Backstreet: An oral history of Atlanta’s most fabled 24-hour nightclub

Backstreet’s infamous 10,000-plus nights of dancing, drag, drugs, and debauchery, spanning the years from 1975 to 2004—recounted by the people who owned the club, worked there, documented its life span, and, of course, partied inside the legendary Atlanta nightspot.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium

American Cathedral: The story behind Mercedes-Benz Stadium

The opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium will mark a rite of passage not just for the Falcons or Blank, but for Atlanta itself. NFL stadiums—new NFL stadiums, that is, with gleaming features and staggering budgets—have become the sine qua non for the cities that claim a franchise. Want to host a Super Bowl? Build a new stadium. Want to ensure your home team doesn’t decamp to another city? Build a new stadium.

Special report: HOPE Scholarship at 20

When the first HOPE scholars were freshmen twenty years ago, Georgia’s scholarship program looked very different from today. It covered two years of tuition at any public college in Georgia for B students whose household income was $66,000 or less.

Bernie Marcus

Born at the beginning of the Great Depression to Russian immigrant parents recently arrived in New Jersey, Bernard Marcus started out with nothing—and if he gets his way, the self-made billionaire will go out like that, too. Fired in 1978 at age forty-nine from his job running a hardware store chain, Marcus—along with partner Arthur Blank—rebounded by changing the way America shops. The Home Depot is now the nation’s second-largest retailer, but its founders are equally proud of creating the culture of corporate integrity and employee loyalty that earned it recognition as the country’s most admired retail chain.

HOPE Scholarship by the numbers

Top high schools: The ten public high schools with the most HOPE-eligible students and the ten with the most students eligible for the even more elite Zell Miller Scholarship (fourteen schools total because of overlap) are clustered in five metro Atlanta counties.
Chattahoochee River

The story of the Chattahoochee is the story of Atlanta. What is the river’s next chapter?

Today’s river is much better shape than it was in the 1970s. That feeds my optimism, but it’s the next part that gets me excited. Another stretch of the river is under restoration. If our own generation is as successful as the River Rats were 40 years ago, the green ribbon that cuts across the entire metro area will truly be a gift for all Atlantans.
Georgia farmers' mental health

Georgia’s largest industry faces a mental health crisis

Agriculture is the state’s largest industry, contributing more than 350,000 jobs and more than $74 billion to Georgia’s economy. With high risks and, often, thin profit margins for family-owned farms, social isolation, the vagaries of weather, and the burden of a multigenerational family legacy, the work can wreak havoc on mental health.
Medical Marijuana in Georgia

Medical marijuana is legal now in Georgia. So how do we get it here?

HB1 is perhaps most notable for what it doesn’t do: permit the cultivation of cannabis in Georgia. This creates a dilemma for the very people it was designed to help: You can now possess cannabis oil for your medical condition, but because you’ll have to purchase it out-of-state, you’ll be breaking federal law by crossing state lines to bring it home.

Foul Territory

Fred Fletcher doesn't watch baseball anymore, but one night in May, he got a text from a friend: Something had happened at that evening's Braves game.

Herman Talmadge

“I don’t need money. People give me things because they believe in me.” So said Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, and so, pretty much, said Talmadge. Ethics investigators found the U.S. senator from Georgia accepted loads of undisclosed gifts: airfare, clothing, fruit of the month packages, a trampoline, and wads of cash that he stuffed in a pocket.

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