— Letter from the Editors —

Transmogrify This

“New Orleans is not fast or energetic or efficient, not a go-get-’em Calvinist well-ordered city.”

—from “What It Means to Miss New Orleans” by Mark Childress, in The New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2005.

“There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them. It’s already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade.”

—from “The Bursting Point,” an Op-Ed column by David Brooks in The New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2005.