Karen Dalton-Beninato

We're about to be awash in articles about the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper shrinking down to thrice weekly publication, and its web site NOLA.com morphing into yet another entity. The collective industy coverage by reporters dwarfs the outcry when free downloads upended the music industry, or when streaming...

My mother was as colorful as an oil slick. Six years ago I first wrote about her for the new Huffington Post Fearless section; it was easier to sift through childhood memories than deal with what was happening at the time. Watching both parents with Alzheimer's...

The Autumn Defense, fronted by John Stirratt and Pat Sansone, is on tour with Nick Lowe, and I had the chance to catch up with both at their New Orleans gig last weekend. A sometime NOLA resident since his Uncle Tupelo years, John is now located in Chicago, where he...

Dr. John, with an album that's charting as high as any of his in the last 40 years, ended his New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival set by playing a song off his next album. The one after Locked Down. He was looking forward, and opening for Bruce...

Now that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has hit forty-something, the regulars have found a groove. What's unexpected is the extent to which a new generations of festers is making it their own.

Saturday's acts included Cee Lo Green, Feist, DJ Soul Sister, Kristin Diable, Empress Hotel...

The Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival's 26th year this March brought fan favorites from classic Williams plays to the annual Stanley and Stella Shouting Contest. It also brought panels discussing a literary world balancing the rise of the e-book with an ever-increasing field of publishing options for...

By the time the SoulFire4TheGulf participants arrived in New Orleans, they had spent days in ceremony on the north shore at the Mandeville Mounds (Fountainebleau St. Park). It showed. A three hour drum circle passed in a flash, with Mac Rebbenack a/k/a Dr. John, Sunpie Barnes and Papa...

New Orleans recording engineer Cosimo Matassa turned 86 on Friday, and Saturday he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cosimo, Cos to his friends, tells the story of his musical role best in his own words, so here's a conversation filmed by our friend Gary Hartley...

Locked Down, the new Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack) album, has a new sound but the energy reminds me of his early '70s recordings at Trident Studio in London. At the time, Mac was working songs with a bombastic horn section, slamming backup choir and sidemen Eric Clapton and Mick...

Update: Sean Payton is appealing his NFL penalty.

In the Saints Nation uproar since Head Coach Sean Payton was benched for a year over bounty-gate starting on April Fool's Day, one thing has been nagging at my memory. It starts with a series of citations sent by the NFL to...

Feeling like the world could use some sweetening? Pastry chef and author Gesine Bullock-Prado has come up with Pie it Forward, the title of her upcoming book and also Pie it Forward Day on March 14 to encourage bakers to make pies for those who need their spirits lifted. She...

It's Leap Day, a day when 40-year-olds can celebrate their 10th birthday, and the day that La Bougie du Sapeur is published once every four years.

Shout out to my friend Reuters Deputy Social Media Editor Matthew Keys, @ProducerMatthew, whose keen eye notified me of the eight...

Singer, songwriter and author Rosanne Cash was kind enough to share how it felt attending yesterday's groundbreaking of Arkansas State University's Johnny Cash Boyhood Home Restoration Project on what would have been her father's 80th birthday.

KB: Attending the groundbreaking on ASU's Boyhood Home Restoration Project for your father...

One day after finding out about a girl bullied on their parade route, the all female Krewe of Muses hosted a personal parade for her in their float den. Muses founder Staci Rosenberg pulled the event together and New Orleans locals are calling it Emily Gras. Author Amy...

As the moon rises over Mardi Gras 2012, I'm recovering from a day in which we met Mayans with End of the World 2012 signs, a honey badger and a Dogs Against Romney mascot, all within a block. The moons rising were of the Bourbon Street variety, and the Krewe...

'Love Is Love' by Jeff Beninato, a benefit track for Dan Savage's It Gets Better project fighting against bullying of LGBT youth, was inspired by the sea of humanity passing under the balcony on Mardi Gras Day. It was like a Where's Waldo of loved ones, and the...

"Blogger Karen Dalton-Beninato sent me this beautiful picture of the project Brad Pitt is working on..."

Five years ago, Arianna Huffington posted my husband's photo of pink tents in a planned green community in New Orleans. That was two years post Hurricane Katrina levee failures, and it often...

If this is the year you were thinking of spending Mardi Gras in New Orleans, New Orleans hotels are ready for the influx as more and more are reopening, rehabbing, or starting out entirely new.

The stock of French Quarter hotels now includes the fully...

When it comes to topping best of lists, New Orleans is the tops. We're the city with a chunk of the Eiffel Tower. Cole Porter could have written a song about it, including the Eiffel Society which has a section of the Eiffel Tower encasing a cocktail lounge. The past...

I keep feeling like I should be buying a holiday present that my mother neither wants nor needs; first because we didn't celebrate Christmas, and second because she died last month. We had the most Christian of all reasons not to celebrate the holiday: a faction of Evangelicals took to...