Amanda Heckert

In the small towns around Indy, ice-cream stands are more than just purveyors of frozen treats—they’re touchstones, an experience of sticky fingers and bellyaches passed from generation to generation.

There’s a worry when profiling someone as universally beloved as John Green that the story will become a hagiography. The brains behind the bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars couldn’t be as good-hearted and scandal-free as he seems, right?

IM faced stiff competition to take home the best-in-class recognition.

Check out the lauded features and photo essays here.

It’s rare that an outing with friends doesn’t involve breaking bread, right? All the more reason to check out this month’s 25 Best Restaurants list.

There’s a satisfaction in being able to provide for yourself, something that my great-grandmother understood.

The recent writer-at-large and former associate editor at IM will return to the magazine full-time on April 1.

More than 100 judges from the likes of Esquire, Bon Appetit, and Vanity Fair narrowed the field of finalists, including these from IM’s 2013 issues.

Those who carry on about flying saucers and abductions are often considered kooks (and let’s face it, some of them might be). But the odds of life beyond our planet are great enough to make even a skeptic wonder.

One couple visited all of Indianapolis Monthly’s recommended Best Bars—and have a top-five ranking of their own to share.

There are new traditions and rites of passage taking root here, from reading (and spotting the local landmarks in) John Green’s novel to hovering in the helium-filled balloon over Conner Prairie. So we created a fresh set of iconic local experiences—“The New Indy Must-Do List.”

For Kristine Bunch, prison was not hypothetical. It was her life—unjustly, she maintains—for more than 16 years before she was able to gather enough evidence, with the help of Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, to convince appellate judges she had been wrongly imprisoned for arson and the murder of her son.

Death, though certain, is anything but predictable. And how we react to mortality can be just as unforeseeable.

Ellis will cover dining and home, as well as other lifestyle topics and projects. Previously, she initiated a redesign at the award-winning Ball Bearings publication at Ball State University that won Best Overall Design at the 2013 Indiana Collegiate Press Association awards.

“If anyone at these hospitals tells you they know what’s going to happen when Obamacare goes into effect, they’re lying. Nobody has it figured out,” one hospital administrator told me last spring.