When the Levee Broke
ESPN’s Wright Thompson with an excellent piece on New Orleans in the shadow of Katrina: Beyond the Breach. “With the air conditioner off for filming, the only noise in Steve Gleason’s home is the breathing machine that keeps him alive. That’s as good a place as any to start a Katrina story, with the wires and plugs and tubes strapped to the back of his wheelchair, a life-support apparatus doing the heavy lifting for one of the most fervently alive people the city has ever known.”
“When we look at the first 15 years of the 21st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today.” Jamelle Bouie in Slate: Where Black Lives Matter really began.
+ FiveThirtyEight: Katrina washed away New Orleans’s Black middle class.