Commentary
Dear Gov: Suppressing Black people (like kids in AP) is a bad look outside the Fox News fever swamp
Ron DeSantis, pay attention: you really do not want Ben Crump suing you on behalf of three Florida high schoolers over that pilot AP African American Studies course you shut down. Have you seen those kids? Clean-cut, All-American, telegenic. Have you heard Ben Crump? Smart, eloquent, relentless. Crump gets on national TV more than you. […]
This time in Florida, the Davids beat Goliath in an environmental battle
Because Florida is such an unusual state, we have some unusual museums. There’s a surreal one in St. Petersburg dedicated to the surrealist art of Salvador Dali. One in Ocala features drag racing — the type with cars, not dressing up — run by champ “Big Daddy” Don Garlits. And one in Miami Beach is […]
If Georgia GOP thinks life starts at conception, why allow ‘murder’ for six weeks?
If you honestly, sincerely believe that human life begins at the moment that sperm is introduced to egg, certain conclusions flow logically from that starting point, including that abortion is murder and that banning abortion is a moral obligation on a par with banning slavery. I strongly disagree with that approach, but I understand it, […]
Cost of turning old Florida tree farm into a discount store is too high
Ask anyone to name the fruits we grow in Florida and they’ll say oranges, although citrus is in a steep decline these days. They miiiight also mention grapefruit. But we grow a lot of other fruit, too: apples, avocados, bananas, figs, guava, persimmons, mangoes, mulberries, papayas, and peaches. People hardly ever bring up pineapples, but […]
Gov. DeSantis’ attack on New College isn’t about philosophy; it’s about votes
Ron DeSantis likes to say Florida is where “woke” goes to die. If by “woke” he means tolerance, science, inquiry, free expression, and knowledge, yes, Florida is where “woke” goes to die. Florida is where public education goes to die; Ron DeSantis is poisoning it. Not content with installing the quack Joseph Ladapo at the […]
Touting his environmental ‘success,’ DeSantis is more con man than conservationist
Maybe it’s because I’m from Florida, home to sooooo many slick talkers, but I love a good yarn about con artists. “The Sting,” “American Hustle,” “The Music Man” — the list of great grifter movies is a long one, including “The Grifters.” These stories show how some people can weave a magical spell with words […]
How Republicans normalized George Santos
Decades ago, Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt warned: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, i.e. the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false, i.e., the standards of thought, no longer exist.” With that quote […]
I’m a professional comedy writer — Republicans have a ‘punching down’ problem
By Jon Savitt There’s one rule in comedy so universal that it connects comics of every background, genre, and skill level: Never punch down. These three simple words can be the difference between being a headliner or being hated. “Punching down” is more than being mean, rude, or vulgar. It’s the intentional act of attacking […]
Even my hard-headed dad understood the importance of Florida’s wetlands
We buried my dad last week. Oscar Pittman had a good, long life. He’d just turned 87, and he and my mom had celebrated 67 years of marriage. Dad loved to tell stories and make people laugh. When I was a kid growing up in Pensacola, I used to hate going with him on trips […]
On anniversary of Rosewood attack, it’s sad to see DeSantis embrace FL’s Old South legacy
It began in the usual way: A white woman (her name was Frances Taylor) accused a Black man of beating her. That was on New Year’s Day, 1923. It ended in the usual way, with violence, lynching, and destruction. That Jan. 2, a mob of white men drove to Rosewood, a mostly black turpentine village […]
Questioning traditions can help us enjoy something new
To me, holidays are merely exercises in tradition, or traditions. Sometime in my forties, I began to question all of them, reliving the “why” phase of my childhood for some unknown, yet admittedly irritating reason. Why do we eat turkey on Christmas? Why is everything closed? And it isn’t just the holidays. When did we […]
Arctic Report Card 2022: The Arctic is getting rainier and seasons are shifting
In the Arctic, the freedom to travel, hunt and make day-to-day decisions is profoundly tied to cold and frozen conditions for much of the year. These conditions are rapidly changing as the Arctic warms. The Arctic is now seeing more rainfall when historically it would be snowing. Sea ice that once protected coastlines from erosion […]