Tropic, the Miami Herald Sunday magazine, was published from October 15, 1967 to December 6, 1998. When I moved to Florida in 1980, it was already a well-established phenomenon, and it soon became a part of my weekend routine. Tropic was a special publication--lively, imaginative and thought-provoking, obviously a labor of love for the writers and staff who put it together. The consistent excellence, and more than that, the creativity of the magazine made it memorable. My Sunday newspaper has had a missing section ever since Tropic ceased publication. I created this website to share my memories of Tropic. If you like the articles you see here, please go to the Herald archive site and buy more. I would be perfectly happy if you were inspired to go to the archives, order articles by the dozen, and make lots of money for the Miami Herald. However, Tropicfan.com is entirely unofficial and noncommercial and is not connected with the Miami Herald in any way.

I do not pretend that the articles presented here are representative of the magazine's overall contributions. They are only a tiny fraction of the articles that were published in Tropic. (See the Herald Archives for more!) The mathematically inclined may be able to detect that Joel Achenbach is over-represented. That just reflects a personal bias that I have developed whilst hanging out at the Achenblog. In addition to his feature articles, Achenbach wrote a weekly column for Tropic entitled "Why Things Are"--I included only one of them, "Why Things Are: Achenbach's Final Answer". If you like that, you can buy the books.

At the other extreme, Dave Barry, whose amazing humor was an essential element of the Tropic experience, is absent here altogether. His work is widely available in books and on the internet.