What is This Week in Florida?

So often people ask us what it is like living in Florida right now or even something more benign, such as, how is your year going. As The Atlantic noted recently , there are so many cultural confrontations going on right now it is hard to keep track of them all—and most of them are centered on public education. Public education is the most important thing in all four of the lives in my household. Amazingly, the cultural confrontations have accelerated dramatically since Ron DeSantis was sworn in for his second term in January. Any time you talk to one of us this is front and center as the governor and the state legislature are actively attacking the schools our kids attend, our kids themselves (they want our kids’ menstrual histories, I wish I were exaggerating or making that up) and our work at the local and massive, public university.

That’s why I’m starting this, as a sort of touchstone for you to know what is going on for us—if you know us personally. If you don’t, well, maybe you want to know what’s going on in Florida but don’t have time to ingest it all. This is meant to be brief overview of the previous week in Florida.

Honestly, this is an experiment, and like most of my writing experiments, I expect it to fail before it really gets going. But, in the hope that it both does succeed and that people like you actually read it, I’m setting some general guidelines. The posts will be between 1000 and 1500 words dedicated to a news recap, which will include “receipts” to sources and little commentary from me and they’ll be no more than weekly. Since the move from Substack, I'm adding some additional features, which at this time will be, "Life in South Florida," which will be a mix of fun and positive things I observe and, well, other things, and "This week in Florida history," which will look back at the last 500 years of history in Florida.

We’ll see if this takes off at all and we’ll see if we need to moderate comments—I will be quick to implement tools for keeping hostile conversation starters (trolls) at bay, if needed.

As for now, I’ll post my first real post tonight and I really hope that you take the time to read it. The first people I’ve signed up for this (ha ha!) are all immediate family, so this is literally for you. I very much would appreciate it if you took a look and offered feedback.