News & Opinion

We all love to hate Atlanta traffic. We like to whine (okay, kind of boast) about how it’s the worst in the country. Well, practice your whining some more: our list of auto-related woes still just got a lot longer.

Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell began his music career as a tagalong kid brother on his older sister’s date to a Ray Charles gig in Tuscaloosa in 1965. “I was 13 and my parents had something else going on that night,” Leavell recalled to Atlanta magazine this week from his 2500-acre tree farm in Macon. “So they said, ‘Why don’t you take Chuck with you?’ She graciously said yes. I was already playing music, learning piano and guitar. I was very interested in music. But I had never seen anything that powerful. I mean, Ray Charles is Ray Charles but then he had [David] Fathead Newman on sax, the Raelettes were singing. The band was just so tight. I walked away that night knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life. If I could be in a band that was anything near that good and that powerful and that moving, that’s what I wanted to do. It was life changing.”

With its northwest location near Buckhead, the Battery Atlanta, and the Silver Comet Trail, Vinings feels both intown-ish and suburban, a combination that attracts people young and old to its leafy neighborhoods. The Chattahoochee River provides one boundary, while I-285 and I-75 provide others.

On Wednesday, the governor finally gave the long-awaited call to issue a shelter in place order for the entire state. Here’s your Thursday morning update:

The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders—for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it.

What is there to do during Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta? A lot. Here's a list of the concerts, parties, watch parties, experiences, and everything else Super Bowl-related we could find. We'll keep updating this list until the big game.

Athens writer Amy Flurry and former Addiction boutique owner Nikki Salk have madly cut and glued their way out of the economic downturn. Their Paper-Cut-Project—in which they transform ordinary Bristol paper into distinctive, delightfully detailed wigs, masks, and accessories—began as a creative outlet after the magazine Flurry wrote for folded and Salk’s boutique closed. It has since morphed into a booming cottage industry.

Atlanta Police Department chief Erika Shields has a lot of progressive ideas, such as having APD build relationships with the city’s top 100 young offenders to help break the vicious cycle of arrests and jail. But will Atlanta's next mayor keep her around?

More than just a home for breaking news and Bieber babble, Twitter has become a modern-day agora. University of Georgia assistant professor of telecommunications Itai Himelboim worked with the Pew Research Center and Social Media Research Foundation on analysis that revealed users of the social media behemoth interact with each other in patterns that fall into just six categories.

Atlanta’s emerging public art scene is exciting—murals and installations enliven our city and make it more engaging, and yes, they draw outsiders to parts of town that might otherwise be overlooked. But the controversy over the Krog Tunnel underscores the need to balance arts promotion and the concerns of communities that serve as the backdrops for street art.