Feature Stories

Baggott took an early retirement and, in 2010—just a year after ExactTarget surpassed $100 million in annual sales—purchased a 98-acre farm near Greenfield to raise livestock. Never mind that he had no agricultural experience whatsoever.

This encounter with Bing grew from—ahem—the kernel of an idea: Challenge the traditional definition of “farmer” by highlighting the more contemporary elements in Indiana agriculture.

“What didn’t happen is enough people showing up to populate the structure we had built,” Venable says. But “Art is not for everybody,” says one IMA critic. “Art is for anybody, which is very different.”

The hottest new face in fashion hails from Zionsville—but what does it mean to give up the last bit of childhood for a dream?

How Ambre Blends fragrances won a cult-like hold on our noses—and boomed into a big-money business

Indianapolis charter schools are signing up students as fast as they can find them. Will reform spell the end of traditional public education?

They appreciate the way their parents protected them from too much fame. “Even as kids, we could say yes or no, and all five of us had to agree. Otherwise, we would not do it.”

The inside story on forming the team and how the city landed the chance to host a marquee international event on August 1—plus, why pro soccer may actually succeed here this time.

Indiana Blast (1997–2004): They had the best record in the D3 Pro League in 1998, and Jamar Beasley, once of the MLS Chicago Fire, played in 21 games in 2003. But a revolving door of head coaches hampered the Indy club’s success.

The drive-in concept was invented by a New Jersey man who wanted to give his mother, a larger-sized woman, a place she could sit comfortably to watch a movie.

Sunday-school director was an “acceptable” position for women, but not the one for which I had studied. There had to be doubts about a woman performing rabbinic functions, but the congregation decided the risk was worth taking.

In her records, she found a single manila folder containing a dozen unopened letters, postmarked nearly 40 years earlier, that she had long forgotten. … “Women of my generation were told to go to college and get your ‘MRS’ degree. It’s hard [for young people] to understand how radical it was to think a woman could be a doctor, a lawyer, or a legislator.'”

While some Indiana wildflowers can be quite showy, many of the blooms are more subtle than the hybrids bred to turn heads at The Home Depot; loving them is like looking past the prom queen and falling for the girl with glasses who reads poetry.

When city-dwellers dream of the simple life, what they imagine are the petite gems of Indiana’s countryside. And it turns out these places are even prettier, the people friendlier, and the autumn leaves more colorful in real life. It’s honest-to-God Americana—only small. You have to look for it (as we did on these five trips). But don’t worry, you’ll find it. Just be sure to drive slowly, or you might blink and—well, you know.

To pitch a movie in Hollywood, you need to be able to summarize the story in 25 words or less. Writer-director David Soren only needed nine: “Like The Fast and the Furious, but with snails.”