New Orleans will reinstitute an indoor mask mandate to fight the spread of COVID-19 while readying for an influx of visitors for the Mardi Gras season, the city health director said Tuesday, Jan ...

Nearly every year (the Covid-19 pandemic years notwithstanding) the city of New Orleans descends in to a chaotic flurry of crowds, colorful masks, and beads galore all in celebration of Mardi Gras.

Besides the famous beads, Mardi Gras—February 13 this year—is best known for the colorful masks that revelers wear. Mask-wearing dates back to the earliest carnivals in 13th-century Venice.

In New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, I, surely, wasn’t ready for the mad ride and ceaseless exhilaration. Think 250 million beads being tossed around randomly. Edible underwear as souvenirs. Men ...

One colorful mask was worn by the late George P. Mitchell, the businessman and developer who brought Mardi Gras back to the island in the mid-1980s: the occasion was a 1986 ball celebrating the ...