Before and after my visit to New Orleans, Dan Baum (a middle aged Jewish guy from Colorado, I believe) has been my prime source of information about the post-Katrina crescent city and it’s inhabitants. I’ve finally finished reading his 10 000 word “article” about the political machinations in the year after the storm:

The Lost Year, Behind the failure to rebuild

which the New Yorker published August ’06. It’s a doozy.

I also very highly recommend reading the entire run of his wide and deep “New Orleans Journal” posts. Unfortunately, that link will take you only to a sample of the articles and no matter how I’ve poked and prodded at the website and it’s search interface the only way to work through all the posts seems to be to click on every possible internal link within them. Which is an added shame because some dim light at the magazine decided not to publish any of them in the actual magazine, and the web versions are all that exist. On the plus side, he and his wife are writing a book about several of the New Orleans residents he researched and interviewed for his articles.