Editors Note

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

I don’t want to give up football—and I’m guessing the players don’t want to, either. But they need to be protected. That’s something that we, the fans, can get behind.

Will the value the IMA’s curators provide—challenging our thinking with shows like Ai Weiwei’s, telling us what art we should be clamoring for—continue as the museum is democratized?

Sure, my drained perfumes are taking up room, collecting dust. But one day I might need my own tether to who I am—and who I was. And there the bottles will sit, my former lives ready to be uncapped and released.

Instead, Dad and I wailed together in the car to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and harmonized on our old plaid couch to “Two of Us,” the first (and one of the last) songs I learned to play on the guitar.

I was inspired to schedule date night at Indy’s last-standing drive-in after reading Amy Wimmer Schwarb’s piece on the subject, “Moving Pictures.” Accompanied by photos of outdoor theaters around the state by our own Tony Valainis, the essay explores the importance of these vanishing pieces of Americana—and how the cinemas are fighting to modernize in a world of Netflix and iPads.

I have not been to my favorite restaurant in, oh, 20 years or so. Too long, I know. Just haven’t been in that part of Virginia. But I remember the eatery as vividly as anything else from the early 1990s.