News & Opinion

On Friday, the Atlanta Braves opened up their Truist Park account with their first home game of the year. The game itself is just one of 162 and in the win-loss column, the result has little impact on the outcome of the season. But the experience for Braves’ fans matters more than any other regular season game in the year. 

It was 50 years ago this month—April 8, 1974—that Henry Aaron hit his 715th career home run off pitcher Al Downing in Atlanta, breaking Ruth’s 39-year record. When he finally reached that summit, it seemed less a cause for celebration for Aaron than reason for a long sigh of relief: The chase was finally over.

Truist Park: The home of the Braves is an enigma. It’s an artificial mecca of baseball that displaced Turner Field to the chagrin of many, but now draws some of the best crowds in baseball. The stadium itself is a beauty, with faux red brick that creates an old-school ballpark feel in a sea of corporate office parks. Let’s leave behind its contradictions for a moment to focus on Truist Park and the great baseball played there since 2017.

With three rooms of varying capacities—named Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory—the Masquerade has always been a unique venue where up-and-coming groups and more established bands can both find a stage. Now, the Masquerade is opening a fourth room, Altar, which has a 250-person capacity and food available for purchase.

What Newport had toiled for seven years to accumulate took David Cummings less than two months to purchase, through deals with seven different lenders. As of this writing, Atlanta Ventures’ new LLC, SoDo Atlanta, now owns all of Newport’s former holdings, save one. Cummings isn’t disclosing yet what he paid for such a hefty chunk of downtown, but says he’s pleased with the sale price: “You never know what something’s worth, [but] it feels good right now.”

British Invasion rockers the Zombies take over Variety Playhouse, 404 Day fun, and David Sedaris comes to the Fox.

Of all works in the operatic canon, few engender such reverence as the four operas that comprise Richard Wagner’s epic masterwork Der Ring des Nibelungen, or, as it’s commonly called, the Ring. Wagner’s magnum opus is lauded as one of the great artistic achievements of Western civilization—and the ultimate challenge for any opera company. The Ring has never been mounted in the American Southeast, let alone Atlanta. But that's about to change.

The "punk rock cabaret" duo the Dresden Dolls played to a packed Eastern on March 29. Here, check out the scenes photographer Perry Julien captured at the show.

The Magnolia Open is one of two local U.S. Figure Skating qualifier events that the Atlanta Figure Skating Club hosts. Every March at Alpharetta’s rink, the Cooler, more than 150 skaters—most of them under 18—participate in the Magnolia Open in categories like European waltz, hoedown variation, and, of course, free skate.

No one listens to classical gamelan music for the first time and thinks, “I’ve heard something like this before.” There’s nothing like it.