I like to drink. Do I have to feel bad about alcohol now?

 

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January 15, 2025 Lots of news happening out there. After tens of thousands dead over 15 months, we've got a Gaza ceasefire agreement. Minnesota Republicans are attempting a brazen power grab. Influencers are hawking wellness products amid the LA fires.   But my mind is still stuck on a headline from a week and a half ago, an eon in today's world of diminishing attention spans: the surgeon general's warning linking alcohol to cancer. As I write in a piece this week, the warning landed, for me, with an unequivocal, self-assured ferocity that left me regularly envisioning the brutal totality of all the alcohol I have consumed over nearly two decades. And since then, I've been feeling a bit uneasy about fond memories that involved some level of drinking. In these moments, a parade of evil-grinning beverages barrels down at me, taunting a future of illness.  So I gave my real therapist a break—I can't imagine she'd appreciate it if I published our sessions anyway—and reached out to Dr. Jennifer Panning in Evanston, Illinois, for thoughts on how to process my alcohol-related anxieties after the surgeon general's announcement. Our conversation quickly expanded into a deeper meditation on guilt—when it's productive and when it is simply unhelpful—recalibrating ourselves into engaging with the present, and why processes are almost always more important than the outcome. It ultimately left me with a renewed sense of kindness for myself, which as Panning and I discussed in our chat, isn't exactly easy in a time that feels so uniquely dismal. I very much appreciated her guidance. Here's to hoping you too might find some wisdom in it here. —Inae Oh

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After Tens of Thousands of Dead, US Officials Say Israel and Hamas Agree to a Ceasefire The deal should bring the release of hostages and the drawing back of Israeli forces. But it is unclear if it will hold for long. BY SOPHIE HURWITZ excerpt:  Israel’s army has leveled two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza, rendered most of its infrastructure unusable, and killed a massive portion of the Palestinian population. The exact number of dead will be unknown for some time, as unrecorded deaths and those trapped under the rubble are added to the tally. Gaza’s health ministry puts the official death toll at 46,600; last week, the latest in a series of independent studies estimated that at least 64,000 people were killed in the first 9 months of the war alone. 90 percent of those left alive in Gaza have been displaced, most of whom are at risk of famine.  Meanwhile, the United States continued to send billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel, without meaningfully conditioning that aid.  On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared a deal was “right on the brink.” Hamas accepted a deal that was near-identical to one proposed by President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council—which Israel scuttled in July. This time, though, the threat of Trump’s inauguration served as something closer to a real deadline. (The President-elect repeatedly threatened that there would be “hell to pay” if the remaining hostages were not returned by January 20th.) His envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined this past week’s negotiations in Qatar, alongside Qatari mediators, US negotiators and representatives for Israel and Hamas.  When the bombs stop, the question of aid will remain. Nearly every hospital in Gaza has been destroyed or stripped of nearly all its capabilities, over 42 million tons of rubble cover the enclave, and an estimated one and a half million Gazans are spending the winter in tents or makeshift shelters. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed Wednesday’s deal, and urged the parties to remove “the significant security and political obstacles to delivering aid across Gaza so that we can support a major increase in urgent life-saving humanitarian support.” At a press conference Wednesday, the Prime Minister of Qatar announced that the first six-week phase of the ceasefire plan would go into effect Sunday. Residents of Gaza expect that Israel will continue to bomb them in the interim. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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What the history of American expansion can tell us about Trump’s threats BY TIM MURPHY A GOP congressman’s campaign finance problem just got worse BY NOAH LANARD excerpt: Mother Jones illustration; Mark Humphrey/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. There are holes in Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles’ personal story. Some have been relatively harmless fabrications. Ogles claimed to be a scholar of German, Japanese, and Russian and he has repeatedly described himself as an economist. In fact, Ogles took one only one community college course in Elementary Japanese (receiving a B) and one in economics (receiving a C). Soon after, he dropped out. But gaps in his narrative of past events might be more consequential. In particular, the stories Ogles told during his winning 2022 campaign about his personal and campaign finances. A recently released Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report found substantial evidence that Ogles “omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements or FEC candidate committee reports” during the race that sent him to Washington—a potentially criminal violation of federal campaign finance law. (Ogles’ congressional office did not respond to requests for comment.) The report centers on a nonexistent $320,000 loan Ogles reported making while running in a competitive House primary in 2022. In late 2023, Phil Williams, the chief investigative reporter at NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee, reported that Ogles’ Congressional financial disclosure showed that he was unlikely to have had the assets required to have loaned his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, followed up with a complaint that asked OCE to investigate Ogles. Republicans attempt power grab in Minnesota BY ABBY VESOULIS Influencers are using the Los Angeles fires to hawk wellness products  BY ANNA MERLAN

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I like to drink. Do I have to feel bad about alcohol now? A clinical psychologist on how to approach guilt and memories of revelry after the surgeon general's warning against alcohol. BY INAE OH

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