Great Reads

Thirty years after the Olympics transformed downtown Atlanta, the World Cup is fueling another wave of development across the city’s core. Centennial Yards, South Downtown, new housing—the tournament’s biggest legacy may be the reshaping of downtown long after the final match ends.

Last week, dozens of women in brightly colored dresses showed up at the Swan Coach House to hear Trisha Addicks, America’s leading sorority recruitment coach, read from her new tome, The Rush Bible: Secrets to Crush Sorority Recruitment and Find Your Forever Greek Home (Simon & Schuster).

In this era of the HIV epidemic, talking saves lives. It pierces stigma and turns ordinary conversation into something lifesaving. Daniel Driffin, an Atlanta-based HIV activist and project manager with the international nonprofit the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, talks a lot. Armed with a PhD in public heath, he speaks on expert advisory panels and directly to people with HIV—both online and in person. In 2025, ongoing dialogue became more critical than ever.

Writer Tom Junod grew up in the long shadow of Big Lou—a dazzling, ruthless womanizer—and spent a decade excavating the myth of his father’s life. His new memoir is a reckoning with sex, power, and the inheritance every son must confront.

In 2021, beloved bartender Katie Janness was brutally murdered at the Charles Allen Gate entrance to Piedmont Park. With broken security cameras, no eyewitnesses, and few leads, the case remains unsolved nearly five years later.

An unrelenting drive to succeed took Tom Johnson from Macon to the White House to leading CNN during its glory years. But it also enabled him to avoid focusing on himself. Only in retirement has he found grace and a greater purpose.

On the cold night of November 10, 2023, The Reserve at LaVista Walk apartment complex went up in flames. Birthday fireworks led to a three-alarm fire that displaced more than 300 residents. It's one of three major roof fires that have destroyed Atlanta apartment complexes since 2020.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the city’s place of transition, where travelers bring their joy and pain together for formative experiences. The busiest and most efficient airport in the world is also where most people, Americans or otherwise, interact with Atlanta. In form and function, the airport resembles Atlanta, in all of its oddities, illusions, and aspirations, and travelers see the city for what it is.

Nonprofit arts organizations in metro Atlanta are facing financial challenges as government grants, corporate sponsorships, and Covid-era relief funding have dried up while costs have risen and audience participation remains below pre-pandemic levels. In response, arts leaders have banded together through weekly meetings and the coalition Arts Capital | Atlanta, which seeks to raise $100 million to stabilize the sector and ensure smaller organizations in particular can survive.

He isn’t famous, though arguably he should be. “J.T. was a personal assistant to Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy,” says Andrew Young, “and he was a friend of mine.” Johnson was a leader of the Ground Crew, a sort of special forces unit within Dr. Martin Luther King’s organization the SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Council—and he ran operations in the streets of nearly every city where the movement played out.