Here’s my story from today’s front page:

A state audit has found rampant financial mismanagement at three family-run Dallas charter schools -– including fictional renovations, imaginary travel and hundreds of thousands of dollars unaccounted for.

30 March 2007 | No comments

Long time no post. Been busy. Some accumulated links:

— Great piece in WaPo about Byron Mouton, a starter on the 2002 Maryland national champion college basketball team. As you can tell from that piece — which details his wanderings in the basketball minor leagues since graduation — Byron’s a good guy. And I’d say that even if he weren’t from my hometown in south Louisiana, if he didn’t grow up about five blocks from my house, and if we weren’t almost certainly related in some distant, antebellum way.

— A fun conversation between two of my favorite people: John Roderick (of long-time crabwalk.com fave the Long Winters) and Merlin Mann (of the Merlin Mann media empire). Both gentlemen, I suspect, should be better compensated for their work. (Some swearing, you should know.)

— Showtime saved the world a lot of BitTorrent bandwidth by simply posting episode one of the This American Life TV show online.

— A peek at Naypyidaw, the new junta-built capital of Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma). The city “is being built on a vast and extravagant scale in hundreds of square kilometres of tropical scrubland. Shining new buildings rise out of tropical scrub like a mirage, separated by miles of broad highways and boulevards.”

Sounds like a recipe for another unlivable clone of Niemeyer’s Brasilia. (A place I’d love to visit, given my love for all things brasileiro, but a place few would want to live in. By the way, did you realize Oscar Niemeyer was still alive, at age 99?)

These photos of the new Myanmari capital seem to support those who fear something Brasilia-like. “The reason I couldn’t walk about and shoot is very simple. The city is too huge to see anything on foot, there are virtually no taxis” — yep, that’s the fear of density you’d expect.

— I will be damned if I’m going to let Business 2.0 share my real estate secret with the world! (Although, to be honest, you don’t need $200K to buy in to Uruguay. There are lovely places in Colonia del Sacramento, in the old Portuguese quarter, for $60K. And you can buy a nice place in Treinta y Tres or Tacuarembó for well under that. And even in Punta you can get something under $100K. Or so I hear.)

— Here’s my column from Monday’s paper.

— Just ‘cause:

29 March 2007 | No comments

When the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński died, I wrote mostly nice things about him. He wrote a lot about Africa.

When the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina last year wrote a great piece in Granta — on the stereotypes Western writers bring when they write about Africa — I wrote nice things about it.

Now, Wainaina writes a piece saying that earlier article was mostly about Kapuściński:

It was Kapuscinski, more than any other single writer, who inspired me to write the satirical essay “How to Write about Africa”…

In his review of The Shadow of the Sun for the Times Literary Supplement in 2001, John Ryle [wrote:] “His writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism … conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them”…

There are many fools like Kapuscinski wandering about. They don’t get published. They do not become legends. The questions about him have more to do with lingering superstitions about the continent held by editors and foreign correspondent types, who built him up entranced by his Polish-flavoured, left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark things.

Wainaina is right, of course. Kapuściński was a strange mix of sophistication and parochialism — he tended to view the outside world with a wide-eyed wonder that took on a sort of magical-realist edge. That turned people into archetypes, and in Africa, those archetypes aren’t always good. Kapuściński was all about evoking the romance of the exotic, which has an inherently orientalist cast — and which is why he’s considered of a piece with the great British travel writers of the early 20th century, who were primarily exploring their own fresh empire.

One thing you see in The Emperor and The Shadow of the Sun is that Kapuściński wasn’t very good at depicting real, fleshed-out people — he was good at creating characters. There’s a reason (beyond mere style choice) many people in his work are never given names. As I wrote last time, I liked the idea of Kapuściński more than I liked the man, charmer though he apparently was.

21 March 2007 | No comments

An excerpt from I Always Do My Collars First, which I believe to be the first ever documentary film on the subject of how Cajun women iron shirts. (More here and here.)

19 March 2007 | 1 comment

Interesting chart of real estate declines in U.S. metros over the past 30 years.

The record for the biggest drop? Lafayette, Louisiana — a.k.a. where I grew up — in the oil bust from 1986 to 1991, when property values declines an astounding 40 percent.

I was a kid then (aged 11 to 16), and while I knew the economy wasn’t good, it’s an indicator of the childhood ignorance that I never would have thought the drop was that severe. I just can’t believe that I didn’t hear more about it — not to mention the fact that I would have pegged the declines more to the early ’80s, not later.

I suppose different classes experience busts in different ways. For my aspirationally-working-class family, the key issue was job losses — there not being offshore jobs for the menfolk any more. Declines in asset values were secondary, since whatever savings we would have been able to generate would almost certainly have sat in cash at the savings and loan — not in property, not in stocks or bonds.

19 March 2007 | No comments

It makes me very happy to see Len Pasquarelli, the best of the national NFL writers, agree with me on the Joe Horn signing, calling it “a reach” and pegging the Dirty Birds as a team likely to tumble next year. (Perhaps even better news: He doesn’t consider the Saints a likely candidate for such a tumble.) Pasquarelli knows the Falcons and Saints well, being based in Atlanta and a former Falcons beat writer for the AJC.

13 March 2007 | No comments

A live crosscultural tribute to the late J Dilla — by Brazilians DJ Nuts, DJ Primo and drummer Pupilo. They’re riffing on Dilla’s production of the Pharcyde’s “Runnin.’” I love this stuff.

13 March 2007 | No comments

Joe Horn is dead to me.

(Until he retires, that is. Then he will be welcomed back into my good graces.)

One point, though (and apologies for the Saints talk, non-football fans.) Joe Horn has been a great receiver for the Saints. But he’s getting old — he’s 35, and he’s missed big chunks of the last two seasons with injuries that wouldn’t heal. Under his old contract, he was supposed to be paid $5.5 million next season — a number that’s too high for an old guy getting slower and with injury problems.

So the Saints asked him to take a pay cut. He refused and the Saints released him.

So now he signs with the hated Dirty Birds, the Saints’ chief rival, out of spite. And he signs a four-year contract worth $19 million. Hey, that’s almost $5 mil a year, right?

On paper. The contract actually only pays him $7.5 million over the next two seasons (about $3.75 mil per). Then he supposedly gets $11.5 million in the last two years of the contract. But none of that money is guaranteed, and I’ll bet anyone $5 that he never sees it. As if slow, breaking-down Joe Horn is going to get paid more at ages 38 and 39 than today? After two years, the Falcons are going to ask him to take a pay cut because he’ll be too expensive (or else they’ll cut him altogether). Those last two years are purely to make Joe feel good.

08 March 2007 | 1 comment

An 18-minute documentary on maybe the world’s most important drum break:

The drummer in question is Gregory Coleman, recently deceased. More on the break here and here.

07 March 2007 | No comments

While I’m reviewing Sunday papers, check out this story in the NYT on the Pine Leaf Boys, the Savoy family, and the youth revival in Cajun music. Many of the crabwalk.com readers I’ve met in person have been bored by my extensive sharing of thoughts on these very subjects. (Which are, in sum, that the Pine Leaf Boys are awesome, I wish I were a Savoy, and that the youth movement they represent is roughly 10 times more important to the persistence of Cajun culture than all Louisiana’s French-immersion classes put together.)

And particular props to reporter Geoffrey Himes, since I can’t find a single error of fact in the piece. (Not something I can say often about south Louisiana stories, even those I like.) Also, I’m glad to see the Pine Leaf Boys get some national press after efforts to get them on NPR didn’t pan out.

04 March 2007 | No comments

Great Times-Picayune today. First and most importantly, day one of their series “Last Chance,” on how, without massive and rapid federal action, New Orleans will be gulf-front property in an alarmingly short period of time.

In 10 years, at current land-loss rates:

— Gulf waves that once ended on barrier island beaches far from the city could be crashing on levees behind suburban lawns.

— The state will be forced to begin abandoning outlying communities such as Lafitte, Golden Meadow, Cocodrie, Montegut, Leeville, Grand Isle and Port Fourchon.

— The infrastructure serving a vital portion of the nation’s domestic energy production will be exposed to the encroaching Gulf.

— Many levees built to withstand a few hours of storm surge will be standing in water 24 hours a day — and facing the monster surges that come with tropical storms.

— Hurricanes approaching from the south will treat the city like beachfront property, crushing it with forces like those experienced by the Mississippi Gulf Coast during Katrina. […]

Despite such dire threats, the most disturbing concern may be this: Coastal restoration efforts have been under way for two decades, but not a single project capable of reversing the trend currently awaits approval. The modest restoration efforts already under way have no chance of making a serious impact, experts say.

“It’s like putting makeup on a corpse,” said Mark Schexnayder, a regional coastal adviser with LSU’s Sea Grant College Program who has spent 20 years involved in coastal restoration.

Important journalism. “We’re always fishing ‘used-to-bes,’ ” a fisherman says. “This used to be Bird Island. This used to be Manila Village.” “We can’t plant gardens anymore because when we get a south wind, the tide comes out of the bayou and covers the yards and the roads,” says a Cocodrie woman. “We used to only see that with hurricanes.”

(More on Manila Village here.)

Be sure to check out the audio slideshow by Ted Jackson and the multimedia presentation by Dan Swenson. (The maps in Part 5 of the Swenson are particularly telling.)

Second, this good piece by Steve Ritea on Edwin Edwards, now halfway through his sentence in the federal pen.

04 March 2007 | No comments

The winners of this year’s National Awards for Education Reporting are out.

I took first place in the Opinion Writing category for a collection of my columns for The News. And if I may brag, this would be the second year in a row I win first place.

I also won a “special citation” (meaning: “third place”) in the Beat Reporting category for a random bundling of my stories. I won first place in this category two years ago, then got skunked last year. I had my fingers crossed for a win, but Daniel Golden and Rosalind Rossi (the two who beat me) are quite the journalists themselves.

Mad props to my DMN colleagues who also scored wins: Kent Fischer, Molly Motley Blythe, Tawnell Hobbs and Pete Slover got a special citation in investigation reporting for their great DISD spending stories over the past year. And Rodger Jones, Jim Mitchell and Mike Hashimoto got a special citation in opinion writing for their editorials on my cheating stories.

01 March 2007 | 7 comments