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organized festivals in Israel and Mali, acquiring some familiarity with challenging situations abroad. Their first festival in Port-au-Prince, planned as part of bicentennial celebrations of Haitian independence in 2004, was postponed thanks to the violent collapse of the Haitian government that year, and eventually took place in 2007. Most members of the 2010 advance team had helped organize the 2007 event as well. By 2010, things in Haiti were finally looking up.</p> <p>“Life seems to have gotten back to normal after decades of trouble,” Laferri&egrave;re writes in his surprisingly calm and measured new memoir, <strong><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1551524988/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1551524988">The World Is Moving Around Me</a></em></strong>.</p> <p>Laughing girls stroll through the streets late into the evening. Painters of na&iuml;ve canvases chat with women selling mangos and avocados on dusty street corners. Crime seems to have retreated. In lower-class Bel-Air, criminals aren’t tolerated by a population exasperated by everything it has gone through over the last fifty years: family dictatorships, military coups, repeated hurricanes, devastating floods, and random kidnappings.</p> <p>For the first time in a decade or more, political turmoil had receded from the Haitian consciousness, leaving space for the country’s extraordinary rich reserves of literature, music, and visual art to claim attention. In the background of Laferri&egrave;re’s street-level observations there were more promising developments. President Ren&eacute; Pr&eacute;val’s administration looked far more stable than any of its recent predecessors, while Obama’s administration in Washington was far more friendly to its Caribbean neighbor than previous U.S. governments had been. The new empowerment of the Clintons, Hillary as secretary of state and Bill as United Nations special envoy to Haiti, bids fair to clear a new pathway toward durable economic development, again for the first time in 15 years or longer.</p> <p>That afternoon, Laferri&egrave;re was in a restaurant. He had just ordered the lobster. “I was biting into a piece of bread when I heard a terrible explosion,” he writes. “We had between eight and ten seconds to make a decision. Leave the place or stay. Very rare were those who got a good start. … The three of us ended up flat on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, under the trees. The earth started shaking like a sheet of paper whipped by the wind. The low roar of buildings falling to their knees. They didn’t explode; they imploded, trapping people inside their bellies.”</p> <p>Laferri&egrave;re always has two items on his person: his passport and “a black notebook in which I write down everything that crosses my field of vision or my mind.” <em>The World is Moving Around Me </em>is constructed as an anthology of these immediate impressions, recorded from the moment when “We slowly got to our feet like zombies in a B-movie,” to begin exploring a country that had just had its recent hopes 

Chris Rock: "Fuck You, Sting"

CHARLOTTE – President Obama and his Republican opponents have fought to a draw for nearly four years over the best way to fix the economy. On Wednesday, Obama turned to the Democratic Party's explainer-in-chief to win the argument: Bill Clinton.

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  By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
  President Obama joins former president Bill Clinton on stage following Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte on Wednesday.

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By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

President Obama joins former president Bill Clinton on stage following Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte on Wednesday.

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The former president did what he does best. He made the case for a Democratic-style economic revival based on investments in individuals and innovation. He stood up for the man who defeated his wife four years ago and stated the case against Mitt Romney better than anyone else has been able to do. For 48 minutes, he delivered a stunning tour de force that had delegates on their feet.

"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was pretty simple: 'We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in,' " Clinton said in nominating Obama for a second term. "I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better."

• MORE: Full coverage of the DNC

• PHOTOS: Top images from Charlotte

• STORY: Day 2 of the DNC