Charles Bethea

Atlanta

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

@newyorker staff writer in ATL // [email protected]

Articles

Kenny Smith Isn’t Going Fishing Yet

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Last July, the National Basketball Association announced a new eleven-year media-rights agreement with Amazon, NBC, and ESPN, set to take effect at the start of next season. Notably left out of the seventy-six-billion-dollar deal was Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of TNT, which has held league-broadcasting rights since the late nineteen-eighties. The news alarmed many N.B.A. viewers: what would happen to the greatest studio sports show ever?
How an Election Denier Became the U.S. Treasurer

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

In Georgia, during the early days of the pandemic, a bald and baggy-eyed Republican state senator named Brandon Beach showed up to the state capitol sick. A couple of days later, the senator disclosed that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus, sending his exposed colleagues into quarantine. “I’m not a bad person,” Beach, who is from New Orleans, and still speaks with a Louisianan accent, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, at the time.
A love letter to Fantasyland Records

4 weeks ago | atlantamagazine.com | Charles Bethea

In an evermore isolating world, a visit to Fantasyland Records invites a return to the simple pleasures of communal browsing. Photograph by John BoydstonI didn’t have a record player back in the early ’90s. But the first word in the name of the shop on Peachtree Road, in Garden Hills, was enough to make an 11-year-old kid beg his mom to pull over and let him wander around inside: Fantasyland Records. It didn’t really belong in broader Buckhead—that much I grasped even then.
Will the Trump Tariffs Devastate the Whiskey Industry?

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Jim Chasteen and Charlie Thompson were roommates and wannabe whiskey connoisseurs at the University of Georgia in the late nineteen-nineties. A few years later, Chasteen and Thompson, who’d started careers in real estate, began to explore a clear form of rye whiskey that isn’t barrel-aged. It was not widely available at the time. Maybe they could create their own version, they thought.
A Lawyer Freed Young Thug. Now He’s Defending Diddy

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

On the afternoon of May 9, 2022, Atlanta police surrounded a mansion owned by Jeffery Williams, the rapper better known as Young Thug. More than a dozen friends were with Williams at his home, on a quiet street in Buckhead, an area of Atlanta where new money mixes awkwardly with old.
Living Through the Market Crash? Ask a Centenarian

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Charlie Duncan could very well be the oldest man in Georgia. “I’ll be one hundred and six in May,” he said the other day at Benton House, a senior-living facility in the town of Woodstock. With that much mileage, he’s survived a few things, one of them being the stock-market crash of 1929. Duncan, who still has his hair and his wits, and tooled around behind the wheel of a PT Cruiser until a fender bender last year, was ten years old when the market crashed.
The Instagrammer Who Floats Like James Harden and Shoots Like Shaq

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

James Harden, the Los Angeles Clippers prolific shooting guard, recently scored fifty points in a game for the twenty-fourth time. The next day, Maxim Peranidze, a twenty-six-year-old Angeleno born in Moldova, headed to an indoor basketball court in the San Fernando Valley which he’d rented with his twin brother, Gene. “I was, like, ‘Bet—I got him,’ ” Peranidze said, of Harden. He set to work.
The Art Works in Flannery O’Connor’s Attic

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

In May of 2023, about two dozen small paintings were discovered in a box in the attic of a two-hundred-year-old clapboard mansion in Milledgeville, Georgia, where the writer Flannery O’Connor lived between the ages of eight and twenty-one. They were her work. The house’s most recent occupant, Louise Florencourt—lawyer, pack rat, and protector of her cousin Flannery’s legacy—had died the previous summer, at ninety-seven.
Chasing Waterfalls in the Peach State

Feb 24, 2025 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

What is a waterfall, exactly? “It can be controversial,” Mark Oleg Ozboyd said the other day, in Rabun County, Georgia. “There are fifty different answers.” Ozboyd leans conservative when it comes to applying the designation. “A random cascade out in the woods is not a waterfall,” he said. “Neither is a little white water. Personally, I think it needs a ten-foot sheer vertical drop.
Why Trump Freed Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts

Jan 27, 2025 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Last September, I spent an evening at a meetup near Atlanta titled “Bitcoin Enters the Mainstream Political Arena.” It was the first time that the group of mostly white, mostly male, mostly bearded thirty- and forty-year-olds, had convened to focus their attention on the politics of cryptocurrency—which had suddenly, rather shockingly, become front and center.