Appalachia Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Tasteless jokes abound on the internet, including one I recently read: “Did you know the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia? Anywhere else and it would have been called a teeth brush.” I chuckled before considering the misguided notion that it’s still OK to trash poor whites. Writing for NPR’s “Code Switch,” Leah Donnella explains …

Appalachian Reckoning: An Antidote to Hillbilly Elegy? Read More »

Region

With the Local Newspaper in Decline, What is the Fate of Local Reporting?

by Neil Strebig

Local newspapers have struggled for more than a decade to secure a foothold in the digital era and stay in business. Dwindling revenues and flagging demand for print editions have led some southwestern Pennsylvania papers to close and others to downsize their newsrooms, affecting coverage of local news. To make matters worse, there doesn’t appear …

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Creative Capital

The Stubbornness of Culture

by Greg Curtis

In 2013 J. D. Vance graduated from Yale Law School, an accomplishment he shared that year with the following fraction of his fellow Americans: 0.00000063. I deduced this remarkable statistic very simply, by dividing the number of students in the Yale Law School class (208) by the population of the United States, which, at this …

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