Great Reads

Lance Cooper was looking for answers behind a single car crash. What the attorney found led to a recall of 30 million vehicles. Inside General Motors’ deadly ignition switch scandal—and the price one Kennesaw family paid.

In a move that combines burlesque with recycling, Blondie Strange crushes Budweiser empties flatter than platters between her breasts without flinching, dismounts the stage, and pulls a Sharpie from behind the bar to autograph them for the hooting frat boys, intown scenesters, and gamy night crawlers who are waving dollar bills.

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.

Downtown Clarkston in DeKalb County extends westward from Rowland Street to Indian Creek Drive, with the old Georgia Railroad line running in between—a total of just three city blocks, give or take. And yet there may be no place in the country as kaleidoscopically, vibrantly, viscerally diverse.

Originally published in 1971, this story by Anne Rivers Siddons looks at the changing lives of black housekeepers in the South.

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.

Robert Schneider was the lead singer for his band, Apples in Stereo, and cofounder of Elephant 6 Recording Co., the Athens-based creative force behind the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Now, instead of pursuing the mysticism of music, he's pursuing something that's intrinsically mysterious and fundamentally human to him: mathematics.

The best Howard Sills could remember, there hadn’t been a double homicide in Putnam County since May 1984, 30 years earlier. In minutes, the mood inside the lake house swung from wild intensity to who the hell did this? This, the sheriff told himself, ain’t local talent.

Every third Saturday of May during the 1970s, Atlanta hosted a raft race on the Chattahoochee River. Sounds simple, and it sort of was, until the race took on dimensions that even its founder, Larry Patrick, never imagined.

On the Georgia coast, which spans 100 miles between Savannah and St. Marys, two things have become apparent during the last decade: Climate change is coming, and it’s already here. If the last decade’s increased tidal flooding initiated a conversation about the changing sea, the hurricane double-header of 2016 and 2017 added a couple of exclamation points. But while the effects of storms will be more severe with climate change, Georgia’s vulnerability to them isn’t new.