Great Reads

The HOPE scholarship program was launched two decades ago with three specific goals: increase the number of Georgians with postsecondary education, improve the overall quality of the state’s university system, and stanch the exodus of high-achieving students. HOPE has accomplished all three aims—and then some. Over the past two decades, the number of Georgians with college degrees increased from 19 to 28 percent.

U2’s intersections with Atlanta over the years have gone beyond the city as a requisite tour stop. For a band from Europe intent on deconstructing the myth of America, Atlanta—its imperfect icons, its musicians, its leaders—has been a specific, if rarely noticed, part of U2’s journey, not only for the city’s social justice movements of the past but for the present, too. In anticipation of U2’s first Atlanta concert in nine years, two generations of Georgians talk about the band.

For more than three weeks, protestors occupied the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by police. Here are the are the stories of four people who witnessed the occupation from four different perspectives.

The Atlanta superstar rose to fame as a street-hardened rapper. For his next act, he wants to save Bankhead, the neighborhood that could've killed him.

Every year several thousand adults are reported missing in Georgia. Most are found alive. They are the demented elderly, voluntary absconders, the subjects of family miscommunication. A few, though, leave behind only a soiled shoe, a wad of cash, an abandoned car. And some, like Justin Gaines, leave . . .

Her critics worried she would be an extension of Kasim Reed. But after more than a year in office, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms wants you to know she’s leading the city on her own terms.

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.

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.

For decades, long after the Civil War, men, women, and children convicted in Georgia courts—sometimes wrongly—were forced into unpaid labor at a brickyard along the Chattahoochee River. How will we remember them?

If there is such a thing as an intentional life, Wes Gordon—the most interesting fashion designer Atlanta has ever produced—is living it. By preschool, he was selecting his mother’s daily outfits for her job at an advertising agency. For his fourth birthday, all he wanted was a suit and a ticket to Phantom of the Opera, and a year later he refused to go to kindergarten without his red suspenders and blue suede bucks.