Articles Archive - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Chris DeCardy becomes president of The Heinz Endowments in April. Most recently, DeCardy was acting CEO with the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation, leading a team of researchers, strategists and collaborators working on climate science. Previously, he served as vice president and director of programs with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which awards $340 million in annual grants in …

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People

Efforts So Far Haven’t Worked

by Jeffery Fraser

Another year has passed in which more southwestern Pennsylvanians moved out of the region than newcomers arrived. The decades-long trend continues to slowly drain people from the region and frustrate ambitions of boosting its population. Southwestern Pennsylvania is a chronic loser in the flow of people between states that offer consistently warmer weather. And the …

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Creative Capital

Poems and College Essays by Chat GPT

by Greg Curtis

“LLMs [that is, large language model generative AI systems] are essentially ‘conventional wisdom’ machines.” – Bruno Massarelli Previously in this series: The Bully Effect, Am I a Bot? Part III Why is generative AI – like Chat GPT – such a threat to Google’s internet search revenue? To understand why, let’s engage in a thought …

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Pittsburgh Today Regional News

Pittsburgh’s Immigrant Puzzle

by Jeffery Fraser

Allegheny county’s small population bump from 2010 to 2020 owes much to a spike in the number of immigrants who decided to make it their home. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the 27,000 residents the county added overall. Without the gains in foreign-born residents, southwestern Pennsylvania as a region would have been …

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People

Noteworthy Spring ’23

by PQ Staff

Après Ski Bar For restaurateur Rick DeShantz, a little imagination has gone a long way — and turned into a lot of fun for Pittsburgh this winter as he opened Après Ski Bar at Butcher and the Rye. It’s several tiers of Swiss-themed spaces, with fur-covered lodge furniture, antler chandeliers, assorted fondues on the menu …

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Arts Culture

The War Against Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

by Stuart Sheppard

Often when I walk through a gallery of contemporary art, I can hear a murmuring between the works that echoes journalist Herbert Morrison’s voice describing the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937: “Oh, the humanity!” It’s as if the depiction of suffering in any form has become the criteria by which we judge art, rather …

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Creative Capital

Banks – and Reputations – Go Poof

by Greg Curtis

[I’m interrupting my series on generative AI for this bulletin on Silicon Valley Bank.] “How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.” — Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Is it just me or was there anything about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank that wasn’t annoying in the extreme? Let’s take a …

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Pittsburgh Today Regional News

Pittsburgh’s Population Problem

by Julia Fraser

Butler street in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood wears the face of a young adult enclave. Seven breweries and counting, a cider house, a craft beer store attached to an independent movie theater and bars with outdoor beer gardens flow through the neighborhood, as does a healthy population of young men with dense beards who patronize those …

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Pittsburgh Today Regional News

Pittsburgh’s 2023 Economic Forecast

by Kurt Rankin and Stuart Hoffman

With the U.S. facing a strong possibility of recession in 2023, the Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area is at risk of losing more than its fair share of economic activity in such a downturn. Pittsburgh’s labor market has not yet recovered to its pre-pandemic levels, in terms of employee headcount, in eight of 11 major industrial …

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People

Get Ready for Pittsburgh Tomorrow

by Douglas Heuck

In the spring issue three years ago, I wrote a long essay about the need for a big plan to reverse Greater Pittsburgh’s downward economic and demographic trends. A Pittsburgh friend called it my Magnum Opus, the product of 35 years of journalistic efforts here, much of it aimed at moving this region ahead. In …

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Creative Capital

The Bully Effect

by Greg Curtis

“I love you.” Bing/ChatGPT to tech reporter It’s almost impossible to overestimate the stakes for generative AI systems like ChatGPT. Google has long dominated Internet search, holding more than a 90% market share. Microsoft’s Bing, meanwhile, has been a pathetic also-ran, holding down market shares in the single digits and being not only largely ignored but …

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Pittsburgh Today

Shelter from the Storm

by Jeffery Fraser

Southwestern Pennsylvania boasts many attractions, but its weather usually isn’t one of them. In fact, a longstanding population trend is the annual exodus of residents who choose to resettle in Florida, the Carolinas and other warmer climates. But when Jordan Fischbach moved his family from Los Angeles 11 years ago, it was the climate that …

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PQ Poem

A Moment

by Judith Sanders

While chops sizzle and onions brown,the radio intones failures, floods, and fires,and the family cries its needs, Step out the kitchen doorTrain your eyes on the clouds, rumpled on the darkening sky How big are they, you wonder, and where is that cicada with its kazoo, and the bees that all day probed the flowers? How far is …

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Creative Capital

Am I a Bot? Part II

by Greg Curtis

ChatGPT is scary good. Elon Musk Every so often a technology captures the world’s imagination. The Economist [Generative AI] is as important as the PC, as the internet. Bill Gates I think it will be the most significant technological transformation in human history. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT AI relieves people of their …

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Books

Ramona Reeves wins Drue Heinz with First Collection

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Take the mordant wit of Flannery O’ Connor, combine it with the stripped-down empathy of Raymond Carver, and you just might have something like It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories. This debut collection by Ramona Reeves offers a window into the entwined lives of characters in Mobile, Alabama — a politically, socially and …

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People

How I Became Ensnared in the Pittsburgh Web

by David M. Feehan

How did a native of Minneapolis, a Viking fan, fall in love with Pittsburgh? It’s a long story, but a good one. In 1968, I was assigned as a newly minted VISTA Volunteer to the community action program in McKeesport’s Third Ward, a tough but lively section of town. Hanging out on Walnut Street, in …

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Travel

Twin Pine: A Singular Shopping Experience

by Barbara Eichenlaub

Inside a converted barn in Wexford, just beyond Winston, the life-sized horse statue decorated for every season, is Martin Potoczny’s labor of love. The serial creative entrepreneur used the forced slowdown of COVID to create his dream of opening a curated antique and vintage lifestyle store. His keen appreciation for artisans, innovators and inventors has …

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Birds

The Evening Grosbeak – a Bright Winter Visitor

by David Liebmann

The day I saw the evening Grosbeaks up along the Allegheny River, I was at a winter corporate retreat at a golf club. I was sitting at a conference table and outside, there were bird feeders. Grosbeaks were picking seeds at every opening, stacked one atop the other. I have no memory of what the …

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Creative Capital

Am I a Bot?

by Greg Curtis

A month or so ago a reader of these pages wrote in to let me know she had concluded that my essays had been written by “a particularly dim-witted Artificial Intelligence bot.” Well! I’ve received many critical and intemperate responses to these writings over the years, but that was the first time I’d been accused …

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Sports

Ralph Kiner, Frank Thomas and Greenberg Gardens

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

At the end of the 1946 season, the Detroit Tigers placed Hank Greenberg on waivers. That season, he had led the American League in home runs and RBIs, but the Tigers they felt they couldn’t afford Greenberg’s $75,000 salary. The 35-year-old Greenberg cleared waivers in the American League, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, under new ownership, …

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Culture

Pittsburgh Opera’s Laced/Unlaced Fashion Show

by PQ Staff

A capacity crowd of 275 recently filled the Bitz Opera Factory for Pittsburgh Opera’s ‘Laced/Unlaced’ fashion show. The event combined ‘Gothic romance’ opera fashion assembled from pieces in Pittsburgh Opera’s costume shop vault with elegant, accessible luxury fashion from Skye Douglass’ House of Couture Designs, and seductive lingerie from Pulchra Intimates. Pittsburgh Opera’s Resident Artists and local tenor Ben Werley sang dramatic operatic …

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Arts Culture

Pitt Stages’ “Seven Guitars” Gives Life to a Dream Deferred

by Stuart Sheppard

It has been said that the sign of great actors is that they don’t care if you watch them perform or not – as they disdain “playing to the crowd” — and I would argue that the same can be said of great playwrights, who write in a way that invites you to listen to …

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