When a subway train first begins to whine and shimmy as it pulls away from a station, for an instant everything inside is suspended. The g-forces have just begun to exert their will on the bodies inside the train cars, but the bodies haven’t yet had a chance to respond. Read More

Food trends ebb and flow, but Kevin Rathbun and his restaurants endure. In Atlanta, his very name supplanted the antiquated term “New American cooking.” Taking a carte blanche approach to national and global flavors, Rathbun has forged a style of comforting excess. Sure, he may serve country ham grits or baby backs braised with Coca-Cola as sideways nods to the Southern food resurgence, but his kitchens (particularly the one at his flagship, Rathbun’s) gather pan-Asian, French, Mediterranean, and regional American flavors into caloric revelries. Read More

When my wife, Linda, and I were very young and very poor, we lived in a tin-roofed cabin in Mountain City, Georgia. Sometimes, to love well what we could love for free, we would drive around the lakes of Rabun County and all the green, wrinkled land in that far northeastern part of our state. Read More

Though short, the South Peachtree Creek Trail offers a romantic landscape—over active CSX railroad tracks, past graffiti-covered ruins of the old Decatur Waterworks (provider of Decaturites' drinking water from 1906 through the 1940s), through the lush trees along Peachtree Creek—and is book-ended by the thwop of tennis balls and the crack of aluminum bats at Mason Mill and Medlock parks, respectively. The winding boardwalk path is a sight in itself. Read More

There is a mattress in my dining room again, which I consider a bad sign because it’s a heavy thing, and not only do heavy things weigh you down, but you’re supposed to reach a point in life—aren’t you?—when you’re past mattresses being dumped on you where they don’t belong. Read More