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My way home from work takes me past Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q on DeKalb Avenue, and it astounds me how they consistently draw lines that snake out the door. They have satisfying barbecue (the Tomminator—Tater Tots covered in Brunswick stew and melted cheese—is my personal favorite), but other places with barbecue just as compelling don’t attract near the crowds. It’s not unusual to see cars on the grass, cars on the curb, cars parked halfway to McLendon Avenue. Part of it’s the exposure on a busy street, not to mention the friendly Candler Park neighborhood that makes the place an easy walk. Part of it’s the layout of the place—bright and airy, loud and convivial. The Fox brothers themselves are Texas-born, but while the Lone Star State’s influence is detectable in their food, they label their style as Southern—“where we are from and where we are at.”

That would make for a good headline for Jim Auchmutey’s essay on page 53, which kicks off our ambitious survey of the metro Atlanta barbecue scene. Jim, an Atlanta native, set out to determine precisely what the Georgia style of barbecue is, or if it even exists. For better or worse, other areas of the country—Texas, North Carolina, Memphis, Kansas City—have staked out unique and identifiable variations on the theme. Does Georgia have one? I’ll leave that for Jim to answer, but I’m not giving anything away by saying that no matter what style you’re a fan of, you’re bound to find it here. Bill Addison, our dining editor and restaurant critic, reviewed fifty-eight barbecue joints around the metro area, but only a deadline and his (presumably) soaring cholesterol numbers kept him from going on and on.

I accompanied Bill on just one outing, which took us all the way to Cartersville and Scott’s Walk-Up Bar-B-Q, a small operation where the owner, Scott Panter, will guide you through the three homemade sauces (also available for sale, and now in my pantry) you can drizzle on his fantastic baby back ribs. It was a perfect late spring evening, capped off with Scott’s sinful peach cobbler; if I’d spent it close to home, I could easily have ended up at Fox Bros., waiting a half hour for a table. Instead I was forty-five miles away, enjoying some of the best food I’d had in a long time. That night I came to my own conclusions about what Georgia barbecue is: a great excuse to take the long way home, because you never know what awesome discoveries await.

Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

After you’re through scanning our list of 251 top doctors in this month’s issue to see if your own doctor made the list, I urge you to turn to page 64 for Thomas Lake’s story on H1N1, better known as swine flu. The media have devoted countless broadcast hours and acres of newsprint to the virus that, unlike the seasonal flu bug, mysteriously favors the young and healthy. Here at Atlanta magazine, we have a luxury that is growing increasingly rare in the frenetic world of modern-day journalism: time. Over the course of several months, Tom spent hours with some of the scores of scientists and doctors at the CDC who tracked the virus and helped develop a vaccine. As he introduces us to a happy young couple in Johns Creek who found themselves in the virus’s crosshairs, Tom’s story demonstrates why the stakes of the CDC’s work couldn’t be greater.

For a lot of us, it can be easy to forget the CDC is even here. It’s nowhere near the Connector, it doesn’t figure prominently (or at all, actually) in Atlanta’s skyline, it’s not a Fortune 500 company, and in recent years it has been woefully under-covered in the local media. In late April, a branch of the CDC called the Epidemic Intelligence Service hosted its annual conference at a hotel near the airport. The EIS was founded during the Korean War, when biological warfare became a very real threat. In the sixty years since, the “disease detectives,” as they’re known, have been dispatched to track down outbreaks of polio, Legionnaires’ disease, Ebola, Asian flu, E. coli, and on and on. Today, each EIS class consists of about eighty officers, a mix of medical doctors, scientists, and even veterinarians. The logo of the EIS is the sole of a shoe over a map of the world; the sole has a hole in it, to indicate the peripatetic nature of the job. When I spoke in early May to Doug Hamilton, the program’s director, he had just sent officers to Central America to monitor influenza, another officer to Guam to check on a mumps outbreak, another two to Uganda to investigate hepatitis E. “Our officers are in many ways the frontline troops for the CDC when they respond to a public health problem,” Hamilton told me. The H1N1 outbreak that Tom writes about in this issue was essentially an all-hands-on-deck situation for the EIS; the scale of the investigation spanned three different EIS classes and involved 184 officers.

But the work of EIS isn’t all about high-profile diseases. A glance at the EIS’s conference schedule reflected the varied work tackled by the agency’s researchers. Topics ranged from the arcane (“Potluck Dinner Outbreak of Salmonella IV Infections Associated with Contamination from Bearded Dragon Reptiles”) to the alarming (“Onsite Case-Finding During a Tuberculosis Outbreak in a Homeless Shelter—Georgia”). The thousands of scientists who have gone through the EIS program are the first responders when public health is at peril, and the work they do gives the rest of us the privilege to remain blissfully unaware.

Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

For about five years my wife and I lived in a two-bedroom, two-floor carriage house in Inman Park. We rented. It was—and remains—the only way we could afford to live in such a gorgeous location, where some of the houses could easily fetch $1 million and where I was just eight minutes from work. Our landlords, who lived in the main house, couldn’t have been better—they weren’t intrusive, but they responded quickly when the washing machine broke down, or the toilet wouldn’t stop running, or a squirrel got under the roof. One year workers spent months renovating part of the main house, which was beautiful but old. This is the South. Wood rots. Roofs buckle. Anne, who owned the “compound,” as she called it, with her husband, would be standing outside in the driveway when I’d come home from work, staring up at her house, arms crossed, oblivious to the mosquitoes. “It never stops,” she’d say. I nodded like I could relate, but I couldn’t. I was a renter. My responsibility began and ended with one task: Write a check every month.

When you’re in your twenties, it’s fine to rent. As you get into your thirties, and certainly as you get married and think about a family, it’s not so fine anymore. People look at you funny. By the time I hit thirty-five, my friends not only thought it was weird I hadn’t bought a house yet, they told me. “Are you nuts? Interest rates are so low.” That’s what they said, but this is what I heard: You mean you’re still paying rent? Don’t you understand that for just $500 a month more and a longer commute—plus a $30,000 down payment that you otherwise could put into an interest-bearing account—you could do what I do on the weekends, which is clean the gutters, mow the lawn, shop for a new water heater, pray that property values don’t sink, and that after twenty years you’ll actually start paying more on the principal every month than on the interest?

Is this a cynical view? I’m not sure it is, especially considering that the economic spasms convulsing the nation began when the subprime mortgage market collapsed. Too many people who shouldn’t have bought homes bought them, because too many banks were happy to oblige. And government is complicit, dangling the carrot of tax credits and deductions. Politicians know it’s not businesses that are the nation’s economic engine; it’s the compounded effect of millions of us spending our money on cars and flatscreen TVs and $2 coffees at Starbucks. And houses. Especially houses. The sales pitch works. Heck, homeowning is woven into the fabric of the American dream itself.

The fact is, just because you can buy a home doesn’t mean you should. A generation or two ago, with money borrowed from their hometown bank, Americans bought a house and stayed. It made sense. Their houses weren’t meant as nest eggs, but simply nests. My parents live in the same house they did forty-five years ago. Today the average American moves a dozen times in her life. Maybe now, in the new real estate reality that we explore starting on page 55, houses will no longer be investment vehicles, but will once again simply be homes.

You can see where this is going. Last year we bought a house. In Decatur. My wife loves it. A massive oak that’s well over a century old towers over the front yard. It produces approximately 18 million leaves, which I rake most weekends. Naturally I wouldn’t trade any of this. Probably. But at least now I can relate.

Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com

The past few years have been tough on the magazine industry. Last year
alone, dozens of titles folded, and their names are hardly obscure: Gourmet.
National Geographic Adventure. Southern Accents. Travel
& Leisure Golf. Vibe. Condé Nast Portfolio.
Each of these magazines boasted good writing, compelling design, and a
knowledge of its audience. Some titles—I’m thinking of Gourmet—had
close to a million subscribers. By these yardsticks and others, they
should have succeeded. And yet they failed, victims of a battered
economy that drained away advertising revenue, a magazine’s lifeblood.

Of course, as tough as things are for the magazine industry, they’re
nothing compared with what’s going on in newspapers, as any regular
reader of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution can divine. Through
buyouts, layoffs, and attrition, much of the staff’s institutional
knowledge—so essential to giving stories context and meaning beyond the
who, what, and where—has been cast aside. Daily circulation, as of last
fall, was barely above 200,000—this in a ten-county metro area of more
than 4 million people.

City magazines such as the one you’re holding right now (or that you’re
browsing on the web) have hardly been immune. Yet as other publications
have folded, and while metro daily newspapers have shrunk in circulation
and ambition, the need for what we do at Atlanta magazine has
never been more apparent. This is evidenced in any number of ways: the
letters we received in response to Charles Bethea’s piece last month on
the Final Exit suicide group; the requests we receive from restaurants
seeking a review; and the news we got this past week from the City &
Regional Magazine Association, which informed us we were finalists in
seven categories in the annual awards competition that pits dozens of
city magazines against one another.

Thomas Lake, who joined our staff a little over a year ago, was named in
three of those categories—one for his story last June on how the
recession had particularly battered Dalton, Georgia; another for his
profile last fall on the unsolved murder of James Brown’s son-in-law;
and finally, for a collection of work in the category of Writer of the
Year. We were also recognized for a compelling photo essay that ran last
February. Called “Arrested Development,” the photographs documented,
better than any story could, the effect of half-finished housing
developments throughout metro Atlanta. Our excellent design director,
Eric Capossela, was also recognized for his design of the story “Deep
Freeze,” which followed one Atlanta woman’s journey as she took
advantage of a cutting-edge technology that freezes and stores human
eggs. And in the category of Reader Service, the fine work of former
staffer Kimberly Turner was recognized for “Street Smarts,” in which we
dissected Atlanta’s traffic issues and told readers how to navigate our
never-ending congestion. And last but certainly not least, Rebecca
Burns, my predecessor who now coordinates our digital edition, was named
a finalist in the category of Excellence Online.

If the economic woes are like shrapnel hitting the industry, awards are
hardly Kevlar. But combined with feedback from readers like you, they
give us the affirmation and encouragement that we’re on the right path.
Drop me a line and let me know what stories you’d like to see next.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Contact Steve Fennessy at sfennessy@atlantamag.emmis.com