Commentary

Especially in the South, philanthropy has sometimes provided superficial atonement for anti-Black racism. Atlanta must do so much better. With leadership transitions at CFGA and other major nonprofit institutions upon us, I offer three goals as a call to action for addressing the mismatch between nonprofit institutional talk and walk.

"The lasting memory I’ll have of him is how much he made me and my community feel seen and known, especially during a time when we were the most in need of help," writes Asian Americans Advancing Justice—Atlanta founder Helen Kim Ho.

My children are back at school. We eat out at restaurants. No one wears masks, and no one is concerned. This isn’t a wild dream; this is New Zealand.  

Western culture idolizes feeling good, making us chronically incapable of facing human fragility. People shun discussions of death. They fear talking about grief. If you haven’t yet squirmed in grief’s grip, I’m sorry to say, it’s ahead.

This time of unrest offers the chance to take a different path forward and lead the Atlanta region, the South, and the nation toward a more equitable future. We must take the lessons (both good and bad) from our courageous past to realize a New Atlanta Way.

Do you promote the individual health of the constituents of our world, or do you promote somebody’s idea of the “economy"?

We created this helpful guide for Georgia businesses with illustrator Tommy Siegel.

In Atlanta, we can be spread out without forfeiting the existential balm of seeing a variety of other people. But nothing makes the details shine like just walking around.

A sunny Saturday in mid-March, the day before my 26th birthday, is one I have come to think of in the weeks since as “the last good day.”

Former Atlanta magazine editor Rebecca Burns, on vacation in Austria last week as COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, describes what it was like to watch the disaster response unfold in two countries at once.