By Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter The news on April 1 that Ellis Marsalis Jr., 85, had died of COVID-19-related pneumonia opened a river of national tributes for New Orleans’ premier jazz pianist, professor and the patriarch of a…

By Jason Berry | The Daily Beast TOO LITTLE TOO LATE More than 4,000 New Orleanians died in one month, largely because selfish, ignorant city leaders ignored basic sanitation measures that might have saved hundreds of lives. After two weeks…

By Jason Berry | Slate Politics As massive coronavirus shutdowns took hold in California and New York, down in Louisiana this past Sunday Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that the state had the world’s fastest growth rate of confirmed cases…

By Jason Berry | Published on National Catholic Reporter (https://www.ncronline.org) In March, the azaleas blossom like tiny valentines on the grassy St. Charles Avenue median where streetcars trundle past the Garden District, heading toward Uptown. It is barely three weeks since…

By Jason Berry The novelist Ernest Gaines, who died in his sleep on Nov. 5, 2019, at the age of 86 in his home in Oscar, La., published nine books in a distinguished career. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, which received the National…

Filmmaker Dan Pritzker’s biopic “Bolden,” about the horn player credited with inventing jazz, reaches for myth and misses the artist. by Jason Berry Early into Bolden, Dan Pritzker’s artful biopic on pioneering New Orleans jazzman Buddy Bolden, a lush scene unfolds as a hot air…

Published in the National Catholic Reporter. Fr. Jerome LeDoux, 88, one of New Orleans’ most popular priests, died Jan. 7 in Lafayette, Louisiana, after surgery for a double heart bypass. He had for several years been living in active retirement…

New Orleans at 300 When you are raised in a town where the grown-ups wear masks and dance at Mardi Gras parades, it plants a certain optimism for the human experiment. One autumn morning in 1992, over breakfast in Manhattan,…

Published in New Orleans Magazine. August marked 117 years since Louis Armstrong’s birth. With the city’s greatest native son on a rise of planetary value, we should remember the woman who played an early pivotal role. When Armstrong left for…