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This week, we listen back to one of our favorite GCL Book Club conversations of the year. Poet and journalist Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, is essential reading.

This summer brought higher than normal temperatures both on land and in the oceans. According to NASA, July was the hottest month on record, more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the historic average for the month, and warmer than any other month in the 143-year record. And those temperatures, at least in part, contributed to this hurricane season tying with 1933 for the 4th most named storms on record. There were 20 named storms, with seven becoming hurricanes, three of which were major hurricanes — including Hurricane Idalia which made landfall in the Big Bend Region on August 30 as a Category 3 storm, bringing significant wind damage and storm surge of 7 to 12 feet to Keaton Beach and surrounding areas. We wrap up the 2023 season, and learn about a project in Cedar Key that's testing what are called 'living shorelines'.

U.S. military veterans often face challenges when transitioning to civilian employment after leaving the service. Sometimes their skills and experiences don’t directly translate to civilian jobs — and employers might not fully understand the value of military experience or how it applies to their industry. Some veterans may need to undergo additional training or education to meet the standards required for civilian jobs, which can be time-consuming and costly. To help with the transition, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and some employers offer programs to help veterans find a new career by providing training, resources, and support specifically tailored to veterans' needs. We learn about one here in Florida that began in 2016 when two employees with the University of Florida Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences decided that helping veterans possibly find a path to a new career in agriculture would be a great fit, so they created the Veterans Florida Agriculture Program.

When OpenAI released the first publicly available, so-called ‘generative AI chat bot’ called ChatGPT, it didn’t take long for users — especially tech-savvy ones — to realize it was a game changer. While forms of artificial intelligence have been used in systems and applications for decades they weren’t this new form of generative AI that were being powered by what are called Large Language Models — or LLMs. As these systems have quickly become more powerful companies and organizations are finding ways to integrate them into all sorts of applications. We talk with two people from the Lastinger Center for Education at University of Florida to find out they’re using these rapidly advancing Large Language Models in the work they do.

When Governor Ron DeSantis announced he was using his emergency powers to have the State of Florida build a detention facility on a relatively unused airbase in Big Cypress National Preserve in Collier County the idea immediately drew criticisms, including the cost and the environmental impact. But there is another aspect of this camp and the name Alligator Alcatraz that has drawn another kind of criticism: echoes of racist language that bring to mind the trope of ‘alligator bait’ that dates back to the late 1800s and the days of Jim Crow. We explore that history with a reporter from the Miami Herald and a Naples Rabbi whose recent sermon titled “A Fence Around Compassion” went viral on Facebook.

New legislation passed during the 2023 session and signed into law by Governor DeSantis makes a host of changes to election law in the state. Part of S.B. 7050 significantly restricts how third-party voter registration organizations like the League of Women Voters of Florida can operate. In response, the League of Women Voters of Florida is suing Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and Secretary of State Cord Byrd, seeking to block provisions of the new omnibus election law that would restrict and penalize the organization’s civic engagement efforts.

Before the pandemic, The Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida was spending almost $40,000 dollars a month to buy food. That jumped to $1.4 million a month during the first year of the pandemic, and has remained high ever since. According to their president & CEO, Richard LeBer, they’re currently having to spend almost a million dollars a month to provide food to those in need. Add the challenges and increased need brought about by Hurricane Ian, and the coming summer months when kids are out of school and seasonal workers have less income, and it’s easy to see how hard the staff and volunteers at the Harry Chapin Food Bank must be working to continue meeting the demand for food across this region.

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.

Back in the mid-1960s Bill Strickland was a directionless public school student in Pittsburgh who didn’t really see a path for success for him or his fellow lower class, minority student friends. Then, one day he walked past a classroom and saw a teacher sitting at a pottery wheel — and that moment, and how he responded to it, changed his life. And since then has changed the lives of countless young people not only in Pittsburgh, but around the country and beyond. Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC) takes seemingly disparate elements — adult career training, youth arts education, jazz presentation and botanical sales (they grow orchids) — and combines them into a program with a proven record of positively changing the lives of underserved populations. Bill has helped start an additional 13 centers, including five in Pennsylvania, 6 in other US states, 1 in Puerto Rico, and 1 in Israel.

In April of 2023 a small group of southwest Floridians got together to express their concerns about what they see as growing trends toward autocracy here in Florida, and more broadly across the United States. They formally launched their nonpartisan nonprofit called Floridians for Democracy in May and since then have been working to bring people together who share similar concerns. The primary focus of their concerns are the policies and positions being put forth by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and the Republican-dominated state legislature, which they say demonstrate autocratic or authoritarian tendencies. We get an update on the work they're doing from Floridians for Democracy co-founder, Jim Nathan; and from Dave Aronberg, the elected State Attorney for 15th Judicial Circuit which includes Palm Beach County.