Hurricane Gustav

Here’s Jonathan Batiste, the latest of many illustrious alumni of the New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts, the finest performing-arts high school in the southern United States. We’re all really glad New Orleans and everyone who works to preserve it did better work and had better luck this time than last.

A quick note on what’s happening in New Orleans, which looks like it could be fairly harmless — except for the way those floodwaters are overtopping the Industrial Canal levee near the Lower Ninth Ward. Here’s a picture from Tulane University geologist Stephen Nelson, who gave me a tour of Katrina flood damage in 2006: