Search results for

Doug MacGregor has been an editorial cartoonist for more than 40 years. He got his professional start at the Norwich Bulletin in eastern Connecticut in 1980. He moved to Florida in 1988 and drew cartoons for the News Press in Fort Myers until 2011. Doug created five cartoons every week, year in and year out, for nearly a quarter century. He has donated a large collection of his original drawings (mostly pertaining to the local environment) to Florida Gulf Coast University’s “Archives & Special Collections” at the school’s Wilson G. Bradshaw Library and students have completed the process of digitizing them and the team at the Archives helps students use Doug’s work in their studies.

During the first Republican presidential candidate debate Governor Ron DeSantis said he would use U.S. military special forces inside of Mexico to help stem the flow of illegal drugs like fentanyl into the United States. While this kind of rhetoric — the idea of using the U.S. military in a sovereign foreign nation to combat illicit drug production and distribution — might seem shocking, it’s not entirely new for a political candidate or even a sitting president to say something along these lines, but rather goes back decades. To get some context we sit down with Dr. Rick Coughlin, he’s an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida Gulf Coast University who focuses on Mexican politics and culture.

Conservation photographer Ian Wilson-Navarro was born in Miami but has lived his entire life in Key Largo. He got his first camera as a teenager, and first visited the Dry Tortugas around that same time camping and fishing with his father. In 2021, he and a friend were chosen for a National Parks Arts Foundation artist residency in the Dry Tortugas on Loggerhead Key. His proposal for the residency pitched the idea of capturing images to create a book, and that book is now out. "Dry Tortugas: Stronghold of Nature" was published last month by University Press of Florida. It features about 200 of his photographs along with essays by people with intimate knowledge of the park who explore its history, culture, and environment.

Research shows that suppressing melatonin production through excessive night lighting, especially blue light, leads health effects including an increase in certain endocrine-related carcinomas. It is now well known that circadian disturbance causes a 20–30% increase in breast cancer rates, and a similar increase in prostate cancers. We discuss the nexus between light pollution and human health, the environment, and public safety with part-time Naples resident, Dr. Mario Motta.

We meet an Venice high school student who turned her attention to feral cats at the local level — and kittens in particular — and the need to both reduce their reproduction rate and to help as many homeless kittens become socialized so they can hopefully be adopted. Venice High School Junior, Maddie Canty, has been a Girl Scout for 12 years. Earlier this year she earned the Girl Scout Gold Award with her project called A Hope for Kittens. The Gold Award is the top award a Girl Scout Can earn. Her project focused on reducing kitten euthanasia by combining public education, direct care, and local policy change.

As internet use became common, communities formed in different ways. Early examples would include internet forums, or message boards. In the early 2000s a message board called 4chan was created that was anonymous by design. And posts made to it, and replies, were inherently temporary. While 4chan had message boards for all sorts of topics its anonymity combined with posts that would eventually disappear led to the emergence of an online culture that would seem strange and even extreme to many people who didn’t spend time there. Our guest grew up immersed in this online culture, and is now a researcher of it, so we thought he’d be a good person to help us understand this world a bit better as it seems to increasingly enter into mainstream culture, from media to public discourse, and the polarization it contains.

The three thousand sheriffs in this country wield a tremendous amount of power, have little accountability, and are difficult to remove from office. The Highest Law in the Land explores more about this seemingly untouchable office.

The Associated Press is reporting that air quality in some parts of the United States is worsening as smoke from dozens of wildfires in Canada travels south, pushed by winds high in the atmosphere.The U.S. was sending aid in several forms to Canada.

We get some insight into the long and challenging journeys dementia caregivers are on from two men who became caregivers themselves after their wives were diagnosed with dementia. Dan Moser’s wife Maria was diagnosed with what’s called Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) in 2015 and he was her caregiver until she passed away about two years ago. During that time, he pivoted away from his work as a bike and pedestrian safety advocate toward dementia caregiving, a role he continues to this day. And Jeff Edwards’ wife Bunny was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018 and he’s still taking care of her. Jeff retired from a 50-plus year in radio a couple of years ago and since then has been producing a podcast called GUTPUNCHED that explores the challenges of dementia caregiving, and shares resources they've found, and as he puts it “their heartbreaks and their little victories.”

Tim Love spent more than four decades in the world of global advertising. Since retiring in 2013, he has focused much of his attention on the way the online world operates today, and how it has been used to polarize us, and has greatly impacted mental health, particularly among young people. Love is author “Discovering Truth: How to Navigate Between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World” and he’s host of a podcast called Tim Love's Discovering Truth where he interviews major players in the online and corporate world about the nature of truth and the trouble we find ourselves in.