of rising fascism. But that bare-bones sketch won’t prepare you for a story that also includes a dog piloting an autogyro, an unsurrendered Austro-Hungarian submarine lurking about Lake Michigan, a bowling alley where Nazi dancers Lindy-hop to a swing version of the “Horst Wessel Song,” and a golem whose left arm doubles as “a modified ZB-26 Czech light machine gun.” This is the sort of book that casually invokes “a secret Indian reservation, mentioned only once in a rider to a phantom treaty kept in a deep vault under a distant mountain belonging to the U.S. Interior Department and unrevealed even to those guarding it.” It has vast conspiracies, encounters with the supernatural, and a development near the end that reveals we’ve tumbled into an alternate historical timeline.

For all that, the book is not some Permanently Wacky Zone that is never anything but absurd and strange. Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t all aerial pie fights and octopus attacks, after all; it has sequences, like an Advent service in wartime Kent, that are genuinely moving. While nothing in Shadow Ticket is as affecting as that Christmas Eve scene, the book has an emotional core to it. Among the characters traversing its surreal labyrinths, you’ll find some three-dimensional beings capable of disappointment and love.

And just as Gravity’s Rainbow deals with serious political ideas, so too does Shadow Ticket. Its 1930s setting makes that inevitable: Fascists are lurking in Europe (and Wisconsin), the persecution of Jews is starting to pick up, and the left isn’t exactly incapable of authoritarian ugliness either. (Besides an inevitable allusion to Stalin, the book periodically brings up Béla Kun’s short-lived 1919 communist dictatorship in Hungary, which is damned here not just for its own predations but for teaching lessons in persecution to the paramilitary antisemites who came along later. The Tankie Esotericists might not care for those parts.) There are no tedious efforts to make everything match up one-to-one with contemporary politics, but there are certainly moments when the fiction feels familiar. At one point, a man grumbles that “there used to be more time to make a getaway. Now they’re flashing everybody’s mug shot all around the world in the blink of an eye, pretty soon there’s no place to run to anymore…”

Not that this is a totally surveilled society. The book’s characters are forever finding refuge in the folds of the map, from that secret Indian reservation to that unsurrendered submarine. (The latter resurfaces later, far from the Great Lakes, rescuing people from death squads.) Nor is it just the congenial characters who seek refuge. A cheese syndicate becomes “more global and sinister in scope” by “avoiding central headquarters, instead choosing a more distributed model, free-zone hopping, setting up shop in short-lived entities emerging from the World War and the Russian Revolution, preferring mixed populations, disputed territories, histories of plebiscites and provisional government, currencies printed on inexpensive stock in fugitive inks.”

One of those places is Fiume, a then-Italian, now-Croatian city that briefly became independent when the poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio seized it after World War I. During that autonomous interval, Pynchon reports, the place “had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie.” In his 1991 tract T.A.Z., the anarchist writer Hakim Bey described Fiume in similar terms, presenting it as an anti-authoritarian festival that briefly blipped onto and off of the map. I’d wager that Pynchon, whose books are peppered with anarchists, has read that. But Pynchon also surely knows that D’Annunzio had an authoritarian side, inventing public rituals that would later be adopted almost wholesale by Benito Mussolini. In our world, as in Pynchon’s, even an apparently free zone can feed into something antithetical to freedom.

Shadow Ticket is eminently quotable, and I could probably lay down another couple thousand words relaying good lines (“If you happen to be a spy, one big selling point about Vienna is there are no laws against spying, as long as the spying isn’t on Austria”) or describing amusing scenes (when “the Al Capone of cheese” meets the actual Al Capone, he asks what Capone is the Al Capone of). But at some point I’d just be retyping the book, and who needs that? Better to go straight to the source.

And to savor it. Pynchon is 88 years old, and this might be the last novel he’ll publish in his lifetime. Though who knows? The man was working on Mason & Dixon while he was also writing Vineland. Maybe he doubled up this time too, and Shadow Ticket is an aperitif for another 10-course psychedelic feast—the sort of book you’d like to have handy in solitary confinement or a space capsule.

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10/5/1953: Chief Justice Earl Warren takes the oath.

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Coal—the dominant fuel in the U.S., before it was steadily replaced by cheaper and cleaner energy sources—has found new life under President Donald Trump. In April, Trump issued an executive order to reinvigorate “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” which directed federal agencies to remove regulatory barriers to coal production and coal mining on federal lands.

Since then, the Energy Department has opened up federal financing opportunities for coal production (which include a $200 billion fund at the agency’s Loan Programs Office), designated coal as a critical material (which allows it to receive more federal funding), and reinstated a federal coal advisory committee that had lapsed.

The Interior Department, meanwhile, has fast-tracked fossil fuel and coal projects on federal lands. Earlier this year, the agency officially ended a moratorium on federal coal leasing, and in August it approved a plan that will make 14.5 million tons of coal available for mining in Wyoming through 2037. The agency has also implemented rules making it harder to permit renewable energy projects on federal lands.

Congress has also made it easier for coal to succeed. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced royalty rates for coal projects on federal lands and mandated that more federal acres be opened up to coal production. The bill also subsidizes foreign steelmaking by giving a tax break to the type of coal used in this production.

The change in coal’s fortune is remarkable given how it fared under the Biden administration. In addition to calling for coal plants across the U.S. to be shut down and replaced by renewables, former President Joe Biden also finalized strict air pollution
regulations that would have increased costs and closed fossil-fueled power plants nationwide. The Trump administration began rescinding these regulations in June.

Just as Biden’s preference for renewables distorted markets and harmed
consumers, so too does Trump’s bias toward coal. In May, the Energy Department ordered the Midcontinent Independent System Operator—which oversees most of the power grid from Minnesota to Louisiana—to keep a Michigan coal plant open through the summer to avoid rolling blackouts. The plant was scheduled to close that month.

In addition to not preventing outages, the order ended up costing the utility $29 million over five weeks, reports E&E News. Consumers Energy, which runs the plant, is seeking “cost recovery” from federal regulators, which would “allow the costs to be spread over millions of electricity customers,” per E&E.

The U.S. needs more energy generation and is facing a capacity shortfall
that could lead to future blackouts and rate hikes. But this shortfall is largely a result of bad government policies, such as federal regulations that delay nuclear power, and politicians picking energy winners and losers. Trump risks repeating the mistakes of past presidents. Coal companies might benefit, but ratepayers, markets, and the environment will be left worse off.

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