A city in recovery - First-hand impressions from ground in New Orleans

Headline Of The Day, Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Today's headline is from Sports Illustrated, Alexander Wollf's Viewpoint. The headline is "A city in recovery - First-hand impressions from ground in New Orleans", Tuesday August 21, 2007 at 12:06PM.

This is such a good article that instead of the usual "Best Quote", there will be three "Best Quotes". If you decide to read one article today, make it the Viewpoint.

Best Quote #1: My other post-disaster experience was in Manhattan, where I lived at the time of the September 11 attacks. By the two-year anniversary, New Yorkers had moved on to debating the details of the memorial and Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions. On the other hand, Katrina's scope -- and the number of people touched by its where-to-begin despair -- dwarfed 9/11's.

Best Quote #2: Again and again, I felt the practiced distance between interviewer and interviewee disappear, as New Orleanians gave in to a deep desire to share that they've been through. Jim Miller, the athletic director at the University of New Orleans, is still waiting for the roof of his basketball arena to get fixed. You'd be correct in assuming he'd love to find someone to blame. Yet, he says, the disaster was of such epic scale that "there really are no villains. I've just learned to be patient. My wife tells me I don't raise my voice with our kids the way I used to."

Best Quote #3: What I love most about the city -- and what, I believe, argues most eloquently for its preservation, regardless of the cost -- is the devotion to it of the people who live there. Its music is a cultural treasure. Its food is too. There are precious few Arby's in New Orleans because no one wants anything but the debris po' boy at Mother's on Poydras Street. Dunkin' Donuts hardly stands a chance because a beignet at Café du Monde cannot be improved upon. And the daily newspaper is not dying in New Orleans, where per capita readership of the local paper is higher than in any other city in the country, because neighbors have a common sense of investment in their town.