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[Merl Reagle] died suddenly on Aug. 22. I learned later that it had happened at almost exactly the moment I had been collecting that morning's Washington Post at the end of my driveway. Because it was a Saturday, the paper included the preprinted Sunday magazine - the one with Merl's puzzle in it. As I have done for the past eight months since I left Tampa, I set it aside while I made a pot of coffee. Our conversations often centered on some recent bit of serendipity. Merl and [Marie Haley] thrived on coincidences, which, I think, confirmed for them that the world respected pattern and meaning. There was always a Hollywood screenwriter or newspaper cartoonist or former FBI agent who had recently revealed himself to be a huge fan of Merl's puzzles. Good things always seemed to come from these discoveries, so it was hard to disagree with their world view. As the 100th anniversary of the invention of the crossword approached, I remember Merl and Marie leaning across the table to whisper that the daughter of the inventor of the famous puzzle was living in Clearwater. \"We took her to brunch!\" Of course.

Floridian - precious habitat for the kind of narrative work for which the Times is nationally admired - has gone through a number of incarnations over the years. It started as a weekly magazine, became a daily section, then Sunday-only. But I have come to believe that it's natural state is this one. Over the 26 months since we created the new monthly magazine, I have watched the flourishing of the full array of feature species - bold documentary photography, inventive layouts, personal memoir, puzzles, humor and, yes, award-winning journalism.

The differences between these two are so vast it's almost absurd to enumerate them. Here's one: [Bill Koch] has spent almost as much on counterfeit wine ($5 million) as the combined annual income of the 350 families who live in [Dontrell Johnson]'s neighborhood. Here's what they don't share: the same risk for failure. Koch's wasted $5 million didn't cost him his home. (Indeed, he spent millions more to avenge his honor in court.) Johnson has no backup plan. His education, shaky at best, was viewed as a means to a football scholarship, not as the single best predictor of his future success. That's a choice he made, but it was one ratified by his community and by the larger football entertainment industry.

In June, photographer Carlton Ward Jr. went to the Dry Tortugas to illustrate a story on the Gulf of Mexico for Nature Conservancy magazine. He picked the national park because the health of its reefs is an exception among reefs in Florida. Coral reefs are in bad shape worldwide, especially in the upper Florida Keys, where runoff from development and pollution is a leading cause of decline. In Dry Tortugas National Park, the reefs, which host about 30 species of coral, are faring much better because they are 65 miles from the closest land and safeguarded as a marine protected area...

Go ahead and do a little inventory of your attitudes right now, because you'll need them oiled and gassed when you arrive at this month's cover story on William Koch, one of this country's richest 400 people and easily in Florida's top 20. Is Billionaire [Bill Duryea] different from you and me? Well, if you don't live in an art museum, drink $2,600 bottles of wine at lunch, spend the equivalent of a small nation's GDP on litigation, then yes, he's very different. But if you're like me and you have quarreled with your siblings, fought feelings of worthlessness, made comically stupid choices in girlfriends and discovered that you're still trying to prove yourself well past the halfway point, then Mr. Koch is about as average as they come.

The story takes place in 1999 when [Jamie DeWolf] and his girlfriend and their newborn daughter were living in less than ideal conditions in Vallejo, Calif. DeWolf talks about a little girl who always seems to be in the hallway, who asks DeWolf every time he sees her the same question: \"What's your baby's name?\" The girl's mother, who is rumored to be running drugs to and from Mexico, leaves the girl alone for long periods of time. The girl is hungry, so DeWolf feeds her, and once he feeds her, he sends her home, locks the front door and puts his own baby to bed.

The magazine in your hand begins in a casual morning meeting held many days, even weeks ago. In a room that looks west over a crumbling YMCA and south toward a rising apartment complex, writers, photographers and editors share what's on their minds. It's an idea factory, but it's more like the place where hurricanes are born off the African coast than a Detroit assembly line. One writer's observation rises on the updraft of a colleague's encouragement, begins to spin harder when it encounters some cooling skepticism, and soon a story is born. Or sometimes the conversation just spins intensely, briefly, like a water spout, vivid only for those close enough to catch a glimpse. Someone wondered if Twitch was any more dispiriting to contemplate than golf on TV, or the Food Network. One man's feed is another man's aversion, I suppose. I've stomped my foot plenty of times at my sons' zombie-eyed video game fixation, and plenty of times I've put my feet up to catch the last holes of a golf major. For slack-jawed passivity, I can't see much difference between the two.