In my youth, I’d often join my grandmother for dinner at the iconic white-tablecloth steak house she owned in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. She dominated the dining room from table 83, a four-top with the best sight lines of the entire restaurant. On the wall behind her permanent seat, over her left shoulder, hung a grand painting: a Mardi Gras tableau of a half dozen white-robed men carrying torches, leading a parade down a spectator-thronged French Quarter street.

New Orleans Second Lines Culture presents traditions of New Orleans’s African American community seen in second line parades organized by social aid and pleasure clubs.

Seems like nothing will bring DanielFuselierdown from the ladder. He’s taken breaks from time to time since 2002, when Miss Antoinette K-Doe invited him to paint the exterior of New Orleans’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, but most weeks he can be found two stories up, a tall, thin, white man in a sun hat and paint-splattered overalls, at work on his Southern Sistine Chapel. 

Some people come to the old Jazzland amusement park by way of the service road off Interstate 510, bringing their cars directly onto the grounds. Before the city stepped up security, I once saw a blue Corvette and black Chevy S-10 pull up and proceed to chase each other at top speed around the central lagoon, then disappear to the far end of the abandoned park. But if you come on foot, it’s best to slip through the hole cut in the chain-link fence, picking your way through the broken glass and shards of scrap metal in the parking lot.

Nothing I met in Egypt, Kentucky, was like I imagined, except the cliché of rolling hills and craggy mountains. Except the poke, and other ground cover, green. No guns were visible except the Confederate flags that flew, that hung limp, wrapped in a wan clutch, not fluttering, clinging to their poles.

Harold F. Baquet—who died last year at fifty-six—takes an intimate look at New Orleans in the late 1980s. 

It was one of General Johnston’s descendants, a trauma surgeon in New Orleans named Norman McSwain, who helped reopen the debate, crusading for the reevaluation of the tourniquet as a valuable lifesaving tool.

In her ongoing project Backwater, Virginia Hanusik examines how coastal communities—specifically in Southeast Louisiana—respond and adapt to land loss on what the artist calls “the frontline of climate change.”

When attacks on my beliefs and stances occur, they come from the right. Or from someone who has a score to settle. But here came Tunde, without personal malice, and with great charm, saying things that made me supremely uncomfortable, making it clear that he saw me as a kind of colonial force, appropriating black cultural processes and products.

Elysium is an examination of the diminishing urban forest of New Orleans, forever altered by a 70% canopy loss due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and further destroyed by rescue and restoration crews in the wake of the storm and in the years since.