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The Space Coast



From the Ancient Past to the Modern Era, Cocoa Beach and the wider environs of Brevard County have maintained a fully innate surf identity...




 
 

Three Generations



This all happened to successful, educated people, in modern times, in one of the most advanced nations of the civilized world. And when Hitler’s men forced my grandparents onto a death train to the Belzec concentration camp...




 
 

Inlets of the Mind



Set waves, pop-culture references, and defiant riddles are essential ingredients in the work of Cocoa Beach artist Bruce Reynolds...




 
 

Eduardo Halfon's Mourning



Jewish literature is like red wine: it tends to find the fullness of its flavor after some years of maturation in the barrel. The vintages of Proust, Malamud, and Bellow only began to open up around the age of forty...




 
 

Florida's Original Surf Legend



Dick Catri––the first Florida boy to charge Pipeline and Waimea, first to deliver Hawaii savvy to the east coast, first to coach immortals like Gary Propper and Kelly Slater––asked that his ashes be cast into Monster Hole...




 
 

Guns, Surfers, and Pop Sculpture



The wind tumbles in from the Atlantic, frays the thinning edges of the cheap Trump flags, bends down an alleyway, and rides in through the high corrugated doors of Bruce Reynolds’ workshop....




 
 

Banning Books in the Name of Liberty



On high school registration day this year, I watched with a sense of existential dread as an English teacher rolled a cart full of Primo Levi and Shakespeare paperbacks out of the classroom...




 
 

The Thousand Islands



Over 2,000 years ago, the Atlantic Ocean breached this barrier island and cut an inlet over what is now Minutemen Causeway in Cocoa Beach...




 
 

The Glass Bank: Masterpiece to Dust



The inside story of Cocoa Beach's First Federal Savings and Loan Building is too squalid and tangled a yarn to weave into the space of this column. But forget the inside story for a moment. The outside story provides a simple enough object lesson...



 
 

NPR Interview: The Cities Project



Jon Hamilton interviews Dan at Hightower Beach. "A Coastal Paradise Confronts Its Watery Future."




 
 

Politicians Using the Lagoon as a Red Herring



Until politicians come to reject the notion that billions spent on fomenting anger and division is a good and proper use of funds, while local infrastructure projects are items to be scrapped over, skinned, and picked apart...




 
 

Thickness Flow:
the Larry Mayo Perspective



In a clandestine shaping room at the southern edge of Cocoa Beach, Larry Mayo takes his caliper to a slab of US Blanks foam. He’s about the same size as the blank...




 
 

Solar Roofs: Power to the People



In the aftermath of the election, we might find no better example of ballot-box fraud than Amendment 1, the initiative meant to suppress the proliferation of solar power in the Sunshine State...




 
 

#AWP15 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bookfair



I am in a dive bar in Minneapolis, waiting out the interlude between poets, watching William Tyler navigate a tractate of reverb...




 
 

Facebook Wants You to Know It Cares



Dear “Friends” –– We are thrilled to announce our latest update to our lexicon here at Facebook headquarters. As of today, the term “user” will be replaced with “person”...



 
 

A Truer Line:
the George Robinson Profile



The shaper formerly known as George Robinson looks too thickly alive, too vital for a man who has been planing and sanding rails for 46 years...




 
 

Battle Over the Barrier Island Name



Sam Lopez, president of United Third Bridge, a Hispanic Civil Rights organization, is spearheading a campaign to name Brevard's barrier island "Ponce de Leon Island"...




 
 

Slaughtering Dolphins Not Acceptable



It was admirable of Caroline Kennedy to speak up in protest of the annual Taiji dolphin slaughter, but when she tweeted that the U.S. government "opposes drive hunt fisheries,"...




 
 

A Plague on our River
Look into the reflected sunset, the pink-ribboned sky pillowed with golden fire, and you might convince yourself that the Banana River is the same river you once knew. Beneath the glass, a thriving, crystalline estuary, flush with living creatures....



 
 

A Tale of Two Cities



Cocoa Beach has a Vision Plan for its downtown. But a vocal minority stands in opposition. It’s summertime, and somewhere near Minutemen Causeway...



 
 

Politics Over Principals



Last March, in response to protests over the Trayvon Martin shooting, Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force to review Florida's Stand Your Ground law...




 
 

Holding the Line



Brevard's beach renourishment has all the makings of biblical allegory: apocalyptic storms, rising floodwaters, relentless stretches of sand. In my last editorial...




 
 

Bring On the Sand



Here they come - look to the east and you will see them - floating goliaths, hopper dredges, those federally appointed defenders of the barrier island...




 
 

Autism and the Evolving Mind



In March, the Center for Disease Control released an alarming statistic: one in 68 children is currently diagnosed with autism. Should the trend continue at its current pace...




 
 

Time to Cut Your Cable Cord



If you're among the 95 million Americans who still pay for "live television", you might want to consider these statistics...




 
 

Storm Surges On Way



For years, the Atlantic Ocean has been swelling up, but in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, the East Coast is finally beginning to take notice...




 
 

Break Down the Two Party System



For all the liberties afforded the American consumer in the information age, one remains scandalously absent: the freedom to choose our political leaders...




 
 

Dolphins



My fascination with dolphins started on a small, sand-dredged mound of muck in the Mosquito Lagoon, somewhere off Canaveral National Seashore, where I camped the night of New Year’s Eve, 2000, along with twelve of my closest friends –– a band of lonely children on the dark, starlit river...



 
 

Mobile Devices Disconnect Us



Five years ago, a telephone was something you picked up when you wanted to talk to someone...




 
 

The Forgotten Land



Last month, I traveled to Port-au-Prince as a volunteer for the 28th Carter Work Project, to help build homes for Haitian families displaced by the 2010 earthquake...




 






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