Neighborhood gem: Greens and Gravy
Cookbook author and emerging restaurateur Darius Williams celebrates black culture in his new “soul bistro” in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood of Westview.
Eat this: Taqueria Del Sol’s fish tacos
The restaurant sells thousands of tacos weekly, but Hernandez's fried fish taco, with poblano tartar sauce and pickled jalapenos, always tops the charts. “ When people go on trips and come back to Atlanta, they come straight from the airport to get a fish taco,” Hernandez says.
Lewis Grizzard

James Edward “Billy” McKinney and Cynthia McKinney

Reginald Eaves

Linda Schrenko
Vanity, thy name is Linda Schrenko. The former state school superintendent paid for a $9,300 face-lift with tax money intended for deaf students, then showed up in court wearing a faux-fur-accented coat. Schrenko squeaked into office in 1994 as the first woman to win a partisan statewide election. She served two terms, then fizzled out in a losing bid for governor financed in part with embezzled federal funds. Schrenko later admitted diverting more than $600,000 to a computer contractor for work that was never performed, then funneling about half to her campaign. She pleaded guilty a week and a half into her 2006 trial before Merle Temple, her deputy superintendent and ex-lover, could testify against her. She’ll get out of prison in 2013.
Michael Vick
Who says there are no second acts in American lives? Yes, Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels harbored the fighting, torturing, and execution of underperforming pit bulls. And yes, Vick participated in the killing of six to eight dogs, some by drowning, hanging, or electrocuting. And yes, he served most of a twenty-three-month prison sentence. But remember: The man knows his way around a gridiron. In February, after a stellar season with the Eagles, he was named the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year. A month later, he signed a one-year contract with the team, estimated to bring in around $20 million. That’s a lot of doggie biscuits.
Sam Caldwell
For seventeen years, Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell treated underlings like serfs: Shaking them down for campaign donations. Extracting a TV, a new car, even cash to pay his taxes. Making them fix his boats,...
Arthur Blank

Tyler Perry
Whether you flock to Fandango to purchase advance tickets for the latest Madea movie or chortled along with last year’s lacerating parody on Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, one thing is certain: Atlanta filmmaker Perry is the only major Hollywood player dedicated to cranking out hits from his adopted hometown. Only five years after shooting his first film (for one scene, he took a chain saw to a couch inside his own house), he was directing Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg and Grammy winner Janet Jackson in last year’s film adaptation of playwright Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf—partially shot at his sprawling thirty-acre Tyler Perry Studios in southwest Atlanta. At the TPS grand-opening party in 2008, Perry surprised mentors Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Cicely Tyson by dedicating soundstages in their honor as Will Smith beamed and Oprah Winfrey cried her eyelashes off. An awed Tyson said, “I never dreamed I would witness this in my lifetime. What I’ve achieved in my career is minuscule in comparison to this.”