"Officers on horseback cleared Bourbon Street early Wednesday, declaring an end to Carnival 2012 as Mardi Gras revelers began to prepare for the beginning of Lent, the period of fasting and repentance before Easter," The Washington Post reports. "Streams of people poured into the French Quarter as the sun began to set Tuesday to continue the party that began earlier along the city’s traditional Garden District family-friendly parade route which follows stately St. Charles Avenue. Bathed in springlike warmth and showered with trinkets, beads and music, New Orleans reveled in the excesses of Fat Tuesday. The drinking was in full swing shortly after dawn, and with it came outrageous costumes and flesh-flashing that drew thousands to the Quarter."

Isn't it nice to see New Orleans in the news for a celebration? In recent years, journalists have mostly busied themselves writing about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the recovery that's still underway. But the city's singular ethos has been explored by a few writers who appreciate it more than most, Rick Bragg among them.

In one piece, he described New Orleans for a certain kind of visitor. "There are two distinctly different sides to this old river town, like the black and white halves of the ceramic Mardi Gras masks for sale in T-shirt shops in the French Quarter. One is the guidebook New Orleans, the one that encourages visitors to ride the elegant old riverboats, to sip the rich coffee at the Cafe Du Monde and maybe even gamble a little bit at the floating casinos," he writes. "And all of that is fun. But there is a whole other New Orleans that many tourists might never quite get to, unless they went with someone who lives here. You can do it in a weekend, or at least a New Orleans one."

In another piece, Bragg recounted a peculiar New Orleans tradition. "The Big Chiefs dance, sing and stage mock battles -- wars of words and rhymes -- to honor American Indians who once gave sanctuary to escaped slaves. It is an intense but elegant posturing, a street theater that some black men devote a lifetime to," he explains. "But this ceremony is also self-affirmation, the way poor blacks in New Orleans honor their own culture in a Carnival season that might otherwise pass them by, said the Big Chiefs who carry on the tradition, and the academics who study it. These Indians march mostly in neighborhoods where the tourists do not go, ride on the hoods of dented Chevrolets instead of floats, and face off on street corners where poverty and violence grip the people most of the rest of the year. The escape is temporary, but it is escape."

In a third feature, Bragg described his favorite food. "People love this old city for many reasons, for music and architecture, of course, and some for the fact that they can careen dang near naked down Bourbon Street one night and then go home to Indiana and sell life insurance," he writes. "But for me, when I come back to this city, I am happiest in the company of a po’boy. They are iconic now, like red beans. People argue over who has the best, but there are so many places and so many recipes—from fried oysters to roast beef, barbecued shrimp to catfish, soft-shell crab to hot smoked sausage—that picking one is like feeling around in a sack of rubies."

Of course, other writers have taken on the city too – Julia Reed, for example. "From the beginning, an exotic mix of French, Spanish, African, and Catholic cultures separated the city from the less forgiving Protestant, Anglo-Saxon rest of the country, and indeed, the rest of the South. The late great New York Times reporter Johnny Apple once compared New Orleans to the slightly shady port city of Marseille, and it is important to remember that New Orleans existed as a French and, mostly, Spanish city for almost a century before the United States got its hands on the place," she writes. "Its age—and the fact that it has given America its only indigenous music and cuisine—have long lent an air of superiority to the older families among the populace that can border on provincialism. In this regard it is not unlike Boston or Charleston, except that New Orleans is also marked by a concurrent strain of innate Mediterranean lustiness, a languid laissez-faire approach to pretty much everything from business and politics to religion and sexuality."

As she noted elsewhere, the city also created a new kind of drink. "In such an unsteady environment, one could certainly be driven to 'create' a few drinks. In fact, though it is a subject of much debate, the cocktail itself is said to have been invented here, by a pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud who had escaped a slave revolt in his native Santo Domingo with a family recipe for bitters in hand," she writes. "In 1838, he opened an apothecary shop on Royal Street, where, after hours, he offered friends a mixture of brandy and bitters in an egg cup. Thus was born the precursor to the Sazerac, a cocktail now made with American rye whiskey, absinthe, and bitters. In the ensuing decades, an enormous number of additional cocktails were invented in New Orleans: the Vieux Carré, the Brandy Crusta, the Ramos gin fizz, and the Hurricane, to name a few. Last year, the Louisiana legislature wasted an entire month arguing over which one should be named New Orleans's official drink."