New Orleans

By Philip Shenon and Larry Sabato via Politico Magazine,

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

Sometimes the headline says it all. On Monday, the Washington Post ran an article titled “New Orleans removes a tribute to ‘the lost cause of the Confederacy’ — with snipers standing by.” The piece opens:

“On the same day that some southern states were honoring their rebel heritage, masked workers in New Orleans dismantled a monument to that past - chunk by chunk, under darkness and the protection of police snipers.”

For a while now residents of New Orleans have been hearing loud booms around the city. The unexplained phenomenon has rattled houses and people but nobody has the slightest idea what the deep ‘boom’ sound is. Witnesses say they have never heard anything like it before. WWLTV.com reports: It’s been going on for weeks, so you can imagine many are starting to wonder if the mystery will ever be solved. “It’s pretty easy to hear the boom,” said resident Karen Chustz.

We have old friends visiting this week from Europe. I encouraged them to go to Rosedown Plantation, in St. Francisville, which is one of the grandest and best preserved plantations in the South. It really is a wonder to behold. But Julie and I also suggested that they get the other side of the story by going to Whitney Plantation, down the river in St. John the Baptist Parish.

When Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped her surprise Lemonade record on HBO last Sunday night, the Internet, well, it lost its mind. Perhaps moreso than any other artist recording today, Mrs. Knowles-Carter commands the power to reduce adult human beings into automata programmed for the typing of assorted punctuation.

As the online world exulted in the opening baseball bat pyrotechnics of Beyoncé’s seeming record of recovery from her husband’s infidelity, however, Brentin Mock at The Atlantic‘s CityLab was captured by a moment of quiet and stillness: