Articles Archive - Page 103 of 155 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Returning home last Monday from a weekend trip to visit our newly transplanted daughter and her family in Seattle, we had a delightful conversation with our Uber driver, a native Pittsburgher, on the way back from the airport. He had recently retired from his full time job, but enjoys meeting people and figured driving for …

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Creative Capital

Happy 200th Anniversary! Part IV

by Greg Curtis

In celebration of my 200th blog post, I’m blogging about blogging. Last week I talked about my (mostly boring) writing habits. This week I’m answering this question: Many of your blog posts adopt a position quite different from those we read about in the mainstream media, left or right. Are you naturally contrarian or do …

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PQ Poem

Homewood Cemetery

by Valerie Bacharach

My husband and I walk its paths at dusk in the lessening light when heat and humidity ease. There is much life among these graves— deer browse, wild turkeys run and flirt, groundhogs and chipmunks hide in shadows. Red-winged blackbirds flash across the pond, land on reeds that surround it. Water lilies bloom, a thick …

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Business

The Puzzle of “E”

by Tom Flannery

If you didn’t read my first piece, I was prompted to consider writing this blog by my own passage through late middle age to advanced middle age. I can see the end of the road, career-wise, through the haze. My younger, more energetic colleagues are assuming more of the responsibility in our office and are …

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Creative Capital

Happy 200th Anniversary! Part III

by Greg Curtis

In celebration of my 200th blog post, I’m blogging about blogging. Last week I went over the terrifying issue of how to come up with a new topic to write about every week. This week I’m answering the question: You have a day job and six kids, so how do you find time to write …

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Sustainability Watch

Regional Energy Use

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

In a region where coal was once king, nearly half of the electricity consumed today is generated from non-carbon sources. Yet, wind, solar and other renewable sources claim a tiny fraction of the local energy portfolio. An estimated 49 percent of the electricity consumed locally was from carbon-free sources in 2014, for example. Most was …

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Travel

Car Trouble

by Elizabeth Wiethorn

At 5:30 a.m. one recent morning, I was driving the Parkway East to Monroeville, and actually ON TIME. I began to hear a loud “ka-thunk” from the front left of my mini-van. Suddenly, my front left wheel popped clean off. Had it been later, I would have been horrified at the idea of my wheel …

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Creative Capital

Happy 200th Anniversary! Part II

by Greg Curtis

In celebration of my 200th blog post last week, I’m blogging about blogging. Last Friday I went over some details about the blog and addressed a question about whether I’m really writing an investment blog or not. (Read “Happy 200th Anniversary! Part I” here.) This week I’m answering the question: Isn’t it hard to come up …

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American Spirit

Mario’s Corner of the World in Sewickley

by Kate Benz, photography by John Altdorfer

Mario spends most of his life in the dungeon. That’s what he likes to call his Sewickley Shoe Repair shop, the dungeon, although his beaming face betrays him. His customers come from all over—Aliquippa, Cranberry, Erie, Weirton—ready to launch with their “savior of my sole” puns. They’re mostly right, because there isn’t much that Mario …

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Business

Meet Jack Roseman, the Tech Whisperer

by Evan Pattak

Shortly after Keith LeJeune helped found Agentase, a company that developed tools to detect hazardous chemicals, he called on Jack Roseman. LeJeune was so impressed with Roseman that he hired him as a consultant. When Sue Parker needed an exit strategy for her software start-up, Paragon Systems, she tapped Roseman, who helped her sell Paragon …

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PQ Poem

Walking

by Philip Terman

My first walk is also my first memory— On the purple carpet, in the living room Of that bungalow in the suburbs built For the soldiers who returned from the war. One parent directed me towards the other, Who waited with open arms, Both of them smiling, encouraging, My brothers on the stairway cheering. No, …

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Profiles

The Death of a Homeless Man

by Douglas Heuck

Last week, I got the news that I knew one day would come. Joe Regoli had died. Back in 1988, I wrote a series about Pittsburgh’s homeless, based on my living on the streets for 14 days and nights, undercover, with long hair and a beard. I was 26, and the Pittsburgh Press series changed …

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Arts

Quantum’s Surreal “The River” Transfixes

by Stuart Sheppard

In Richard Brautigan’s classic surrealist novel, Trout Fishing In America, the narrator visits a store selling trout streams by the foot. They are stacked in piles like pieces of lumber, each length corresponding to a different price. In Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River, produced by Quantum Theatre, it’s as if they picked out a …

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Creative Capital

Happy 200th Anniversary!

by Greg Curtis

No, it only seems like I’ve been writing this blog for 200 years. I’ve actually been writing it for 200 weeks. As the anniversary approached, I naturally gave some thought about how to celebrate it, and my first notion was to give myself the week off. But nobody gets time off work just because it’s …

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Books

Drue Heinz winner brings humanity to adversity

by Fred Shaw

When Melissa Yancy describes aspects of facial reconstructions, fetal surgery and kidney transplants in her short-story collection Dog Years (University of Pittsburgh Press), she writes knowingly, not gratuitously. The 2016 Drue Heinz Award winner and Phoenix native, comes honestly to this perspective as a fundraiser advocating for health-care causes. And while several of her stories …

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Creative Capital

On the (Inevitable) Donald, Part V

by Greg Curtis

We’ve talked about school desegregation and we’ve talked about the fight against discrimination, two highly desirable movements that were, unfortunately, built on the backs of working families, leaving the elites who sponsored them untouched. Unsurprisingly, many of those working families now support Donald Trump and, whether he wins or loses, will continue to support Trump-like, …

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Creative Capital

On the (Inevitable) Donald, Part IV

by Greg Curtis

Let’s talk about discrimination. I had a friend, now deceased, we’ll call Millie. Millie grew up in a wealthy and influential family and graduated from law school in the 1930s—a real gender pioneer. But getting a law degree and getting a law job were two different things. Whenever Millie would show up for a job …

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Creative Capital

On the (Inevitable) Donald, Part III

by Greg Curtis

I’ll be talking about delicate issues in these posts, so let me be clear about what I’m saying—and what I’m not. Hundreds of years from now, when historians look back on our era—say, the period beginning just after World War II—the glory of our time won’t have anything to do with technology or arts or …

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Creative Capital

On the (Inevitable) Donald, Part II

by Greg Curtis

One reason I dislike Trump but also dislike his elite critics is because I have the misfortune to live in both camps. If you merely took a quick, casual glance at my vita you might conclude (as I try to trick everybody into concluding) that I am a card-carrying member of the elite American intelligentsia. …

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Creative Capital

On the (Inevitable) Donald

by Greg Curtis

Right-thinking person that I am, I’ve spent my adult life in broad agreement with elite American opinion on all the major issues and movements of the age: opposition to the War in Vietnam, support for the Civil Rights Movement, gender equity, reproductive rights, immigration reform, environmentalism, equality for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, etc., etc. Yet, …

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PQ Poem

For James Wright

by John Stupp

You write about shyness the shyness of daylight along the Ohio River like a girl brushing her hair in a boarding house looking for privacy— in one of your poems morning arrives naked uncomfortable shivering in the valley offering only a glimpse of herself to ironworkers electricians millwrights carpenters for the first time like a …

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Regional News

Regional Wages Fall

by Jeffery Fraser

The average weekly wage plummeted in southwestern Pennsylvania during the first quarter of the year driven by sharp reductions in management pay, a weakened energy industry and other factors, regional economy experts say. The average weekly wage fell 5.8 percent across the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area to $1,027 in the first quarter of 2016 …

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