Great Reads

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.

Perimenopause marks the time when ovaries gradually stop working. The body releases eggs less regularly, estrogen levels dip, periods become irregular, and fertility decreases. Fifty percent of women experience perimenopause and menopause—why do we never talk about it?

Winfield Ward Murray provides Burruss Correctional Training Center inmates with access to higher education as part of a partnership between Morehouse, the Andrew Young Center’s Higher Education in Prisons program, and Common Good Atlanta. John, a Black man in his mid-50s, says “the shame of prison makes you quiet.” But through the encouragement of Murray and other faculty, he’s learned “my voice matters.”

This spring marks 50 years since the fall of Saigon—an event many refugees call “the day we lost the country.” A turbulent postwar era followed, with South Vietnamese people suffering imprisonment and persecution by the Communist regime. At that time, there was hardly a Vietnamese presence in Georgia. But in the decades since, metro Atlanta’s Vietnamese population has grown immensely and now ranks as the ninth-largest Viet community in the United States.

Christopher Eubanks, who grew up playing on the courts of the South Fulton Tennis Center, announced himself at Wimbledon in 2023. His string of upset wins was impressive, but the reckless abandonment he played with, plus the shock on his face after every win, made him a crowd favorite. His run ended in the quarterfinals, the furthest an American man had gone at the tournament since 2017, and his ranking jumped to number 29 in the world, a career high. But since that summer on grass, Eubanks hasn’t been back on tennis’s biggest stages.

It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine Horace Reid on a rocket ship to the top of the tennis world. Many already saw him as the next great Black champion. But within a few years, Reid’s tennis dreams would be all but dashed: He’d quit college, fail to find consistency on the pro tour, and suffer an agonizing fallout with Arthur Ashe, his hero and would-be mentor. The rupture would not only hamstring Reid’s career, in his telling, but also burden him with a secret he felt he could never share: how everything went so wrong.

Two years following his hotly debated murder conviction in 1913, Leo Frank was the victim of Georgia’s most notorious lynching. Rabbi Steven Lebow is on a quest to clear Frank’s name.

Memphis, the unofficial capital city of the Mississippi Delta, is widely renowned for two things: blues and barbecue. The two Memphis institutions are tightly connected—each a result of the Great Migration of the early 20th century.