From the Magazine

Talk about getting off to a great start at a new job. John Silvanus Wilson Jr. was three weeks into his gig as Morehouse College president when he got a call from the White House: President Obama was interested in delivering the 2013 commencement address.

Walking into the theater for the best-of-five grand finals between Team Enemy and Team Epsilon, I felt I’d stumbled upon something like The Hunger Games: the palpable bloodlust of the crowd beating noisemakers, the cheery British announcer, the underwriting of the powerful, and the practiced brutality of the players.

It was weeks before Corbette Jackson heard his own song on the radio, but not because “Heart of a Champion” wasn’t getting plenty of airtime. The nineteen-year-old Newnan native—who still has the bashful Ashton Kutcher smile and linebacker shoulders of a high school athlete—and his manager, Stokes Nielson, have bee

Through a slim gap in the chain-link fence, Jacqueline Echols leads me down a short, steep embankment and across a wide sand beach toward the banks of the South River. Deer tracks and footprints pepper the sand at our feet; ahead of us, water rushes dramatically beneath the Snapfinger Road bridge and tumbles over shoals, where Echols tells me she’s seen river otters play. With its sprawling stretch of beach and sounds of rushing water, the Panola Shoals trailhead feels like an urban enclave of natural beauty—idyllic, almost, if not for the signage on the fence warning visitors of the contaminated water.

In just the past five years, Atlanta Civic Circle, Capital B, Canopy Atlanta, the Atlanta Community Press Collective, and local bureaus of Axios and the national investigative news site ProPublica have all set up shop in Atlanta. Decaturish, which turns 10 this year, is focused on repairing the old-school, community-newspaper model. Independent outlets are not only challenging revenue models—they’re changing the way local outlets approach journalism itself.

Today, the average Reynoldstown home value exceeds half a million dollars, making it harder for legacy Black residents to pay their rising property taxes and stay in their homes. But the sense of community pride that Reynoldstown cultivated all those decades ago lives on today, through the dedication of steadfast residents like Pamela Mayo. “I think it’s a good community,” Mayo says. “It’s just a different community feel from what it used to be.”

On January 14, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal hands the keys to Brian Kemp and will settle in Habersham County, where he and his wife, Sandra, will retire. He looks back at criminal justice reform, the issue that brings him to tears, why he didn’t expand Medicaid, the religious liberty bill, and the importance of baby steps.

Burial for a King In Burial for a King: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Funeral and the Week That Transformed Atlanta and Rocked the Nation

Titanic artifacts are brought to the surface, cleaned off, and delivered to an anonymous storage facility in northern Atlanta whose exact address is kept secret. They are some of thousands of artifacts salvaged from the remains of the RMS Titanic.

Ariana Grande comes to State Farm Arena, commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans at Juneteenth Atlanta Parade, and tour Glover Park and the historic Marietta Square with the Marietta Square Food Tour.