The Key West Mystique
Key West Island News
Key West Island News connects Key West residents and friends of the island, fosters our One Human Family culture and advances understanding of shared goals for our island community
Linda Grist Cunningham | Columns and news analysis
Key West Island News editor Linda Grist Cunningham has written more than 4,000 columns — in print and on the web — since 1968. She hates writing and is compelled to do it anyway.
Key West updates and short takes, including sargassum, gasoline, Disney, Covid and Tallahassee
Ever have one of those days when there's so much rattling around in your brain -- think Disney Fantasia -- and so many things on the to-do lists -- think Disney Cinderella -- that you just want to lock the door, sit in a corner in a dark room and dare your family and...
Martha Hubbard | Key West gets a new “old island” cookbook
Give me the right group of folks and I'll talk politics, bathroom cabinet painting or subjunctive mood (look it up). It wasn't until Covid Years that talking about kitchen knives and the relative merits of Mexican or Italian oregano became an actual thing. That's when...
Key West, local news and what we learned from Covid. Time to up the game on digital information
Key West Mayor Teri Johnston pops up rather frequently these days in my social media "on this date" memories. That's because in April 2020, we were smack in the middle of early Covid-19 days and the mayor's no-nonsense, here's what we know and don't know videos kept...
Key West fees | Gouging the customer or coping with inflation?
James Bond was on to something when he ordered his martinis shaken. You might want to consider nixing on-the-rocks cocktails and going with shaken the next time you hitch up on a Key West bar stool, because at least one hyper-local restaurant is adding a two-buck fee...
Key West rain | Just dry season or is there a drought?
I'm not alone in grinning when I read a weather forecast that calls for rain. Or when I get up to promisingly heavy cloudy skies. Dadgummit! It could rain today. One needs only eyeballs to confirm it's been darn dry the past three months. It's dusty. Everything is...
Key West infrastructure | What happens when the pipes break?
Well, that was fun, huh? You know, the night the bars shut down and the water stopped running? You probably didn't know it until you went to get some water in the middle of the night and went "what the heck." That's what happens when the Key West infrastructure...
Dear Connor is a collection of columns Linda writes for her grandson, Connor. Though he may never read them, they help her make sense of the world.
Dismantling the 14th Amendment: Keeping it upbeat in Key West when the world isn’t
I love my Key West Bubble, but national dissonance is dribbling through today. I am unsettled at the prospect of living through the dismantling of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1868, can be boiled down to this: Oops, when we wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments), we were thinking only of straight white men with money. Perhaps we need to fix that?
Dear Connor | As the American democracy unravels, can there be hope for your future?
American history is filled with "times like these." Three times we have been here. I believe we will be OK. Though my rage boils over too often, I believe in Americans-in-the-middle. I believe there are extremists on the right and the left -- and I believe they do not, do not, represent who we are as a people. They get the attention and the headlines today; spoiled children clamoring for their own ice cream cone, unwilling to share and willing to fight to the death to keep what they believe is theirs and theirs alone. Getting through this transition will not be for the faint of heart. But get through we will.
Hurricane Irma | In September 2017, Linda Grist Cunningham created and launched a Facebook Page that aggregated news coverage during Hurricane Irma. She was off-island at the time visiting her mother in Virginia. Her husband remained in Key West. Over the three weeks that she and her partner journalists John Teets maintained around-the-clock coverage, they reached almost a million people around the world. These are the columns she wrote each day. Hurricane Season is always June 1 – Nov. 30.
Hurricane Irma | 5 years that changed Key West and the Keys
Once a month I drive to Marathon and back for a board meeting. I've done that since before Hurricane Irma clobbered Key West and the Florida Keys on Sept. 10, 2017. For five years that 100 mile round trip has been my gauge for our recovery from...
Hurricane Irma: 9-23-17: Closing up shop. Saying Godspeed. Going home to the Cat 5s
When we launched Key West Hurricane Irma, our online news coverage, we weren’t sure when “quit” would happen. We were confident we'd know. Today is the anniversary of knowing. It was time to wish our house guests farewell and Godspeed.
