“I’ve played enough Minecraft to know where diamonds are,” my 19-year-old cousin says as we schlep across acres of muddy furrows with our rented bucket, sieves, and shovels. Although I’m highly skeptical of the real-world applications of Minecraft, there’s no sense in arguing when he points out a small rivulet of water trickling through the muck.

On that starry evening with a bright full moon, I wore a powder-blue outfit I’d made myself, a peasant-style skirt with a top that fell off my shoulders. John sported a suit and tie. As we pulled into Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, the lights and cars and overhang felt like a Hollywood red carpet scene to me. This was my first time to valet park.

  Officially established in 1716, Natchez is the oldest continuous settlement on the Mississippi River and teems with history. From the early 1800s to the Civil War, Natchez reigned as one of America’s wealthiest cities....

 As told to Allison EntrekinI spent six months in Atlanta filming The Resident. I had never really been to Atlanta before. I stayed in Virginia-Highland, a neighborhood I found both intimate and cosmopolitan at...

Governed by the maxim “we make baseball fun,” the Savannah Bananas have sold out every game since their founding in 2016. Following their own eccentric brand of play, dubbed “Banana Ball,” the team eschews anything that could make the sport feel sluggish.

I am lost in the wilderness. Not “lost” in the desperate sense. My phone still shows 5G in case I need to drop a pin, and two bars if I want to make a call. (Does this thing have a compass, too?) And I know where I am: somewhere on a wooded ridgeline in the Cherokee National Forest near Shady Valley, Tennessee, not far from the North Carolina and Virginia borders.

Growing up in Belmont, I couldn’t wait to get out. It was small. We were a dry county, so we couldn’t even get a chain restaurant to open there. My friends and I hung out in a church parking lot and jogged up and down the street for fun.