Articles Archive - Page 104 of 158 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

I spent three decades at a job that wasn’t a job, one at which few have actually earned a living. But cartoons disappear when the newspapers are bundled up for recycling. Heck, newspapers disappear. After leaving the newspaper, I began painting… and soon remembered it is darn hard. I venture to say this in spite …

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Sustainability Watch

Graduation Rates

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

High school graduation rates are improving in southwestern Pennsylvania overall. Yet, in a handful of districts, nearly a third or more students fail to graduate on time. Dropping out or otherwise failing to earn a high school degree robs students of opportunity and puts them at greater risk of being unemployed or working low-paying jobs. …

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Creative Capital

Is Everything That Didn’t Work Worthless? Part II

by Greg Curtis

In my last post, we discussed the sorry state of value investing following seven years of rigged markets courtesy of our central bankers. In this post we’ll turn to another category of investing that sits right near the top of so many investors’ Sh*t Lists: hedge funds. Whole books have been written about hedge funds, …

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Sustainability Watch

Racial Equity

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The racial and ethnic demographics of southwestern Pennsylvania are changing, just as they are across the nation. The share of the population held by African American, Asian, Hispanic and other minority residents has increased since 2000 and continues to do so. But racial and ethnic minorities accounted for less than 14 percent of the population …

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Creative Capital

Is Everything That Didn’t Work Worthless?

by Greg Curtis

For reasons best known to themselves and their (not very robust) consciences, America’s central bankers concluded that the best way to drag the US economy out of the Financial Crisis was to make rich people richer and poor people poorer. They therefore adopted policies—QE1, QE2, QE3—that drove up the prices of assets mainly held by …

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Pittsburgh’s Top Stories of 2016

by Douglas Heuck

Number five: Pittsburgh’s 200th Anniversary. Pittsburgh is getting younger. You read about it, hear about it and see it anytime you’re out on the “tahn.” Even the demographic data backs it up. If you still don’t believe it, consider this: This year, just eight years after the Pittsburgh 250 celebration, the City of Pittsburgh celebrated …

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PQ Poem

Blending Image and Word

by Aaron Fischer

Ekphrasis first began as a rhetorical form used by the ancient Greeks. Defined by Webster’s as “a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art,” it remains one of the oldest forms of artistic analysis, dating back to Homer’s description of Achilles’ blacksmith god-created shield in The Illiad. This form of writing …

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Homes

Flipped Out

by Elizabeth Wiethorn

Our adventure began with a two-sentence conversation with Eric as we watched our new favorite HGTV show, “Flip or Flop.” The show stars Tarek and Christina El Moussa—a young, attractive (and a bit annoying) married couple who buy property, flip it, and sell it, usually making an outrageous profit. Eric: “We could do that.” Me: …

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Arts

Hath Not a Jew

by Sarina Gruver Moore

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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