Articles Archive - Page 101 of 155 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Hath Not a Jew

Of Shakespeare’s major comedies, The Merchant of Venice is my least favorite because it’s the least funny. In a post-Holocaust world it’s difficult to stage the play’s anti-semitic jokes, and directors often make the understandable choice to shift the tone contour of the play toward the political and tragic. At first glance, a recent production …

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Arts

The Art of Lazar Ran

by Jennifer Faines

From origins at the Vitebsk Fine Arts School in Belarus (founded by Mark Chagall in 1918), to safe-keeping in an Ohio home for decades, the art of Lazar Ran and his contemporaries has taken a circuitous path to appear on the walls of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. The collection conveys a lesser-known story of …

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Creative Capital

On Karoshi, Part III

by Greg Curtis

As noted in my last several posts, Japanese salarymen worked long hours without overtime pay for a selfless reason: to pull their defeated country up by its bootstraps. And they succeeded wildly. By 1978 Japan had surpassed Germany to become the world’s second-largest economy, a position it held until it was pushed down to third …

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Sustainability Watch

Air Quality Trends

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The days when Pittsburgh earned the reputation as the “Smokey City” may be long gone, but the quality of the region’s air remains a concern. Air quality has improved across the region for more than two decades due to a number of factors, including the decline of local steel and other heavy manufacturing, tighter air …

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Sustainability Watch

Environmental Ethic

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The environmental ethic among southwestern Pennsylvanians is complex, data reported in the Pittsburgh Regional Environmental survey suggest. They do not, for example, exclude citizens like themselves from sharing the burden of solving environmental problems. More than 86 percent of those who live in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area agree that individual citizens should be responsible …

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American Spirit

The World Through a Food Truck

by Kate Benz, photography by John Altdorfer

“Just don’t tell Baba our chicken is better.” It’s the only request Ryah asks customers who stop by to visit Leena’s, the food truck she operates out of a ’91 Chevy Step Van that began its life delivering the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Baba is her father, Mohammad, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp before …

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Creative Capital

On Karoshi, Part II

by Greg Curtis

The word “karoshi” was invented in 1978 to describe an increasingly common phenomenon: Japanese workers, mostly the venerable salarymen, were dropping dead of heart disease in the prime of life. There was a reason it all happened in the 1970s. The shocking—to the Japanese—and humiliating loss in World War II had caused the proud country …

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Arts

Seeing the World Through Music

by Stuart Sheppard

Nietzsche famously castigated Euripides for killing the tradition of the chorus in Greek tragedy, because the audience no longer had music to inform its comprehension. He even felt that Euripides caused the death of tragedy itself by trying to make it too Socratic, too rational. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” might …

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Creative Capital

On Karoshi

by Greg Curtis

“Karoshi” is a Japanese word that means, literally, “death by overwork.” For nearly half a century it’s been quite common for Japanese workers, usually the legendary “salarymen,” simply to drop dead, almost always from heart problems, after working long hours for many years. Other Asian cultures, especially, South Korea and China, experience a similar phenomenon. …

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Arts

Exploring the Work of Damianos and Mulcahy at the Westmoreland

by Vicky A Clark

To paraphrase a new friend, director general of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts Jamal Shah: in celebrating life, art follows the inquisitive human mind in its desire to delve deeper as it challenges the established reality and surprises us with new realities. It challenges us to deepen our quest to explore the overwhelming …

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Sustainability Watch

Infant Mortality Trends

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Infant mortality remains a serious public health issue in the region, nation and around the world. Local data, however, is encouraging. Rates of infant deaths have decreased since 2003 in Allegheny County, where infant mortality has historically been high, particularly among African Americans. Racial differences African American infant mortality rates have declined more sharply than …

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Creative Capital

The Illusion of Control, Part III

by Greg Curtis

In my last post I pointed out that, contrary to the claims of Modern Portfolio Theory, families who own businesses aren’t at all uncomfortable with the “single stock risk” they are taking. (I’m not counting startup companies, which mostly fail.) I also pointed out that, once a family sells its company and invests the proceeds …

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PQ Poem

Miraculous

by Brandon Fury

I found the miraculous in the dim lamp that hung above your head, swinging. I found the miraculous in the hospital lobby— a bag of candy hearts left by a child whose mother ached in a blue chair. The voices of sick and well mingled across the linoleum floor. I found the miraculous in the …

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American Spirit

Seeing a Garden in a Pile of Debris

by Kate Benz, photography by John Altdorfer

Julia had fired up the chainsaw because she had been bored, really. Retirement had been fun for an hour or two, but she needed something to do. She had grown tired of watching people dump things in the vacant lot adjacent to her East Hills home: couches, loveseats, enough beer cans to make you a …

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Sustainability Watch

Combined Sewage Overflow

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Abundant annual rainfall leaves southwestern Pennsylvania in a fortunate position as much of the world grapples with the prospect of a shortage of fresh water. But effective stewardship to protect the quality of its rivers and streams has not been the region’s strong suit. The region’s most pressing water problem is in Allegheny County, where …

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Creative Capital

The Illusion of Control, Part II

by Greg Curtis

When I was writing my last book, Family Capital, my objective was to make it appealing—well, tolerable—for people who didn’t care much for investment issues but who knew they really should learn something about them. Adult children, for example. But also spouses, cousins, attorneys, accountants, bankers, trustees and others who needed a working knowledge of …

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Sustainability Watch

Regional Poverty

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Poverty remains a stubborn problem for most regions in the United States and southwestern Pennsylvania is no exception. The rate of poverty in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Areas remained relatively stable in 2015 at 12.3 percent of the population, according to U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data. But, following national trends, the region …

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Architecture & Neighborhoods

The Unconventional Pays Off

by Charles Rosenblum

Sometimes a building aims to look as if it has always been there. Frequently, architects match the brick of the surrounding neighborhood and use slightly modernized versions of traditional details to make a structure appear that it’s been there longer than it has. This is not such a bad thing. Buildings end up being agreeable …

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Profiles

Jim Withers, M.D., Street Doctor

by Jeff Sewald

My father was a country doctor; my mom, a nurse. Their relationship was grounded in the values of service and compassion, and they included their children—me, for sure—in that vision. So I made house calls with my dad and, among other things, got to practice parallel parking while delivering Meals on Wheels with my mother, …

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Opinion

Passing the Torch

by PQ Staff

Earlier this fall, a group of about 250 civic and cultural leaders gathered to pay tribute to Teresa Heinz Kerry on the occasion of her handing over the chairmanship of The Heinz Endowments to her sons. From creating Riverlife, to championing causes from the environment to social equity to the Cultural District among many others, …

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Regional News

A Question of Learning

by Julia Fraser

As a digital revolution changes classrooms across the region and country, one key question lingers at the end of each school day: Do the new technologies actually enhance students’ learning? The answer is unclear. After decades of research in fields such as cognitive science, the debate is no longer about whether digital technologies have the …

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Regional News

Rethinking Education

by Julia Fraser

Janice Smith’s fifth-grade reading class at Central Elementary in the Elizabeth Forward School District was supposed to be working on a book report. Huddled around iPads, the students chatted with one another, pointing and swiping at the screens. No one was being shushed, few were sitting square in their seats, and no one was holding …

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