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When the National Review's John Derbyshire came to New Orleans in 2007 and wrote about the experience, I defended the city but didn't come down too hard on Derbyshire —*one, because not everyone has to like the same things, and two, because the flat affect of his prose made me wonder whether he fell on the high-functioning side of the autism spectrum.

The following passage, for instance, came close to the top of the travelogue and seemed to go a long way toward explaining why he felt so uncomfortable in New Orleans:


<blockquote>From the tourist’s-eye view, New Orleans is a black city. The servicepeople at the airport, the hotel, concessions, stores, museums, and fast-food outlets are uniformly black.? [ Read more ]

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