LONDON--The American media seem spellbound by Terry Jones as a stuntmaster. They can't stop talking about his threat to burn copies of the Koran on the 9th anniversary of 9/11, or asking other notables, from generals to cabinet members, to comment about it. The only thing it doesn't seem fascinated...

NEW ORLEANS--Sorry, can't be sure that's the planet he's living on, but this intelligent, well-informed man surely can't be living on this orb. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to start off his speech at Xavier University Sunday afternoon with this reprise of his town-hall remarks here last October:

"It...

NPR announced recently that it's no longer National Public Radio. Like CBS and NBC before it, it has decided that its initials are now so iconic they stand for nothing but themselves (ABC recently revived its full name, the "American Broadcasting Company", probably to ride the early Iraq War patriotism...

NEW ORLEANS -- President Obama comes here this weekend to deliver a speech on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the city's near-destruction. Since he's got a big Iraq speech coming up as well, and since nobody wants a repeat of the ghostly, ghastly, floodlit Jackson Square performance by...

The trouble with the proponents of this premise, that immigrants are coming to this country to have babies that will get automatic citizenship and grow up to be terrorists, is that they're not making the case strongly enough.

Listen how here.

As we approach the 5th anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans, it's clear that, though the city has seen a profusion of "Katrina" art and music, the major enduring presence of the catastrophe has been on the bookshelf, or the e-reader. Because I live in the city, and because...

LONDON -- The fifth anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans occurs at the end of this month, and the Times-Picayune takes the occasion to print thank-you notes from some New Orleanians to those who've helped them. Moving and emotional stories are recounted in these notes.

Behind...

It's one thing to be in love with New Orleans, as I have been for almost two decades. It's another thing entirely to spend almost the entire first half of the year in the city, as it's roller-coastered from Super Bowl-inspired ecstasy to oil-spill-driven gloom. No city has traveled so...

NEW ORLEANS -- Today in this city, the Presidential Commission looking into the Deepwater Horizon disaster is holding its first meeting. Quick question: how quickly after the water receded in the 2005 New Orleans flood did that Presidential commission hold its first meeting? Answer: never, there was no such commission.

NEW ORLEANS -- It's not as if the U.S. isn't sufficiently anti-intellectual (see the Climate-gate "scandal", e.g.), but we have been led into three consecutive neo-imperial expeditions since the 1950s, and the trumpets for each one have been blown by the nation's national defense intellectuals -- what David Halberstam called,...

NEW ORLEANS--In some ways, it's a cliche of the media business: reporters butter up their sources to keep precious "access" to tomorrow's leaks. In another way, it's always news.

Jay Rosen writes an eye-opening piece today about the Rolling Stone McChrystal article; more precisely, the piece is about...

NEW ORLEANS--Yes, it does come as a surprise that they're still putting out the LA Times, especially when it publishes a story like this one, a report on the riot that swept the neighborhood of the Staples Center following Thursday night's Laker victory in the NBA Finals.

Some...

LONDON -- The British media have been ablaze with patriotic defensiveness, upset that President Obama keeps calling BP "British Petroleum." Strange: I was at the Tate Britain museum yesterday, visiting galleries sponsored by ... BP. The London Olympics have as a main sponsor ... BP. Seems pretty British to me.

It's all there in the HuffPost archives, posts about the Corps of Engineers choosing what they admit is a "technically (not) superior) solution for the permanent rebuild of the canals whose floodwalls failed catastrophically during Katrina, about the Corps whistleblower's vindicated allegations about the shortcomings of the pumps at those...

Yes, he played cat-and-mouse with Rachel Maddow on the subject of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but, as he rightly points out (pun intended), that's primarily a backward-looking debate. What's escaping public notice so far, though, is his take on a far more contemporary issue: accountability. Here's Rand...

NEW ORLEANS -- Every time I've written a post here on the subject of the secret U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan -- a prison where, according to reports, at least one detainee has died as a result of harsh treatment -- commenters here have pooh-poohed the notion....

NEW ORLEANS -- Ray Nagin is Na-gone, the city is enjoying a second springtime when it should ordinarily be early summer, hot and muggy, and yet, walking around today, there's a strange chemical smell in the air, something like heavy-duty charcoal lighter fluid. "Everybody at the dog park," said a...

NEW ORLEANS -- Mid-Saturday morning, storm clouds are motorcycling across the sky. We're seeing, and feeling, the winds we've been hearing about for two days, the winds whipping the BP oil slick closer and closer to the shore of the coastal wetlands. And, after two or three months in which...

Now, just weeks away from the fifth anniversary of the federally-caused flood, New Orleans has recovered, physically, economically, even spiritually, to a degree un-dreamed of by locals and outsiders alike in the early years. Yet a new report in the Times-Picayune spotlights a key choke-point in the recovery,...

How enraptured is New Orleans with David Simon's portrait of the city in Treme, which just premiered last Sunday? This enraptured: news of the series' renewal for a second season was above the fold on the front page of yesterday's Times-Picayune. Dinner-table conversations all over town have focused on what...