Black Friday is behind us and holiday decorations are popping up, but the Midwestern snow is stubbornly holding off.

As radio and television ads become relentlessly holiday themed, retailers hope shoppers can help get them back in the black by New Year's Eve.

To help...

While thankful for the closure that comes from a ruling that engineering disasters in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and levees led to post Katrina flooding, I was taken aback when a CNN commentator conjectured that New Orleans residents are now looking for their "Pound of flesh."Our diaspora can be compared...

The Voodoo Music Experience just wrapped its 11th year, and volume-wise it goes to 11 (to borrow a phrase from Spinal Tap). Voodoo had an uphill climb, announcing its lineup on the weekend Michael Jackson died and fighting to change its date to Halloween for a New Orleans...

I spent the morning almost interviewed as part of CNNOnline's Blogger Bunch, but my feed dropped at the last minute. As a displaced New Orleans resident, that's either a metaphor or plain old bad luck.

To their credit, CNN and MSNBC are spending much of today focused on the...

And then there were still three. The three declared candidates in the New Orleans mayoral race for 2010 are becoming luckier by the day. State Rep. Karen Carter Peterson just declared that she will not run for mayor next year, following Mitch Landrieu and Arnie Fielkow's similar changes of heart.

Apparently men do make passes at style editors who wear glasses. This year's New York Fashion Week featured Anna Wintour of Vogue in trademark sunglasses next to her bespectacled boyfriend Shelby Bryan. La Wintour's date indicates that retro eyeglass frames have reached a coming of age, good...

"No more turf wars. All of us need to move forward together, because there is much more work to be done," President Barack Obama 8/29 Katrina Anniversary Radio Address

I’m not worried about the music slipping away, I’m worried about the whole city slipping away. Look,...

Finding out Michael Jackson's birthday falls on the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was a bad day. Finding out that he was also going to be buried on 8/29 was worse. The New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund has hosted ReDefine 8/29 commemorations in the past, but...

Blogger Julie Powell's warm relationship with her readers dovetails with Meryl Streep's relentlessly luminous Julia Child in Julie & Julia. Both writers were pioneers in their respective fields -- Child searched for years to find a publisher for "Mastering the Art...

As exuberance following the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korea rules the trending topics on Twitter, I asked Richard Horgan for a statement on his e-activism through @LiberateLaura and the WordPress blog.

He describes a chain of events that truly reached Twitter's sixth...

Quinn Cummings has written her debut book, the alternately lyrical and hilarious, Notes from the Underwire, Adventures from my Awkward and Lovely Life. From her stories about starring in The Goodbye Girl to her string of endearing domestic mishaps, this book...

This has a festive ending, so please bear with the lead. Four years ago New Orleans became a canary in the coal mine for common decency as stranded citizens waited five days in the Convention Center with no drinking water, let alone medical help, when our levees failed. My brilliant...

G8 Update: Their Lincoln photo added below:

Our Fourth of July kicked off like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Small town reactionaries answering to a bullhorn chant of "When I say constitution, you yell revolution." Constitution. Revolution. Constitution. Revolution . . . I don't know what to call it but the...

With a mountain of newsboy hats already thrown into the how-to-save-publishing ring, here's another. The collective naval-gazing of reporters and publishers far exceeds the outcry when free downloads upended the music industry and streaming video tanked television ratings, because when a crisis hits the writers it's what we write about....

"Rumi is considered the greatest mystic poet of Iran . . . As an Iranian, I am immensely proud and delighted to see that Rumi's work is being widely recognized in the West at a time when my country's image is otherwise tarnished." - Empress Farah Pahlevi to the

Now that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is cleared to leave Shanghai, here's something to remember his quarantined stopover with: The Red Rockers new wave classic "China" video. John Thomas Griffith, back in...

Hurricane season starts today. When it comes to moving back to New Orleans we've dipped a toe in the water by sharing a house with friends. A giant pod on the lawn with all our books, record albums and thrift store furniture finds would move us back for good, but...

A Villanelle to Oxford Skullduggery

The question of a rivalry was quaint
It simply felt like what she had to do
It was the day to bring about a taint

She chose a writer up for laureate
In ivy covered walls of golden hue
The question...

Last spring in New Orleans I met a D.C. lobbyist who had read my piece on John McCain's lack of a visit to New Orleans aside from his private fund-raisers, and we talked about how shortly after that McCain...

Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" first hit the airwaves 41 years ago, and was just named the UK's song most played in public places by BBC radio. Why a Whiter Shade of Pale? Why not a Darker Shade of Tan? Lyricist Keith Reid was kind enough to...