Florida really outdid itself this year. Cuba Gooding Jr. came here and ate a cell phone, which should be enough to catapult this year to the top of Florida’s all-time ranking of strange trips around the sun, but Gooding Jr.’s antics barely cracked the list of the weirdest things to…
Voice Media Group (VMG) announced today it has completed the combination of its South Florida publications, Miami New Times and New Times Broward-Palm Beach. Moving forward, the company’s award-winning editorial coverage and business operations will be handled through Miami New Times, a consolidation consistent with VMG’s nationwide emphasis on expanding…
By most sane measurements, 2016 has been worse than a straight-to-Netflix movie starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James. But for long-form journalism at New Times, it’s been a hell of a great 12 months. We’ve crunched the numbers, and these were our ten most popular longreads of the year.
Here’s your yearly reminder not to shoot your gun into the air on New Year’s Eve.
Biking in any major city is dangerous. But biking in Miami every day can be straight-up suicidal. One study shows Miami is the fourth most dangerous city in America to commute on two wheels — behind Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando, three other Florida cities. Miami’s roads aren’t just crowded and poorly protected; they’re also full of drivers who seem to openly hate cyclists. In June, one bike commuter told New Times that an 81-year-old woman berated her after the elderly driver ran her over near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line.
Most people don’t know this, but Florida has its very own version of Santa. Some know him only by the choking, smog-like mist that shrouds him whenever he appears or by the warm scent of stale Coors Light that wafts through the air when he’s especially close. Those who have seen the deity’s physical form typically refer to him by one name: Harry the Meth Snake.
On a surface level, Miami is a prosperous place — new condo towers are forever rising in Edgewater and South Beach, luxury cars are lined up at valet stations, and foreign cash seems drawn to South Florida development like an unscrupulous retiree to a Ponzi scheme. But beneath that sheen lies one of America’s least equal distributions of wealth. And that inequality includes a sizable and worrying gender gap, with more than one in every five women in Miami-Dade County living below the poverty line.
We all agree that 2016 was an epic dumpster fire of a year. To be honest, it was more like 12 months of increasingly large dumpsters filled with increasingly terrible-smelling refuse being lit into ever-bigger pyres of reeking, flaming garbage. No one disputes this. However, some truly great things also happened right here in Miami in the past year. Before sending 2016 out with the drunken binge it deserves, let’s recall some of that good stuff.
Florida Panthers owner Vincent Viola could soon run an entire wing of the U.S. government. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Viola, a military veteran and low-profile New York billionaire, to serve as secretary of the Army. That job requires caring for the well-being of thousands of Americans who volunteer to do the hardest jobs, and serious empathy for those who develop mental illness in the service.
Red-light camera operators are the tow-truck drivers and repossession kings of today’s drone-flying, surveillance-obsessed world. Camera companies place tiny, cheap lenses on traffic lights, wait for you to inch too far into an intersection, and cackle into the sky as they and the cities that hire them siphon a few hundred dollars from your wallet. The cameras themselves might not even be legal in Florida.
Dear Stoner: My favorite marijuana strain is Lamb’s Bread. Does that name mean anything, or is it just made up at a grower? Burt Smiley Dear Burt: Marijuana names definitely mean something, especially for the strain you mention. Lamb’s Bread is an iconic Jamaican sativa that Bob Marley reportedly liked to…
When the clock strikes midnight December 31, kiss your loved ones, pound some champagne, and give 2016 a big, hearty middle finger on its way out the door. This year has seriously sucked. Prince and David Bowie died. Donald Trump won the presidency. Racist Twitter eggs will soon dictate our…
Hey there, newcomer! ¡Bienvenido a Miami! Our beaches are a year-round paradise, and our water is tranquil. Ibiza trembles with envy at our clubs. Anthony Bourdain lies awake at night, tormented by the sheer power of our restaurant scene. Everyone is attractive as hell. Oh, and also literally no one here cares about anyone else. Probably should mention that part too!
The Miami Dolphins are an NFL playoff team. What is an NFL playoff team, you might ask? It’s a team that plays all 17 regular-season games and then plays an additional matchup in a single-elimination tournament that concludes with a game between the final two remaining teams, called the “Super Bowl.”
A wild gun battle rocked Ocean Drive this morning, with more than 30 shots blasted in the early hours near Fifth Street. Nearby streets are still closed while Miami Beach Police try to unravel a chaotic crime scene. By some miracle, no one was injured in all the gunfire…
On January 29, 2013, Nikki Beach bartender and self-described “party princess” Karlie Tomica slammed her car into a pedestrian walking down Collins Avenue. Stefano Riccioletti, a 49-year-old chef and father of three who was walking to his job at the Shore Club, died on the spot.
Florida state Sen. Travis Hutson, a Republican representing St. Johns, Flagler, and parts of Volusia Counties, wants to set up two entirely different punishments for people accused of identical crimes. The difference? Whether you’re a U.S. citizen or not when you are arrested. Under Huston’s proposal, anyone committing simple battery or assault in Florida as a U.S. citizen would be charged with a misdemeanor. Commit that identical crime as an undocumented immigrant, and Hutson’s bill would make that crime a felony.
Donald Trump owes so much of his ascendency — and his continued commitment to sowing world chaos — to Twitter that it’s appropriate the first big black eye of his White House came via some tweets. And Miami’s own A.J. Delgado, an attorney and Trump campaign advisor, appears to have…
Some Miami politicians sucked this year because they were incompetent. A whole lot of people thought longtime Miami businessman Jeb Bush, history’s least exciting royal prince, would be in line to lead the free world by this time in 2016. Instead, he blew his shot big-time, squandered hundreds of millions of dollars, and cemented his place in history books as one of the clearest cases of white-bread upper-crust mediocrity in American history. Let’s hope some rich jokester capitalist gifted Bush a coal mine this Christmas.
Christmas is all about getting cozy, so keep that in mind as visions of sugar nugs dance in your head. And nothing is cozier than Christmas cookies and cocoa, both of which you can infuse with pot.
After a series of high-profile drownings aboard its cruise ships, Royal Caribbean has begun quietly advertising positions for lifeguards. The cruise line — which is headquartered in Miami, and the county’s eighth-largest private employer — posted the job description on an onboard TV channel Wednesday.
Most people who regularly ride Metrobus are accustomed to launching horrid invectives at Miami-Dade Transit on a daily basis. Most of the tweets tend to hit some of Metrobus’ greatest hits, including questions such as “Where did my bus go?” “What’s the point in taking the bus if it’s going to sit in standstill traffic?” and “No, seriously, did the bus I take regularly to work cross the wrong river and accidentally get trapped in the haunted bathhouse world from Spirited Away?”
