News & Opinion

The best stories each week about Atlanta, from Atlanta-based writers, and beyond.

Imagine, after years of wandering through dry and desiccated dating pools, you stumble upon a wise matchmaker who’s helped thousands of people find true love. Now imagine there’s two of them. “We don’t really have a business secret,” says Lisa Lyngos with a shrug. “The secret is that we’re twins.”

“This is the most disruptive chain of events that has affected our industry that I’ve ever experienced,” says Georgia Restaurant Association president and CEO Karen Bremer, who’s been in the business for three decades.

In her haunting debut novel, Ghost on Black Mountain (Gallery Books), Ann Hite interweaves and overlaps the stories of five women whose lives are bound together by a murder in rural 1930s North Carolina. Each woman’s revelation forces a slight recalibration of the truth and gives great depth to a good old-fashioned ghost story. The spirits link history and the afterlife, dropping eerie hints—and not-so-subtle warnings—before vanishing into the woods. The author, fifty-three, lives in the Smyrna-Vinings area and learned the art of Southern Gothic story­telling the time-honored way: sitting on the porch, listening to her elders. A 2004 North Carolina getaway inspired her to write. “When I went home, the character Nellie made an appearance in my mind,” Hite says. “She spoke the first two sentences of Ghost on Black Mountain: ‘Mama warned me against marrying Hobbs Pritchard. She saw my future in her tea leaves: death.’ I couldn’t resist. I had to know, what death? And who in the world was Hobbs Pritchard?” Hite paints a loving portrait of rural mountain life in the early twentieth century, and characters are nuanced and true.

On Monday, as many kids adjusted to being homeschooled (or just home) for the time being, we saw Georgia’s positive coronavirus cases jump and the mayor impose a new restriction on public gatherings. Here’s your Tuesday morning update.

Roughly one week after imploding the Omni to make way for Philips Arena, demolition crews laced the 32-year-old Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium with 1,250 pounds of dynamite. The site would become a parking lot for the new Turner Field.

When life takes a turn for the dramatic, anyone can feel like the star of their own movie. Most people, though, will not go to the lengths Bill Lundy did to translate their experiences to the big screen.

When married couple Emily and Drew Hecht dreamed up their entertaining company late last year, they had no idea that small outdoor gatherings would be all but the rule for seeing friends in 2020.

Can FEMA swoop in whenever it wants? If we have FEMA, why do we also need GEMA? The emergency response departments, explained.

Dan Suiter has a superpower: He can walk into a restaurant and tell if it has rats or roaches, just by the smell. “Rat urine is kind of pungent,” he says. “Roaches are more musty.”