politics

Hurricanes, Hezbollah, and Apartments in New York City

The New Republic examines Katrina one year later, the New Yorker publishes Seymour Hersh's latest, and the Believer highlights how one talented journalist practices her trade.
August 15, 2006

It’s hurricane season across the southeast United States, and the New Republic has dedicated its latest issue to the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Jed Horne, a metro editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, contributed an article about agonizing over whether to sell his home, asking, “Why is rebuilding New Orleans not a matter of national pride, rather than grudging debate? Whatever happened to the can-do spirit America once laid claim to?”

Unable to answer why his city has essentially been forgotten, he says that “A part of me wishes the housing market would crash and get it over with, erase the run-up that makes me feel like I have too much at stake in New Orleans to stay on in New Orleans. In the end, I doubt we’ll leave. Our lives are in New Orleans, a city that has never been for the faint of heart. We have too much at stake here. So does America.”

The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh weighs in with a look at the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and how it apparently ties in to the Bush administration’s desire to deal forcefully with Iran. “Current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials” told Hersh that the Bush administration “was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.”

But the scariest part of Hersh’s piece is that the flawed Israeli plan apparently is “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” What’s more, there are accusations (reminiscent of the run-up to the war in Iraq) that the Pentagon is ginning up intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran. An unnamed source (a Hersh specialty) told him this: “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top — at the insistence of the White House — and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely.”

Back on the journalism beat, Vanity Fair‘s Michael Wolff lambasts the New York Times and its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., for being “just another newspaper company coming to its natural end.” In a long essay that segues from how the Bush administration has made the paper its whipping boy to Sulzberger’s acquisition binge (About.com, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, etc.) to the economics of publishing on the Web, Wolff cranks out a cranky essay that, true to form, is more provocative than convincing.

Finally, the anti-snark brigade over at the Believer reviews a new non-fiction collection — Toni Schlesinger’s Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories. The book is a compilation of one of the Village Voice‘s more readable columns over the past several years: Schlesinger’s weekly “Shelter” column. In stories that are never longer than a few hundred words, Schlesinger profiles various New Yorkers living in interesting arrangements and, along the way, creates some memorable vignettes of life in the city.

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“I do not use a tape recorder,” Schlesinger writes in the book’s introduction. “I write down only what I want to remember — ultimately the test of what is interesting.”

The Believer‘s reviewer, Jenny Davidson, writes that Schlesinger “attributes that choice to the experience of working on one of her first big stories as a Chicago journalist in the late 1970s, ‘The Call Girl Game.’ A vice cop hooked her up with a pimp named Bobby who was too paranoid to let her write anything down, but the pages she transcribed afterwards from memory were wonderful material — in stark contrast to another conversation with a pimp called the Saint who was ‘totally open.'” The review is well worth a read, if for no other reason than to learn how one talented journalist practices her trade.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.