Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books, most recently Dream State, an historical memoir of her Florida family, and Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.
A lot of people are scared. Scared of ideas, scared of books, scared of the human body, scared of education. Scared of educators. When people get scared, they resort to bullying. The trustees of New College, the cadre of reactionaries recently imposed by the governor, have denied tenure to five long-time faculty members. The professors — two […]
Just when you think conservatives have reached their nadir, the absolute bottom of the stupidity barrel, they start slinging poop like a bunch of over-stimulated chimps. During the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators picked up all kinds of rhetorical turds to hurl. They only soiled themselves, wallowing […]
