John M. Edwards remembers the bon temps of his college days in New Orleans, including live music, po boys, and cameos by Frank Zappa and Quentin Tarantino. * * * At the Napoleon House—an atmospheric inn where the “Yats” (New Orleans elite) once hatched a nefarious plot in the inner courtyard sanctum to return their Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to the so-called Louisiana Purchase (brokered between the Little Colonel and Thomas Jefferson for only several mil)—I sat munching on a… Read more

Whether you live near or far from the home where you grew up, there comes a time when you go down into the old family basement to haul remnants of your past to the dumpster. That time came for me on my most recent visit to New Jersey when my brother and I and some hired arms hauled several decades worth of half-buried memories up from the basement of the house where we grew up. Emptying a basement is often associated with mourning or natural disaster, but in this case our reason for… Read more

By Janet Hulstrand. I don’t know the technical details of the heightened alert in New York City over the last few days: my following of the news is (sometimes deliberately) spotty at best. But I hear that New York City was “on lockdown” last night. Probably the safest place in the country, 2 cops on every corner… read the post of a Facebook friend, an exaggeration in typical New York City style. I went to the city for a meeting yesterday. The friend who dropped me off at the bus… Read more