Andrei Codrescu moved to New Orleans in 1985, and Hurricane Katrina followed two decades later. “New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never again be the city I know and love,” he declares in the final chapter of his anthology New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City, published the year after […]
I wonder: have I ever described the city as “humankind’s greatest invention”? It’s not impossible, given the proclamation’s tempting combination of boldness and obviousness — which it would retain if applied to, say, language, another of my own interests. Reading Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention, I realized its subtitle sounded familiar because […]
There have surely been better times for city aficionados than the summer of 2020. I write you from Seoul, which as I observed in the New Yorker this past spring has so far managed without serious disruptions to its everyday life. (In fact I just got back from a haircut, albeit a masked one.) But then, for the past […]