New Orleans
There’s a fix for flooding in cities, but you’re not going to like it
Some cities are imposing fees that force all property owners to help pay for, and even prevent, stormwater runoff from their land
The new battle over Confederate monuments
The toppling of Confederate statues in New Orleans has exposed deep tensions and ugly politics in America’s Deep South
New Orleans removed its Confederate statues. Here’s why.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: ‘If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society, this would have all been in vain’
Undocumented families are uneasy in New Orleans
Even in so-called ‘sanctuary cities’, many immigrant families now live in a state of fear
A star sculpture brings a New Orleans back story to Canada
John Geddes in conversation with Montreal artist Michel de Broin
The lessons not learned from the Gulf Coast oil spill
It’s been a year since the BP disaster, and nobody has learned anything
The American character at work in post-Katrina New Orleans
It has been five years since the disastrous Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf of Mexico and the bordering states. Many reports this week are showing the incomplete but nonetheless significant resurgence of New Orleans. The citizens of the Gulf states, most recently affected by the BP oil spill, have endured much in the last few years. But they are examples of the American character in action—resilience and the ability to rebound have once again won the day.
Please pass the P.E.I. mussels
The BP oil spill is killing the local fishery—and making the region’s chefs search for creative alternatives
Finally, an insider’s New Orleans
Award-winning writer Joseph Boyden gets caught up in the magic of the new HBO series ‘Treme’
Meghan McCain fights back, Georgia May Jagger models, and Jean Sarkozy gets a boost
Newsmakers of the week
MUSIC: Hope
The 40th edition of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival unfolded in a manner that would not have shocked audiences at the first 39. A dozen stages, tents and other-shaped venues opened on the grounds of a New Orleans racetrack for the last weekend of April and the first of May. Bands took turns at each of the stages. Most were from New Orleans. Many were not. The operative noun in the festival’s title is not “jazz” but “heritage,” and in New Orleans more than in most places the word can have many meanings. It is not a great place to make serious study of the state of jazz music. It is a glorious place to eat crawfish and bask in the sun. Still, there was indeed music, and here is what some of it sounded like.
Gratitude
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.