http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/home.aspxen-usCopyright 2010, AtlantaMagazine-NAMon, 26 Jul 2010 12:57:20 GMThttp://emmisinteractive.comThe nerve center of Atlanta’s electric rail system hides in an unmarked concrete building east of the city limits in DeKalb County, behind a fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The outer gate opens only with an electronic key card, which also opens the building’s front door. To reach the control room, you pass another tall metal door marked with a sign that says This Door M...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1256311Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1256311Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:57:20 GMTLate in the spring, after the foreclosure, the Peachtree Pine homeless shelter Downtown was itself in danger of homelessness. Inside the brick walls, where 574 men sleep on an average night, the leaders prepared for a siege. They believed that the city’s most powerful forces were allied against them. Some of the leaders lived in the shelter. They had nowhere else to go. On a gray Tuesday mor...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1246622Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1246622Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:00:56 GMTThe president of the South Atlanta Tea Party is a gracious stay-at-home mother named Cindy Fallon, and a few weeks ago she was talking about taxes (especially their inverse variation with job-creating capital), Ponzi schemes (especially the federal government), and the proverbial toilet (toward which her three children’s proverbial futures are sliding). And that got her talking about angry c...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1222763Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1222763Tue, 04 May 2010 18:02:18 GMTWe couldn’t talk about the gun, the Ruger 9 mm fired in the dark at the university and then hidden where the police would not find it. We couldn’t talk about the bullets, at least six of them, flying at random through a crowd—one hitting a freshman on his third day of school, burning his right forearm like hot coals until he pulled it out and saved the evidence; another hitting a sopho...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1212891Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1212891Tue, 04 May 2010 18:03:54 GMTThere is a hidden restaurant near the south end of Grant Park, in a tan-painted aluminum warehouse. No silverware, no tablecloths. If the place had a menu, it would feature colossal rats and quarter-inch crickets. In the kitchen one morning, a man stood over a red-stained cutting board, slicing beef from raw bones. He stacked the bones in a plastic tub. They would be served without fanfare or seaso...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1200493Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1200493Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:08 GMTSandon Jones went in the ground on a Wednesday morning, 141 days after his death. No friends or relatives attended his funeral. The ceremony lasted not quite two minutes and was shared with another man, whose coffin was placed in the same hole. Neither man received a headstone. “Spare me,” said the chaplain toward a chalky sky, through diagonal rain, by way of a eulogy, “that I ma...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1187300Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1187300Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:19 GMTThe Atlanta Hawks play their home games on a giant jigsaw puzzle in one of the world’s busiest arenas, four inches above a layer of ice. Traveling shows come and go through the fall and winter, but the ice remains, so that when Celine Dion thumps her sternum, when Jay-Z and Young Jeezy shuffle across the stage, when Britney Spears impersonates a snarling cat in a golden cage, they all stand ...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1179563Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1179563Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:30 GMTA rapper sat in his bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, scribbling on a notepad with a No. 2 pencil. He did not write about guns or drugs or gangsters of any kind. All such topics had been forbidden by his mother, who walked in and looked over his shoulder. “Look how sloppy that is,” she said. “It’s comin’ out of my head,” the rapper said. “Once I finish, make a w...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1165865Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1165865Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:42 GMTRain came in September and it stayed for nine days, filling the grooves and fissures on the crust of North Georgia. Eighteen miles west of Atlanta, in Austell, Sweetwater Creek became Sweetwater River, then Sweetwater Lake. The water smelled like petroleum. It turned houses into submarines. Near the lower end of Jones Road, after a long night of inspecting chickens at a slaughterhouse, Debra Swineh...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1155452Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1155452Tue, 04 May 2010 18:04:55 GMTThe hunters find their prey one clue at a time, fishing addresses from an ocean of data, plotting social networks like the spokes of a wheel, gauging the speed of an electrical meter, reading cigarette burns on the venetian blinds. Betrayal is their friend. In every case, there is something they call the Judas Factor. Neal McWhorter and Raymond Matthews are bail recovery agents, which is to say the...http://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1140635Thomas Lakehttp://www.atlantamagazine.com/Channels/firsthand/story.aspx?ID=1140635Tue, 04 May 2010 18:05:06 GMT