Ten years ago this week, Americans watched their televisions aghast: It seemed that when New Orleans’s flood-control infrastructure failed, so too did its social order. For a week, the media offered stories of rampant, animalistic violence: of rapes, murders, looting, even of senseless assailants shooting at rescue helicopters. In banner headlines on September 2, 2005, both The New York Times and The Washington Post paired New Orleanians’ “despair and lawlessness,” suggesting that one of these states necessarily led to the other.