Atlanta Magazine • Atlanta Magazine August 2025 • Field Notes

Step up and behold the Orb at Ponce City Market. Chasing speed at a Velodrome. Salsa heads to the burbs.

A visit to Ponce City Market offers many diversions. You can ride a three-story slide, mull over the magic of crystals, and sample a gummy-flavored sour ale. You can also, as of this May, scan your eyeball and use it to verify your humanity in the dawning age of supersmart robots.

Inside a spare, warehouse-like store wedged between Sweetgreen and City Winery, World invites you to join the 12 million other people globally who have stepped up to the Orb, proffered an eye, and had their iris scanned in exchange for a World ID proving they are human—plus access to a cryptocurrency called WorldCoin.

We are living through a monumental hinge point in history, in which the arrival of artificial intelligence as a dominant force is being measured in single-digit years, if not months. What will it do when it gets here? No one quite knows. (No one quite knows how we’ll know if it’s here, either.) But as the tech industry races to create it, unveiling new generative AI models that can paint, code, or kvetch on social media with evermore humanlike skill, two things have become abundantly clear: We are not prepared for AI’s impact on humans, and we have little idea how to prepare.

Given that predicament, it’s perhaps no surprise that the solutions are coming from the same place as the problem. World App was cocreated by Sam Altman, the Silicon Valley wunderkind (at 40, he’s now more of a wunderguy) behind OpenAI and ChatGPT. Altman and his cofounder, Alex Blania, said they were driven to create World by a desire to build “trust in the age of AI.”

“We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special,” Altman told an audience in April, “in a world where the internet was going to have lots of AI-driven content.” Left unsaid, of course, was that Altman—whose net worth is around $1.7 billion—is among those working assiduously to create that world. Why should we trust the Dr. Frankensteins to protect us from their monsters?

When posed with this question at the launch of Atlanta’s World store, Adrian Ludwig, chief information security officer for Tools for Humanity, World’s parent company, smiled. “The tech sector can see the problem,” Ludwig said. “Other people can feel it, but they don’t understand it. I think it’s just a reality that the solution is going to have to come from people who are familiar with it.”

World currently has 27.5 million users, but more than half of those users were onboarded not by the Orb’s human-proofing but by WorldCoin, which is popular abroad in places with volatile currencies, like Kenya and Argentina. (World arrived only recently in the U.S., partly due to the Trump administration’s recent embrace of cryptocurrency.)

The cryptocurrency is something of a gimmick to draw in users while Tools for Humanity figures out what WorldID, its human-verification system, might be used for (and how it might generate revenue). As a user, do you want to prove you are real while trolling your enemies on Facebook? Get the government to employ it to make sure bots aren’t stealing your welfare payments?

Tucked along a stretch of East Point’s Sumner Park, the Dick Lane Velodrome is a concrete time machine where neighborhood kids, adults, and elite athletes alike chase speed and strategy in thundering laps. The high-banked racetrack, a centuries-old invention, invites cyclists to push the limits of physics at breakneck speeds in a crucible of grit and centrifugal force. Races are held on Wednesday nights. The racing fee is $15, and it’s always free to watch. Once the whirr of bike tires on banked pavement fills the air, it’s impossible to look away.

The story behind the arena began in 1972, when a handful of East Point residents and city officials attended the Munich Summer Olympics and were dazzled by the races they watched at the velodrome Radstadion. Why not, they considered, build such a track in East Point?

Dick Lane is a towering figure in the history of East Point athletics. Lane—who, at 16, became the youngest player to be in the starting lineup of a University of Georgia varsity football game, and was a runner-up for Mr. Georgia in 1948—served for decades as superintendent of East Point Parks and Recreation.

In 1961, Lane organized a popular bicycle race that pitted local Tri-Cities politicians against each other; the race soon attracted politicians from around the world. Building the velodrome was his next move. The city council appropriated $6,000 for the track’s construction, and Lane—by then serving as a state legislator—slowly secured the rest of the funding from local, state, and federal sources. The final price tag was about $200,000; the velodrome hosted its first race in March 1975.

Today, the Dick Lane Velodrome, or DLV, as it’s often referred to, is one of 21 active velodromes across the country. Its oval-shaped track, one-fifth of a mile around, is tilted at 36 degrees in the turns. It doesn’t meet the qualification standards to host world championships or Olympic events, but it does hold pro competitions as well as the junior national championships.

The track is operated by the East Point Velodrome Association, which hosts professional races and a robust youth cycling league. Once kids hit the banked turns, they’re hooked, says Wayne Whitesides, president of the East Point Velodrome Association.

“We’ve had numerous kids go on to race in professional cycling, including the national championships, collegiate championships, and even in the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France,” says Whitesides, who also announces the Wednesday night races. “We pride ourselves on our kids who we have helped gain collegiate scholarships and additional schooling opportunities by learning to ride at the track.”

Some of the current cycling coaches came up through the youth cycling league and now run the program. “Seeing that and having our new youth taught by them is a great inspiration,” Whitesides says. The velodrome is a space where anyone—from a curious kid to a seasoned sprinter—can test their mettle, find their rhythm, and feel the rush of riding fast. On race nights, families line up on blankets and lawn chairs to cheer for kids amid the sounds of laughter and cowbells. When the sun sets over East Point and the lights hit the track, the scene feels like much more than a race. It feels like home.

Until recently, Jema Kellum had never danced salsa. She was more into Reba McEntire and line dancing at the local VFW in Dallas, a northwestern exurb of Atlanta. But then something changed. She went on a date to a Latin Party at the restaurant Rosa Negra. “I’m originally from Alabama, where we can line-dance to anything,” says Kellum, a hairstylist at Bloom Hair Salon. “But salsa is freer. You shake your hips more.”

Kellum is part of a wave of salsa fever currently taking over the country, much of it inspired by a single source: Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican singer-rapper-songwriter, and his wildly popular new album, released in January.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (in English, “I Should Have Taken More Photos”), which was recorded entirely in Spanish, reimagines classic salsa with sleek, contemporary production. It spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, then shot back to number one again in May following its release on vinyl; DeBÍ TiRAR now holds the record for the biggest vinyl sales week for a Latin album in the United States. At the same time, the album caught fire on TikTok; viral trends linked to certain tracks have helped to push old-school rhythms into new territory and introduced salsa to a huge swath of Americans.

The combination has given salsa dancing an unlikely footing across metro Atlanta and beyond.

Longtime dance instructor Carrie Thomas says she never would have guessed that she would be teaching salsa outside of the city limits. And yet these days, students are flocking to her private salsa classes around Acworth, Dallas, Marietta, and Douglasville. She credits social media with the demand. “People are watching the dance clips online and coming in saying, ‘I want to learn that!’” she says.

Thomas, who’s taught dance in Atlanta for more than two decades, says salsa’s growing popularity makes sense. “Line dancing is more solo, just memorizing a pattern,” she explains. “Salsa is a lot more impromptu.”

In Dallas, Rosa Negra—a Latin fusion restaurant—has become an unlikely cultural hot spot. Juan Quintana, Rosa Negra’s former manager, says that he wouldn’t have thought to offer salsa to a mostly Southern, non-Latino crowd who’d never heard of Bad Bunny, much less danced to Celia Cruz.

But earlier this year, Quintana and Rosa Negra’s co-owner, Colombian American restaurateur Adrian Quintero, “took a chance” and began hosting a full Latin Party every fourth Friday, complete with a live band. “It’s packed,” says Quintana, who has since left Rosa Negra. “The staff has to move all the tables out of the way. People just want to dance.”

Miami native Tatiana Sanders, the catering and events manager at restaurant Cubanos ATL, which has locations in Roswell and Sandy Springs, says she’s also noticed a newfound love of Latin music. “Lately our patio is packed on salsa nights,” she says.

These enthusiasts may have just discovered the centuries-old appeal of salsa rhythms, but they’ve jumped in with both feet. Kellum, in Dallas, is out on the floor as often as she can get there.