Articles Archive - Page 72 of 155 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

There are fittings on Thursday. Eight costumes still left to make and only two weeks to make them before the first dress rehearsal for The Great Gatsby. And Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre costume designer Janet Campbell is calm. Totally calm, actually. Not a hair out of place. Looking amazingly pulled together, as if the only thing …

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Innovation

Girl on the Move

by Lenore Blum

I arrived at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the fall of 1959 as a 16-year-old first year student in the architecture department in the College of Fine Arts. I had chosen architecture because I loved art and math ever since I was a kid, and architecture seemed like the perfect combination. Besides, I lived …

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Arts

Soft-Core Pathos: A Review of Pittsburgh Public Theater’s “The Tempest”

by Stuart Sheppard

Cleverness is not a Shakespearian trait. In fact, as we have found after more than 400 years, the more we try to shape him, using our own devices, the less he is able to tell us. This is because his chief mode of artistic engagement is the sublime – versus the allegoric, the symbolic, or …

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This Week’s Astrology: Feb. 7–13, 2019

by Judi Vitale

Maybe Phil the Groundhog had it right! Or, could it be the planets had an early spring feeling planned out for us all along? In any event, this week will be a build toward a burst of activity by the time we reach next Wednesday. The sun is still in the community-oriented sign of Aquarius, …

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Creative Capital

Time Warp with Lucretius

by Greg Curtis

Lucretius lived and wrote a long time ago. Indeed, if we wanted to, we could calculate how much time has passed since De Rerum Natura was completed in 50 BCE—how many centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. (But don’t bother. It was 20 centuries, 2,079 years, 24,948 months, 759,355 days, 18,224,520 hours, 1,093,471,200 minutes, and 65,608,272,000 seconds—i.e., a …

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PQ Poem

Kitchen

by Rebecca Clever

Its scent was more like the bread Grandma’s fingers shaped, rising warm to my nose than the ash of her Salem’s crushed in thick glass trays, her coffee cup ringed black after finishing a smoke. That candy jar glazed butterscotch, plump atop her laminate table we used for Go Fish, the cards dumbed down below …

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Events

Thirteen Debutantes Presented at the 93rd Cinderella Ball

by PQ Staff

Presented by their fathers in traditional cotillion style, thirteen Pittsburgh debutantes walked the Omni William Penn ballroom on Saturday, January 26 at the 93rd Annual Cinderella Ball. The evening’s Prince Charming—Joseph Anthony Katarincic III (Jack), a junior at Miami University from Fox Chapel—randomly selected Miss Margaret Elizabeth Maglio as Cinderella. The debutantes, as part of …

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The Pulse

How Healthy are Allegheny County Residents?

by Jeffery Fraser

In their own view, people in Allegheny County are generally healthier than the nation’s population. They’re also smoking less. Only 16 percent of county residents overall described their general health as fair or poor in the Pittsburgh Regional Quality of Life Survey conducted in June. Nationally, 18.4 percent of Americans say they’re in fair or …

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Birds

Death in the Back Yard

by Don Feigert

I had been an outdoors guy all my life, until Donna Rae found “our dream house” in the city of Sharon in 2006. The compromise was that, for a place in town, this property had a bit of wild land and some wildlife: dozens of squirrels, occasional deer, raccoons, skunks, and—some years—hawks roosting in the …

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This Week’s Astrology: Jan. 31–Feb. 7, 2019

by Judi Vitale

Apart from harsh weather, this time of year rarely seems “eventful.” However, the planets do not see it that way this week. In addition to a new moon on Monday, we will notice other shifts that will result from some rather important planetary interactions. Most powerful among these will be a harmonious exchange between Saturn …

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Regional News

Lowest in Decades

by Julia Fraser

Unemployment in southwestern Pennsylvania fell again in December, ending a year that saw the jobless rate slip to levels last seen when the region’s steel industry still ruled the local economy. The unemployment rate in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area was 4.2 percent for December 2018, down .4 percent from December 2017, according to …

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Creative Capital

On Lucretius, Part II: Why His Poem Was so Great

by Greg Curtis

“The greatest poem by the greatest poet.” —Dryden on De Rerum Natura and Lucretius ”Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti / exitio terras cum dabit una dies.” —Ovid [“The verses of the sublime Lucretius/will perish only when a day will bring the end of the world.”] What exactly was it that made De Rerum Natura, or DRN, so remarkable? …

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Nature

Wild Bones

by Daryln Brewer Hoffstot

My daughter brings home bones and piles them on the driveway: femur, rib, jawbone with a few flat teeth attached, dozens of thin arced parts. —from “My Daughter Brings Home Bones” by Jennifer Richter The American photographer Sally Mann, controversial in the 1990s for the photos she took of her naked children, has a fascination …

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Books

Short Takes: “Thank Your Lucky Stars” “Asia Ascending”

by John Allison

The pleasures of “Thank Your Lucky Stars” are doubled in the re-reading. The 50 stories tucked into 189 pages encourage a binge. Most are short short, sometimes just a few paragraphs; about 10 are traditional-length short stories (if size matters). But when you return to browse through the collection, images and phrases bust out like …

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Books

The Bad Old Days

by John Allison

You won’t get depressed by reading Richard Gazarik’s “Wicked Pittsburgh.” The retired Tribune-Review reporter does not seek to darken the name of our fair city. He merely wants to gather, in one handy and readable volume, key stories of corruption, crime and skulduggery stretching back to the turn of the 20th century. The cumulative effect …

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Special Reports

Up in the Air

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

This four-part award-winning series of articles offers a comprehensive look at air quality in southwestern Pennsylvania. The scope of the 14-article series, winner of a national Folio award for regional journalism, ranges from the legacy of the region’s industrial past when Pittsburgh earned the reputation as the “Smoky City,” to the characteristics of the region’s …

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Nonprofits

Disability Community Looks to Commonwealth Leaders for Hope and Help

by Ruth Siegfried

With a re-elected governor sworn back in for his second term, a new lieutenant governor snug in his new office and a gaggle of new legislators joining lawmaking hands with their seasoned colleagues, it’s time for Harrisburg to settle in and begin work one of its most vexing tasks: enacting a fair, adequate and balanced …

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This Week’s Astrology: Jan. 24-30, 2019

by Judi Vitale

While we will certainly notice less frenetic activity than the last few weeks have brought, this one will have its share of interesting turns. The sun will remain in Aquarius, bringing to mind the general concern of what works for “everyone,” whether that constitutes your family, circle of friends, business associates, community, country, or more. …

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Nature

Patterns at the Reservoir

by David Aschkenas

With winter’s storms and frigid temperatures come delicate specimens of nature’s beauty, for those attentive enough to notice. Over several years, photographer David Aschkenas captured the natural art of ice patterns on the surface of the Highland Park Reservoir. Enjoy the beauty of freezing temperatures—without needing to bundle up—in this photo collection by Aschkenas. View …

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Creative Capital

On Lucretius: The Man Who Changed the World

by Greg Curtis

One happy day in the year 1417, with the mind of Europe still firmly in the grip of the Dark Ages, a fellow named Poggio Bracciolini was mucking around in the Benedictine library at Fulda in present-day Germany. He reached out his hand and pulled off the musty shelves a volume which, to his astonishment, …

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Sports

The Flying Dutchman Once More

by Teake Zuidema

It all began when my car caught fire. I smelled something burning as I approached the intersection of Penn and North Negley Avenue. I scanned my surroundings to see which building was ablaze. Nothing. Just then, it dawned on me the smoke was inside my car while all the windows were closed. A few days …

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Health

Making a Splash

by Kelly Casey

More than a century ago, scientists figured out how to deploy sound waves to locate the position and distance of enemy submarines. This discovery would also lay the groundwork for using high-frequency sound waves to peer inside the human body and usher in the age of ultrasound. Today, ultrasound (or sonography) is the most widely …

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