Charles Bethea

Atlanta

Staff Writer at The New Yorker

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

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

Articles

Living Through the Market Crash? Ask a Centenarian

1 week 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

3 weeks 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

1 month 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

1 month ago | 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

2 months ago | 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.
Remembering Nathalie Dupree’s Charleston Hospitality

Jan 15, 2025 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

In today’s newsletter, remembering the pioneering TV chef and author Nathalie Dupree. And then, news of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Plus:• What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTokWhen I arrived at a home on Charleston’s Queen Street, in September of 2018, as Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the old city, I had only a rough idea of my hosts. Jack Bass was a well-regarded author of books on Southern politics.
Jimmy Carter Rests

Jan 6, 2025 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Some four thousand people, my mother and I among them, filled Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre, in September, to celebrate Jimmy Carter’s centenary with a night of music, which the thirty-ninth President probably loved more than any other. Carter himself was in Plains, his home town. He’d watch a taping from hospice care, where he’d been already for the better part of two years.
The Joseph Pulitzer of the Young Thug Trial

Dec 15, 2024 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

“We were trying to figure out the whole story the state was alleging,” Bliv went on. “What Thug’s chances were. Was he cooked? The media said he was on wiretaps ordering hits, stuff like that. Nobody on the Discord had ever read a whole indictment before.” They considered the accused. “We’re big fans, so we knew, like, eight names—but not all twenty-eight,” Bliv said. “Some seemed like randos.” Good analysis was hard to come by. “So I kinda stepped up,” he said.
R.F.K., Jr., Wants to Eliminate Fluoridated Water. He Used to Bottle and Sell It

Dec 1, 2024 | newyorker.com | Charles Bethea

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was skiing in upstate New York when it occurred to him: if a ski area can sell its own branded bottled water, why can’t an environmental organization do the same? It was the late nineties. Kennedy had recently helped form the Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of environmental groups dedicated to cleaning up polluted waterways. In 1999, to support this work, he co-founded Keeper Springs bottled water.
How Pro-Trump Activists Hijacked Georgia’s Election Board

Nov 8, 2024 | rsn.org | Jonathan Blitzer |Charles Bethea

Since the 2020 race, the state has been at the center of a national movement to contest elections. Now a group of unelected officials is sowing suspicions about the 2024 results. On the morning of October 1st, Janice Johnston, a mild-mannered former ob-gyn in her early seventies, was sitting in the back of a crowded courtroom in downtown Atlanta, taking notes on an iPad. She wore an orange skirt suit and a pearl necklace.