I like to say New Orleans has three good seasons, and summer isn’t one. There are the hurricanes, of course, and then ...read more

I was halfway through my pompano when a man in a gray wool suit stood up from his table along the mirrored ...read more

August 31, 2021, two days after Hurricane Ida made landfall as a Category 4 just outside New Orleans, where I live, I ...read more

A hundred yards behind Brandon Ballengée’s art studio, in a former cane field near Lafayette, Louisiana, his dog lollops right over a ...read more

When the mayor of New Orleans cancelled Mardi Gras 2021 late last November, crews sheathed their half-built floats in plastic to await ...read more

The house my grandparents built was one story, brick. It sat modestly on its suburban lot, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, ...read more

One month before the first coronavirus tests arrived in Louisiana, I pushed through a raucous crowd of strangers in the French Quarter ...read more

The flash flood warning blared through the car’s speakers as we forded a side street rushing with high water. The rain crashed ...read more

When our daughter was just a month old, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the eastern seaboard, flooding our neighbors’ houses, burning towns. While the ...read more

In the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, bodies floated in the streets and slumped in folding chairs in the sun. They lay ...read more

We sat around on folding chairs, pinning ostrich plumes into one another’s hair, sharing college gossip. Near the door that led into ...read more

Inside the Gentilly studio of the artist and designer Annie Moran, okra flowers twine up a clear blue sky. Nearby, lotus leaves ...read more

In the antique kitchen of his family’s restaurant, C.J. Gerdes slips a handful of corn-floured oysters into one of the six blackened ...read more

I met her on a Monday night, sometime after ten. Just off the plane from New Orleans, I could still smell the ...read more

They called us an island once, “we” being New Orleans. Certain old maps are marked “Isle of Orleans,” and it’s true we’re ...read more

On November 2, 2004, I stood among other American expats outside an Irish pub in Paris, watching the election results come in. ...read more

The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only ...read more

In the Marigny of New Orleans, on my friend Miriam’s kitchen wall, hangs a picture frame containing one crinkled white wax-paper wrapper. ...read more