Award of Excellence: Damon Winter | POY 80 International Photographer of the Year

The Villages: A Disney for Boomers

The Villages isn’t so much a retirement community as an empire, a collection of dozens of neighborhoods covering more than 32 square miles spread over three counties, with the bulk in Sumter County. It boasts more than 60,000 households and is expanding. Fast. Dump trucks and excavators swarm the developing areas, and new buildings spring up practically overnight. Thanks to the thousands of new Villagers who arrive each year, the Villages was the fastest growing metro area over the past decade.

Hurricane Ian Leaves Behind a Staggering Scale of Damage

Hurricane Ian, as a category 4 hurricane, made landfall on the Florida Gulf. Homes in Fort Myers faced catastrophic losses to flooding and wind damage. Hurricane Ian embodies several of the major hurricane trends in recent years, as the world copes with the effects of climate change. It’s a strong storm — and strong storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic Ocean, as its surface water has warmed. Ian also rapidly transformed from a relatively weak storm into a strong one, another phenomenon that has become more common.

Gerrymander, U.S.A.

The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of residents identify as Latino, Black, Asian or multiracial. There aren’t too many places in Texas where you can encounter Muslim students praying on a busy downtown sidewalk, but Denton is one of them. Drive about seven hours northwest of Denton’s city center and you hit Texline, a flat, treeless square of a town tucked in the corner of the state on the New Mexico border. Cow pastures and wind turbines seem to stretch to the horizon. Texline’s downtown has a couple of diners, a gas station, a hardware store and not much else; its largely white population is roughly 460 people and shrinking. It would be hard to pick two places more different from one another than Denton and Texline — and yet thanks to the latest round of gerrymandering by Texas’ Republican-dominated Legislature, both are now part of the same congressional district: the 13th, represented by one man, Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson. After the 2020 census was completed and Congress reapportioned, state Republicans, who control the governor’s office and both houses of the Legislature, redraw their district lines to tighten their grip on existing Republican seats -- and in the process, they squelched the political voice of many nonwhite Texans, who accounted for 95 percent of the state’s growth over the last decade yet got not a single new district that would give them the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice. Denton offers a good example of how this played out. Under the old maps, downtown Denton, where the universities lie, was part of the 26th District — a Republican-majority district, but considerably more competitive than the 13th. If Texas politics continue to move left as they have in recent years, the 26th District could have become a tossup. The liberal residents of Denton could have had the chance to elect to Congress a representative of their choosing. Now that the downtown has been absorbed into the 13th District and yoked to the conservative Texas panhandle, however, they might as well be invisible. Even with the addition of all those younger and more liberal voters, the 13th remains a right-wing fortress, with a 45-point Republican lean. This is the harm of partisan gerrymanders: It’s the opposite of how representative democracy is supposed to work. This is the community of Texas-13.

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