Danny Schechter quotes Nicholas Lemann from his interview with Daniel Cappello on the magazine's website:

As you shake your head at these stories, often staring at them with disbelief, fiction merges with faction. Nicholas Lemann writes about his in the New Yorker, with references to authors who have imagined the scenarios we now see playing out. In an interview published on the magazine’s website, he also talks about what the country is learning about the city where he grew up:

For context, let’s think about New Yorker readers, who, I’m guessing, regularly go to places like Jamaica—kind of tropical-resort-like places. New Orleans is a lot like those places, politically and sociologically, in the sense that you go to them and you’re aware, in some part of your mind, that the life lived by most people in the place where you are is not the life that you are living as a tourist, but you don’t know the details. So part of what you’re seeing here is just the underlying condition of the poor in New Orleans. New Orleans is a city with a lot of poor people. They’re not always suffering this dramatically, but they’re suffering a lot of the time, and it’s invisible to people most of the time. So part of the effect of Katrina is making the usually invisible visible.

PLUS: A special Talk of the Town section on the hurricane, with Lemann, David Remnick, Dan Baum, and Christine Wiltz. AND: From 1987, John McPhee on taming the waters of Louisiana and, from 1993, James B. Stewart on his Illinois home town, threatened by floodwaters.

PLUS: How to help.