It’s morning and I’m sitting on a bench on the neutral ground in New Orleans, the city where I’ve lived for the past 13 years, watching people walk their dogs and leave their homes to get into cars and go to work.¹ Some of the trees around me have turned a fall color; some are still green, and the birds are singing to one another. 

We’ve had a lot of fog lately, which is just starting to burn off, and a lot of fires, which is new because New Orleans has always been a very verdant and wet place. But we are in the midst of a drought and now there’s a weird confluence of fog and smoke early in the morning.

I’ve made a point not to listen to the news this year. It’s an experiment in thinking about news as something that’s right here on my block, in my neighborhood, in the p...