"The Real Intent Is to Privilege a Particular Expression of Christianity"

"'It's significant that the Louisiana law uses the same text created for "The Ten Commandments" movie promotions by the Fraternal Order of Eagles and Paramount Pictures because it reminds us that this text isn't one found in any Bible and isn't one used by any religious faith,' Kruse said via email. 'Instead, it's a text that was crafted by secular political actors in the 1950s for their own ends.'"

Holly Meyer and Peter Smith at the Associated Press discuss Louisiana's H.B. 71.

"After Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Most Significant Political Personality of His Day"

"Throughout American history, he says, populist voters have felt 'a sense of a loss of control about what was going on in their society. Things were happening and things were changing, and the change was unsettling, but they couldn't do anything about it. It was almost like they were being acted on from above.' That feeling has engendered the rise of parties and leaders, conservative or progressive, that promise to fight the system on behalf of average Americans."

Annika Neklason at The Atlantic compares Donald Trump to Huey Long.

"A Nearly Successful Slave Revolt Was Intentionally Lost to HIstory"

"The suppression of the extent of the rebellion kept the uprising from historical attention for decades. Hall calls it a kind of 'historical amnesia' in the Times-Picayune piece. However on the 200th anniversary of the revolt, area museums and historical sites in Louisiana organized a year-long commemoration of the event. In time, the uprising may gain the recognition it deserves, thanks to the efforts of historians willing to sort the fiction from the reality."

In a 2016 Smithsonian article, Marissa Fessenden discusses the 1811 Louisiana slave revolt.

The Fat Man

"'After John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Fats Domino and his partner, Dave Bartholomew, were probably the greatest team of songwriters ever,' Dr. John told Rolling Stone in 2004. 'They always had a simple melody, a hip set of chord changes, and a cool groove. And their songs all had simple lyrics; that's the key.' Domino himself, who preferred to let his music rather than image do the talking, was typically modest about his accomplishments: 'Everybody started callin' my music rock and roll,' he once said, 'but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playin' down in New Orleans.'"

David Browne at Rolling Stone writes an obituary for Fats Domino.

"Why Did Houston Pave Over Their Floodplains?"

"In these acute crises, we see inspiring stories over and over: Communities come together. People risk their lives to save their neighbors as well as strangers. It is heartwarming. It reinforces everything that we want to believe about ourselves as Americans, as Texans, as Floridians, as Louisianans.
"But examining why these moments of heroism become necessary tells a darker story about America. People don’t just find themselves in places vulnerable to flooding. They are pushed there by racial injustice, economic inequality, and short-term, profit-driven development practices. The long-term decay of the nation’s infrastructure is a direct result of policy decisions that politicians and communities make time and again. The Gulf Coast is an extreme example of this, a laboratory for what happens when you combine lax planning policies, aging flood-control mechanisms, and a geography that channels storms from the warm (and warming) waters of the Gulf into the cities that line it."

Alexis C. Madrigal at The Atlantic interviews Cindy Ermus about her new book Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South.

The editors of The Washington Post take Texas public officials to task.

Steve Russell at Newsweek writes that "Houston Is Drowning--In Its Freedom From Regulations."

And Thom Patterson at CNN explains "How Houston's layout may have made its flooding worse."

"Delights in Skewering the Left and the Right Simultaneously"

"It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

"Dreher's answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term 'liquid modernity' to describe a way of life in which 'change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.' The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism."

 

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker profiles writer Rod Dreher.

"An American Crucible"

"This week has become a grotesque object lesson in gun culture, one that points to a conclusion that we could have and should have drawn long ago—that the surfeit of weapons at our disposal and the corresponding fears that they induce create new hazards. There is no telling how any of these specific horrors will be resolved. But here is what we do know: we live in an age of open-source terrorism. Our inability to respond to mass shootings has meant that, eventually, even law enforcement would fall victim to one. The context of the conversation about police accountability has been irrevocably changed."

Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker reacts to "Three Terrible Days of Violence."

"The Word 'Cartoon' Describes the Best Rock-and-Roll Songs"

"'John Henry' touches upon several themes that C.C.R. went on to explore, foremost among them the nostalgia for some lost agrarian past. But, of course, that same nostalgia was a founding theme of the South, where Albion's second sons sought to recreate, on the backs of black slaves, an imagined English arcadia. And if this vision was itself a sort of cartoon—a brutal and deadly one, with strange fruit hanging from the trees—an odd thing happened when you spread the cartoonish map of 'Born on the Bayou' across the partly real, partly imagined Southern landscape: you got a one-to-one ratio. The result was something like realism."

Alex Abramovich in The New Yorker talks with John Fogerty about songwriting inspiration.

"The Last Time Britain Fought America"

"The British sustained 2,042 casualties; the Americans 71. To make things worse, the battle was unnecessary. The Treaty of Ghent, ending the 1812 War, was signed on Christmas Eve. News of the treaty didn't reach Washington until February 17."


Harry Mount at The Spectator marks the bicentennial of the Battle of New Orleans.

"What’ll Become of Me?"

"What became of this girl, Northup’s close acquaintance and one of the major figures in his book, who was terrorized by her master and mistress? Did she succumb to one of the bouts of disease that swept the Louisiana-bayou slave communities? Did Epps’s severe beatings or his wife’s unhinged jealousy take their toll, or did he perhaps sell her some time after 1853? Was she secreted away by members of the Underground Railroad? Did she survive until emancipation rolled through the area via the Red River Campaign in 1864, then travel elsewhere? Or did she remain in Louisiana?"


Katie Calautti at Vanity Fair tries to find out what happened to Patsey from Solomon Northrup's memoir, Twelve Years a Slave.

"The Product of Our Own Contradictions"

"'Deregulation' is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its tea party critics claim."

E. J. Dionne, Jr., in The New Republic casts his gaze toward the oil hemorrhaging in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh Say That You'll Be True

"The record failed to sell, and label owner Leonard Chess had reservations about releasing Mr. Hawkins's second record, 'Susie Q.' But a local disc jockey took a demo of the song to Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler. Wexler expressed interest in it, forcing Chess's hand.
"Mr. Hawkins had to assign part of the song's writing credits to Lewis and E. Broadwater, a pseudonym for Nashville DJ Gene Nobles. The move ensured airplay but caused him to miss out on royalty payments."

Terence McArdle in The Washington Post reports the death of Dale Hawkins.

More Apple Chicken

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for actor Paul Scofield, Beatles label chief Neil Aspinall, and Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes Chicken.

The King of Carrot Flowers

"In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a 'cult' record, since that would imply it's some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum's haunting lyrics: 'And here's where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore.' Aeroplane isn't about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song 'Oh Comely' in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell 'Holy shit!' in the background.)"

Taylor Clark in Slate tries to figure out what happened to Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Magnum.

Austin, Boston, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, New York

Find a bit of each town in Southern California, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

Augustus Hawkins, 1907-2007

Claudia Luther and Valerie J. Nelson in the Los Angeles Times report the death of Augustus Hawkins, the first black Californian elected to Congress.

Yesterday and Today

Slate runs a series of photographs to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School.
Vanity Fair offers its own slideshow and an article by David Margolick about the post-1957 relationship between Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan. (Via Ghost in the Machine)

And Richard Thompson Ford in Slate and Erin Aubry Kaplan in Salon consider current civil rights protest in the wake of the march in Jena, Louisiana.