Run, don’t walk, to your newsstand now to buy the Aug. 13 issue of Time, featuring a 14-page special report, “Why New Orleans Still Isn’t Safe.” With a stark image of a drainage canal floodwall, the cover teases: “Two years after Katrina, this floodwall is all that stands between New Orleans and the next hurricane. It’s pathetic. How a perfect storm of big-money politics, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance is setting up the city for another catastrophe.”

The “main course” of the special report is Michael Grunwald’s “The Threatening Storm.” Right off the bat in the lead paragraph Grunwald says the drowning of New Orleans “wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics.” (Investigative environmental reporter Grunwald’s powerful article “Rotten to the Corps” appeared in Grist in 2006 and is linked on our “Environment” page at “Read All About It.”)

“Hurricane Katrina-Two Years Later” features graphics, photo essays, remarks by seven prominent New Orleanians (including John M. Barry and Harry Shearer), and a reader’s forum inviting ideas for saving the city.

The links above are just to get you started. Really: go out and buy the magazine, and then write to managing editor Richard Stengel (letters@time.com) to thank Time for its generous attention to the city’s vulnerability and continuing need for help. Mr. Stengel’s editor’s note (“Why We Returned to New Orleans: Two years later, the country is still failing a great American city”) appears on page 6. (Make that fifteen pages of Time ink.)

We hope that Time’s early publication-well in advance of the Katrina anniversary on Aug. 29-will prompt other ambitious, detailed coverage by the news media. Keep the presses rolling!