Julia Reed

In 1719, a year after Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established New Orleans as the capital of the fledgling French colony of Louisiana, a hurricane wiped out the handful of palmetto huts that comprised the city.

His luck finally ran out last week. Seventy-two-year-old former governor Edwin W. Edwards was convicted of extorting almost $3 million from companies that applied for riverboat-casino licenses.

He couldn't get her off his mind--or on the phone. It was the summer of 1977, and George W. Bush had just met Laura Welch at a dinner arranged by friends in Texas.

When Liz Tilberis, the editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar, died on April 21 after a six-year battle with ovarian cancer, even her closest friends and colleagues couldn't quite believe it. "She never, ever let on," said Brana Wolf, Bazaar's editor-at-large. "In her mind she was always fighting to get better." As late as the week before she died, the British-born Tilberis, 51, was sitting upright beneath an oxygen tent, going over final layouts for the June issue. "It was such a shock," said her...

IN AUGUST 1996, TWO months after Chester Trent Lott became the majority leader of the United States Senate, he granted a reporter a rare interview inside his Pascagoula, Miss., home.

WHEN COMMODORE Matthew Perry sailed his ""black ships'' to the mouth of Tokyo Bay in 1853, most Japanese feared a barbarian invasion. But as artist Renjo Shimooka soon learned, America's gunboat diplomacy opened Japan to invaders of a different sort: tourists and their gadgets.

I SHOULD CONFESS UP FRONT THAT I have been a guest of Sally Quinn's. It was last year, and I'd written a piece for Vogue complaining that no one gave great parties anymore.

THE FIRST TIME I MET Gianni Versace we talked about Jane Fonda's new implants. ""Jane Fonda is so fabulous. Why did she do that to her breasts? When she came to Milan her breasts were up to here,'' he said, pointing to his chin.