Now Batting For David Halberstam: Didion, Hersh, Et Al.

“The command post is a set of Manhattan publishing offices, and the foot soldiers include Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Alex Kotlowitz, Paul Hendrickson, Samantha Power and Bill Walton. They are going on David Halberstam’s book tour for him. Five months after Mr. Halberstam’s death in a car accident on April 23, some of this celebrated journalist’s closest friends and colleagues will be banding together to cover different legs of a nationwide publicity tour for his final book.”

How Architecture Could Help Heal New Orleans

“In the two years since Hurricane Katrina, what has the rebuilding effort produced? … There have been only a handful of earnest, grass-roots proposals to preserve what’s left of the historic fabric. Amid this atmosphere of malaise, two recently announced projects for downtown New Orleans stand out as the first truly creative attempts to foster the city’s resurrection. The first, an extravagant proposal for a new New Orleans National Jazz Center and park by Morphosis, is the most significant work of architecture proposed in the city since the Superdome.”

Movies Are Losing Their Women To TV

“Since its inception, television has been threatened as the doom of movies. And we may be getting to the point where it’s actually true. TV has never looked so good, with cable channels from Lifetime to AMC finally following the HBO model and creating edgy original series with the look, cast and soul-searching of good indie films. And not even indie films. Of good mid-budget films, the kind they used to make in the ’70s and ’80s when movies didn’t have to make a profit on the first weekend, when they didn’t open for 3 1/2 seconds on 1,000 screens.”