St. Louis Cardinals Manager Mike Shildt was named recipient of the 2019 National League Manager of the Year Award as voted on by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Shildt, who this season guided the Cardinals to their first National League Central title since 2015, joins Hall of Fame managers Whitey Herzog (1985) and Tony La Russa (2002) as Cardinals past winners of the award.

In 2009, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan suddenly experienced hallucinations, paranoia, seizures and catatonia. She was misdiagnosed for a month before she was finally treated for a rare autoimmune disease that can attack the brain, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.

Cahalan has little recollection of this time in her life, but she investigated her experience and published the details in her 2012 book, “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.”

For nearly three decades, the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has bestowed its World Ecology Award on prominent biodiversity-minded individuals ranging from John Denver to E.O. Wilson. But this year the center is instead honoring a pair of world-class local institutions — the Missouri Botanical Garden and the St. Louis Zoo — for their critical research and conservation work in Madagascar.

On Tuesday’s St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske talked with the center’s interim director, Patty Parker, and with a Malagasy scientist, Fidisoa Rasambainarivo, who is in St. Louis to speak at an upcoming gala where the zoo and garden are being honored.

Members of a board that could recommend big changes to St. Louis and St. Louis County government met for the first time Tuesday, expressing optimism that they can present a plan that city and county residents will accept.

With city members of the Board of Freeholders still unseated, the board spent most of Tuesday’s meeting getting to know each other — and hearing from members of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen.

In 2009, when Sheila McGlown began battling metastatic breast cancer at the age of 43, she was already a skilled fighter. She’d spent 25 years in the U.S. Air Force, a background she says gave her strength as well as a sense of defiance that would serve her well amid new challenges.

Ten years later, McGlown is still undergoing cancer treatment — and still focused on the service to others that she cherished during her military career. The Swansea, Illinois, resident has found a new passion for advocacy around the inclusion of women of color in clinical trials. Meanwhile, she’s also 16 months into a clinical trial participation herself.

On Monday, in light of Veterans Day, McGlown joined St. Louis on the Air host Sarah Fenske to discuss her journey.

Parents and educators often look for various ways to engage kids in reading. Traditional novels are seen as the ideal, but graphic novels can be just as effective. While similar to comic books, graphic novels tend to be in a longer format, and the narrative is largely self-contained. With the combination of text and pictures, graphic novels have complex plots, characters and conflicts. 

DC Comics recently introduced a line of superhero-based graphic novels aimed at middle-grade readers, between the ages of 8 and 12.

St. Louisans will get to learn more about some of them by visiting the St. Louis County Library this week. Authors Ridley Pearson and Meg Cabot are in town Monday and Tuesday to promote their separate DC Comics graphic novels aimed at middle-grade readers.

GRANITE CITY — An undisclosed number of non-union employees at Granite City’s U.S Steel plant have been laid off.

In a statement U.S. Steel spokesperson Amanda Malkowski said the layoffs were due to “challenging market conditions.”

Critics of airport privatization believe they are close to having enough signatures to force a public vote on any potential lease.

Since June 2018, a group calling itself STL Not for Sale has been circulating petitions for a ballot initiative requiring any airport lease to be subject to a public vote — that’s even though Mayor Lyda Krewson would prefer to leave the matter to the Board of Aldermen.

On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, Josie Grillas and Chris Ottolino of STL Not for Sale said they are now working with the union-rights organization Jobs with Justice. The groups are working together to analyze the petitions they’ve gathered and see how close they are to ensuring they have enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot.