Florida & Beyond, and All Opinions

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped low-income Americans buy groceries for decades with few disruptions. A political scientist who has researched the history of government nutrition programs explains who SNAP helps, how enrollment varies from state to state and what the program costs to run.

Good coaching candidates are getting hired and doing their best to keep high school sports fixtures in their communities. But coaches often feel like they’re missing something, and they wonder whether they’re living up to those aspirations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was arguably the most powerful vice president in American history. He also thought that the assertive Congress of the 1970s had gone too far and had emasculated the presidency, making it nearly impossible for the president to get things done. Under Bush, he the unitary executive theory, a conservative thesis that calls for total presidential control over the entire executive branch. Now, nearly two decades later, President Donald Trump is using this theory to push his agenda.

Zohran Mamdani’s approach to democratic socialism is less about an abstract political ideology than it is about practical solutions. As he has put it: “We want to showcase our ideals, not by lecturing people about how correct we are, but rather by delivering and letting that delivery be the argument itself.” Because of this, he has also been described as an heir to the historical tradition of “sewer socialism”, a brand of left-wing thinking that favoured incremental, practical reform over revolutionary rhetoric.

For over a century, Hollywood has tended to portray Muslim men through a remarkably narrow lens: as terrorists, villains or dangerous outsiders. From shows such as “24” and “Homeland” to procedural dramas such as “Law and Order,” this portrayal has seldom allowed for complexity or relatability. Such depictions reinforce Orientalist stereotypes – a colonial worldview that treats cultures in the East as exotic, irrational or even dangerous.

Throughout the shutdown battle, Congress – particularly the House of Representatives – has been unwilling to assert itself as an equal branch of government. Beyond policymaking, Congress has been content to hand over many of its core constitutional powers to the executive branch. This renunciation of responsibility is difficult to watch. Yet Congress’ path to irrelevance as a body of government did not begin during the shutdown, or even in January 2025.

Thirty beluga whales are at the risk of being euthanized at the now-shuttered Marineland zoo and amusement park in Niagara Falls, Canada. Marineland said in a letter to Canada’s Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson it will have to euthanize the whales if it doesn’t receive the necessary financial support to relocate them. The park has come under intense scrutiny recently due to the ongoing struggle to relocate its remaining whales amid financial struggles, a lack of resources and crumbling infrastructure.

The Trump administration announced plans to stop releasing food insecurity data. The federal government has tracked and analyzed this data for the past three decades. Food banks relied on the data to understand who was most likely to need their help. The data also allowed policymakers to see the big jump in need during the Great Recession starting in 2008. It also showed a slight decline in food insecurity with the rise in government assistance early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

A new study of 600 employees suggests burnout may quietly fuel worrying attitudes – specifically, the potential justification of violent extremism – towards the perceived source of their distress. In the study, employees made daily notes of their burnout symptoms, emotional states, and violent extremist attitudes. On days when employees felt more burnt out, they reported significantly more sympathy toward extremist ideas, such as justifying violence against perceived injustices.

the Trump administration is mobilizing heritage and architecture as tools of ideology and control. He is seeking to roll back inclusive historical narratives at U.S. parks and monuments. And he is reviving sanitized myths about America’s history of slavery, misogyny and Manifest Destiny, for use in museums, textbooks and public schools. Dictators, tyrants and kings build monumental architecture to buttress their own egos, which is called authoritarian monumentalism. They also seek to build the national ego – another word for nationalism.

Mark Twain would have found Trump the showman – the pre-2016 version – a fascinating figure. He would have been appalled, however, by much about Trump the president. Imagining how Twain would view Trump is timely because when some have tried to look to history for an equivalent political moment, they’ll sometimes point to two decades – the 1880s and the 1900s – that happened to also be important in Twain’s life and career.

Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground, the largest burial ground for enslaved and free people of color in the United States, has witnessed deliberate acts of violence. As the historian Ryan K. Smith writes, Shockoe “was not, as some would say, abandoned – it was actively destroyed.” In recent years, similar threats to Black cemeteries and questions about preservation have been reported at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the Morningstar Tabernacle No. 88 in Maryland and a rediscovered graveyard in Florida, among many others.

On Sunday October 19, criminals managed to steal eight pieces of extremely valuable jewelry from the Louvre Museum’s Gallery of Apollo, in Paris. The robbery highlights long-standing issues for criminology in the field of cultural heritage, as museum security has to address traditional and emerging threats as well as a range of symbolic visions and criminal dynamics. From a security point of view, there are five key ideas that can help us understand what the flaws were in the Louvre, as well as how, and why, criminals target museums.