From the Magazine

Dispatches from Atlanta and beyond. Also in this month's edition: BYOB (buy your own bridge) and remembering Marshall Rancifer

Honestly, beach reading is really more about a state of mind than the tangible location. Whether you’re actually sitting surfside or lounging near your condo pool or simply taking a long lunch break or passing time on MARTA, these titles from local authors promise an escape from workaday reality.

Almost 80 percent of female business owners, 70 percent of female legislators, and all female astronauts used to be Girl Scouts. That’s fairly compelling evidence that scouting teaches young women to dream big. Want more? Consider Morgan Coffey, a junior at Oglethorpe University.

In the male-dominated stand-up comedy world, Lace Larrabee is making sure women are a force to be reckoned with by launching Laugh Lab, the only stand-up comedy class in Atlanta that’s exclusively for women. She also role in the new Catherine Zeta-Jones comedy Queen America, which debuts this month on Facebook Watch.

A year ago, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta launched its fiftieth year while facing a major dilemma. The organization, which serves about 3,100 children, had a list of 1,100 boys waiting for Big Brothers. There was no such backlog for Sisters; in fact, an excess of women wer

Since early 2014, the two-mile stretch of Memorial Drive east of the Downtown Connector has become the site of one of Atlanta’s biggest development booms. With more than 1,300 apartments and condos under development, Paces Properties CEO David Cochran envisions the strip becoming “the next Inman Park.”

Located between two MARTA stations, Pratt-Pullman Yard includes 11 buildings, totaling 153,000 square feet, and is flanked by a small forest, stream, and grassy field. Plenty of big-thinking developers have craved turning it into an adaptive reuse success story, including one nonprofit that envisioned soccer fields and urban farms. It's also been used in movie and television productions including Baby Driver and the Fast and the Furious and Hunger Games series. But its potential has never been tapped.

Movie theaters have famously struggled to get a streaming-obsessed audience out of their Cloud sofas and back into the multiplex—with the exception of Atlanta’s historic Plaza Theatre. Working alongside another bastion of Atlanta film culture, Videodrome, the Plaza has become a buzzing nexus of cinema since owner Chris Escobar took over in 2017. With the launch of “Plazadrome” collaborations in 2018, the film synergy has been off the charts.

Situated between downtown Atlanta and Decatur, Kirkwood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This original streetcar suburb is home to a diverse community, a rich variety of Victorian and Craftsman-style houses, strong community associations, nearby MARTA stations, and half a dozen parks, with additional bragging rights as the place where world-famous rapper Future grew up.