Charles Bethea

6 days 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.

2 weeks 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.

2 weeks 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.

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.

1 month 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.