From the Magazine

Six nights a week, Marshall Rancifer visits Atlanta neighborhoods to help thousands of homeless men, women, and children by passing out meals, hygiene kits, overdose medication, and condoms—and, if they want, referrals to permanent housing or treatment.

As beverage director for Taco Mac’s parent company, Tappan Street Restaurant Group, Fred Crudder is responsible for what goes into the 1,900-plus beer taps at the chain’s twenty-four locations. He’s also the inspiration behind the Fred, an underground bar at the Prado location open to frequent drinkers in the

Tayari Jones—author, professor, and griot of the American South—has a lot on her plate. She teaches a creative writing class at Emory University, she has book blurbs due and forewords to file, and she has words in a just-released craft book, How We Do It, where her Emory colleague Jericho Brown gathered Black writers to explain “how they go about making what they make.” “I know I have a novel,” Jones writes, “when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer.” She is also putting the finishing touches on her fifth and forthcoming novel, Old Fourth Ward, which is set squarely in Black Atlanta’s centers of gravity: the historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown Atlanta (and the book’s namesake) and Cascade Heights (her old stomping grounds).

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.

Photograph by Amy Gibbons

Who controls Georgia colleges and universities? It’s not the university presidents. The buck stops with the Board of Regents.

At the core of the group’s work is the conviction that a suffering dog isn’t always the victim of willful neglect or malice—sometimes a pet’s owner simply isn’t aware of the harmful side effects or doesn’t have the resources to properly provide for it.

Why use metal plates to cover up potholes? Can you report those steel slabs? Does Atlanta actually enforce violations? Allow us to explain.

Gregor Turk paid $85,000 for his northwest Atlanta studio. That was in 2003—ancient history in the fast-evolving landscape of intown gentrification. Turk’s studio is now surrounded by 35 new single-family homes, with prices starting at $550,000, and the area has been rechristened “West Town.” Not so fast, says Turk, who in 2016 erected a billboard in his yard that reads, “Welcome to the Heart of Blandtown.” The sign is not a passive-aggressive middle finger at developers, Turk says. Instead, it’s a history lesson.

Little Women: Atlanta launched in January 2016, and now 1.3 million viewers tune in per episode. Is the drama provoked or organic? “The story is the story,” coexecutive producer Mark Scheibal says. “Obviously, we have to produce it, put them in situations that allow it to happen or amplify it.”