From the Magazine

Last year, at a time when the use of death penalty had dropped to historic lows nationwide, Georgia executed nine people convicted of murder, more than any other state. Don’t expect that pace to continue.

MARTA Army’s core team is comprised of Georgia Tech students and alumni, lawyers, accountants, designers, developers, and even teenagers who lend their skills to serve the overall objective: making MARTA a more efficient and appealing option in a city angling to become a pro-transit powerhouse.

Inspired by the black oral tradition, many of Bryan’s books are reworkings of traditional spirituals, folk stories, and poems. “His works are a celebration of African American experience and offer black children an important opportunity to see themselves represented in the pages of books,” says exhibition cocurator Virginia Shearer.

If it seems like the Guardians club is the soccer pitch version of the United Nations, that’s by design. The club was started in 2014 by Jason Brooks, a 33-year-old player, coach, and die-hard fan who was bothered that—even in heterogeneous Atlanta—soccer tended to break down along racial or socioeconomic lines.

When a reporter in 2003 told Atlanta Beat coach Tom Stone that young girls in the metro area were crying because the team was shutting down, his was a caustic response. “If more of those girls’ parents had brought them to our games,” he said, “they wouldn’t be crying today.”

Getting a cease and desist notice from Morgan Freeman may be one of the best things that’s happened to Mark Kendall.

When Hannah Palmer moved back to her hometown of Forest Park in the mid-2000s, she found that every place she’d ever lived in had been obliterated. The destructive force at play: the Atlanta airport.

With funding from Atlanta United FC (by way of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation), nonprofit Soccer in the Streets unveiled the first pitch built at an urban transit station. Sanjay Patel, the creator of Station Soccer, hopes to build nine more and create a league.

In Taylor Brown’s brilliant second novel, The River of Kings, brothers Hunter and Lawton Loggins kayak down the Altamaha River to cast their father Hiram’s ashes into the ocean.

On Second Thought host Celeste Headlee came to Atlanta with many questions. Perhaps most poignant: “How do you live in what’s basically the black capital of America . . . and yet just a few miles outside of town you see Confederate flags flying everywhere?”