The Vanity Fair and Wall Street Journal reporter and editor Steve Garbarino profiles his alma mater, the city of New Orleans, where he began his career working for the now greatly diminished Times-Picayune. He reminds us that America’s weirdest, sultriest, sometimes hottest, and most murderous city isn’t definable in the conventional travel-story sense; you can only get a feel for it by living there. photography by ALEXIS DAHAN text by STEVE GARBARINO As a state of mind and a natural fact, you do not so much land as sink into New Orleans. While much of the loamy, paddle-fanned, Spanish-mossy, French-architecture-inspired turf of this relatively small city is just below sea level, it is also a subtle, subtropical oasis that is well beneath anyone’s (that goes for Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, too) ability to accurately capture in its multitudinous nuances, its blatancies so banally extreme they only act to…