Student Life
Devin Roach knows a shortcut to breakfast. The spiky-haired eighteen-year-old bounds into the budding morning from Armstrong Hall, a dour 1960s low-rise freshman dorm, and strides confidently across the empty courtyard before crossing the street and cutting through a nearby parking deck.
Pretty Girl Rocks
Keri Hilson’s voice sounds sore, like a smoker (she’s not), or an exhausted cheerleader (she was), or someone who went to bed at seven this morning (she did).
Will the pandemic ruin MARTA’s plans for its biggest expansion in decades?
The Covid-19 pandemic has been catastrophic for public-transit agencies across the nation. Even when the pandemic does end, it’s possible that our work and travel patterns will be disrupted permanently. Then, there’s the economic impact of the pandemic and its corresponding effect on tax revenue, a major source of funding for many transit agencies, including MARTA.
Have You Dined at Ford’s Lately?
Several architects, interior designers, and restaurant conceptualists swivel their heads to look around the room, and a couple of them thoughtfully clear their throats.
Pat Swindall
You’d think with a name like Swindall, a politician would work to be a paragon of integrity. Not Pat Swindall, a former two-term congressman from DeKalb and onetime up-and-comer in the Republican party.
Struggle of the ERA
From 1973, this sometimes off-base article details the legislature’s run-in with the infamous Phyllis Schlafly and the fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in Georgia, something the state (and country) has yet to do.
“The birds stopped singing”: Inside the battle for Atlanta’s South River Forest
Over the centuries, the South River Forest has been many things: Indigenous land, a prison farm, a dumping ground—and the keystone of an ambitious proposal to incorporate nature into Atlanta’s growth. But in 2021, people living nearby were surprised to learn that the city had different plans for it: a massive new police training facility.
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.
Carl Patton
When Patton took over as president of Georgia State University nineteen years ago, the campus was blighted with boarded buildings and classrooms full of students commuting into town for the day. Through his vision—and his ability to raise more than $1.5 billion for campus expansion, including a science center, a 2,000-bed University Commons dorm, fraternities, and sororities—he transformed Georgia State from a place where students went out of necessity into a genuine draw for the state’s best scholars. The Carnegie Foundation gave the school the prestigious ranking of research university. With three years left in his reign, Patton endorsed something he never thought would happen in his lifetime: fielding a football team.
Inside Story
Writers tend to present themselves as hardy flowers that bloom wherever planted, when in fact, most of them more closely resemble hothouse orchids in their finicky sensitivity.
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