Bill Duryea, Times Staff Writer
Bill Duryea has been the national editor of the Times since August 2005. He spent eight months studying the media and democracy as part of the Knight Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan. Before that he was a general assignment writer for the Times.
Phone: (727) 893-8770
E-mail: bduryea@tampabay.com
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Opening lines: Playing the high and the low
05/03/13 Human InterestSome years ago, when my wife and I were still a cat family, we had three of the critters living with us. And then, after a particularly awful weekend, we didn't.
Emmett was my wife's cat, and he just got old and blind. Late one night, he had a seizure, which entailed a trip to the emergency vet and a very tearful decision to put him to sleep.
Two nights later we were back at the vet, in the same "goodbye" room, this time holding Bess, a stray that I had found two years before, bleeding from a bite wound on my doorstep. Bess had never been a particularly robust cat, but by the time her kidneys quit she was spending most of her days motionless under a reading lamp, more or less like a furry order of fries....
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Opening Lines: Divorce shatters yet another illusion
04/03/13 Human InterestDivorce bores me. I'll cop immediately to a deep personal bias here brought on by too many family splits with too many decades of low-level emotional radioactivity. But even when the stories involve bold-faced names and gobs of money, they have never managed to overcome my sense that divorces generally are pretty pedestrian affairs.
I suspect that I'm not alone in my impatience. Once divorce was a taboo society politely avoided. Now, we seem to talk about it constantly. Who among us hasn't nodded sympathetically at their friends' independent recitations of wrong and woe? She cheated; he's cheap. At the end all you know is that someone — her or him, and with them a branch of mutual friends — is about to disappear and the holiday card list will need trimming....
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I'm not chagrined about 'Diamond Jim'
02/02/13 Human InterestTruly, I was not expecting this call.
"The members of the Singles Social Dance Club in Sun City Center, which is very significant, are very insulted about your recent article that was in the Floridian magazine," said the person on my voice mail. "It has been a detriment in our community. It is not a very good selling point for people wishing to move to Sun City Center. It was a complete insult. Be ready."...
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Legacy of persistent genital arousal disorder victim
01/05/13 Human InterestThe response to the first issue of the Floridian magazine on Dec. 2 was so uniformly and enthusiastically positive, I briefly contemplated the idea of a celebratory lap. Very briefly.
I abandoned that idea about 5 p.m. on the Monday after we published when reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton beckoned me aside. Gretchen Molannen, she said, had killed herself.
Self-congratulation suddenly seemed almost shameful....
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Legacy of persistent genital arousal disorder victim
01/04/13 Human InterestThe response to the first issue of the Floridian magazine on Dec. 2 was so uniformly and enthusiastically positive, I briefly contemplated the idea of a celebratory lap. Very briefly.
I abandoned that idea about 5 p.m. on the Monday after we published when reporter Leonora LaPeter Anton beckoned me aside. Gretchen Molannen, she said, had killed herself.
Self-congratulation suddenly seemed almost shameful. ...
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2012 in review: Troubles in Syria, Egypt and Iran
12/28/12 Human InterestDo you remember that moment nearly two years ago when popular revolts were going off like a string of Independence Day firecrackers throughout the Arab world? Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen. Syria.
Nearly 40,000 dead civilians later, Syria looks like the place the Arab Spring came to die. Cities shelled into rubble by a regime whose eye doctor-turned-dictator has vowed never to surrender power. Refugees flooding by the hundred thousand across borders of worried neighbors. Rumors of chemical weapons spreading as governments once friendly to Bashar Assad acknowledge a possible future in which he doesn't feature. Nothing is getting better quickly there, or anywhere else in the Middle East for that matter....
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2012 in review: The embassy attack in Benghazi
12/28/12 Human InterestOn Sept. 11, an armed mob attacked the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
What otherwise might have been a rallying point for Americans, quickly became a point of bitter political division. At first the Obama administration insisted spontaneous protests over an low-grade anti-Muslim video had morphed into violence. But contradictory evidence mounted quickly that no such protest had occurred and that the heavily armed attackers were affiliated with known terrorist groups....
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2012 in review: The shooting death of Trayvon Martin
12/28/12 Human InterestWe know the teenager had Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. We know the older man had a gun. We know that the teenager died of a gunshot to the chest about 70 yards from his father's fiancee's townhome in a gated community called The Retreat at Twin Lakes.
But much of what transpired between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the night of Feb. 26 in Sanford remains the subject of intense debate. Did the media rush to accuse a self-appointed neighborhood watch coordinator who seemed overly suspicious of an unarmed black kid wandering through his community? Or did police rush to excuse a man who claimed he fired his handgun in self-defense?...
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Times' Floridian section revives familiar format
11/30/12 Human InterestThirty years ago, Carol Polacek became the Floridian she always knew she was meant to be.
She had endured her limit of Ohio winters when in January 1983 she and her husband, Marty, a deli manager who played the accordion and piano, sold their home outside Cleveland and headed for an oasis called Palm Harbor.
What made the Polaceks a little more special than the other 20,000 arrivals to Pinellas County that year was that a Times writer named David Finkel documented their midwinter escape. David watched them inch along the icy predawn streets of their suburban subdivision. He snapped a photo of their sedan as it crossed the Florida state line. He was there when they pulled up to their tract home in Cypress Green. ...
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A new Floridian section
11/24/12FeaturesNext Sunday you will hold a new Floridian in your hands. Instead of the weekly section that we have published for years, Floridian will debut as a monthly magazine.
This change, which is in some ways a return to the section's roots, offers an opportunity to showcase classic Floridian stories in a format that makes for an even more enjoyable reading experience.
You will still read the best narrative journalism from our award-winning writers. And you won't miss a single one of your favorite "Real Florida" stories by Jeff Klinkenberg....
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Murder motive implicates darker side of fantasy card game Magic
11/03/12CriminalWhen Sean Dugas' body was found encased in concrete, buried in a back yard in Georgia, suspicion fell quickly on the twin sons of the man who owned the property.
Christopher and William Cormier were charged recently in the death of the 30-year-old former Pensacola crime reporter. Officials say the motive was robbery:
Of game cards. Up to $100,000 worth.
The game is called Magic: The Gathering and it has been described in news articles as "cardboard crack" for the obsessiveness of its fans....
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At Studio@620, a reading of poet Archibald MacLeish's prescient 'Panic'
08/18/12 Performing ArtsIn the early 1930s, as a roving correspondent for Fortune magazine, Archibald MacLeish had an unrivalled platform to comment on the collapse of the American economic system. He had chronicled the squalor of the Hoovervilles, witnessed farmers spilling milk they couldn't sell on the highways, hungry coal miners striking for a living wage. He had more than once encountered former classmates from Yale selling apples and pencils on the sidewalk near Grand Central Station. • He laid the blame for this catastrophe squarely at the feet of the businessmen and politicians whose greed and failure of imagination lead to "one of the most dreadful, contemptible, horrible mismanagements of the society I'd ever heard anything about," he once said....
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Fire ants decline in Florida as 'crazy ants' advance
03/30/12NewsThose Floridians who have conceded defeat in the war with invasive species, who have yielded their canals to Nile monitors and the entire Everglades to Burmese pythons, can take a small measure of comfort from a report this week about the decline of the fire ant.
Entomologists have documented a sharp drop in fire ant mounds, reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The fire ant, which inflicted its first stinging bite on a Floridian ankle sometime in the 1930s, ruled the state's back yards with the kind of vicious hauteur reserved for a species that knew it had arrived in a place with no natural predators. ...
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The State You're In: True nature of war doesn't change
01/27/12 Human InterestI received a letter last week from William A. Sutton, who at age 96 is almost without doubt the most diligent chronicler of the role of Dunedin in World War II. In light of the recent controversy over the four U.S. Marines who appeared in a video urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban, Sutton wanted to share a brief interview published on the front page of the Dunedin Times on Sept. 24, 1943. ...
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State You're In: Tampa is not making anyone's A list
10/28/11 Human InterestSomeone threw another brick through Tampa's window last week.
So far this year, America's Next Great City has received these image-shattering statistical assessments:
Second-most dangerous burg in the country for pedestrians (harsh but true, Transportation for America). Sixty percent of our homes are underwater (thanks for the tough love, Zillow). Even when Businessweek.com ranked Tampa 47th on a list of best cities, it came with the downbeat caveat that we would have ranked much higher if it weren't for all the smog. ...
