I was tenth in a family of 12 children. My mother was a secretary and seamstress. My father was a bricklayer who was in the ...

It was a couple summers back, when I was sitting down the third base line at PNC park, that my thirst finally won. I had made ...

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, ...

To celebrate the beginning of our 20th year, we’ve set out to catalogue the contributions that Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have made to the world. The list has grown and grown, and despite our ...

It’s a hell of a thing to know your birth coincides with a line of demarcation in your hometown. On one side is prosperity. On the other, ruin. I was born in Youngstown in 1977. At the time, it was an ...

The last time Roberto Clemente stepped up to home plate was on a field on Puerto Rico’s west coast where he was teaching boys to play baseball. Locals had coaxed him into taking a swing, and he ...

Like it or not, the Carnegie International eclipses everything the Carnegie Museum of Art does. Every director has grumbled about how it commandeers all available resources. But it’s a time-honored ...

It was a snowy day in Pittsburgh in 2024 when a City truck slid into a guardrail. No one was hurt, but it caused risk and damaged the vehicle. Asking “why” yielded a typical answer, “duh, it was icy.” ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was on vacation in Michigan, walking down a path to collect my dog, when two old friends said hello from a cottage porch. One, from Cincinnati, gets the magazine and asked ...

Everyone is born with a gift from God. Some people discover their gift, and use it to a positive end. Some discover their gift, but squander it. And others, for one reason or another, never discover ...

Rhododendrons blazed scarlet on the trail to Mt. Everest Base Camp, and the snow-capped Himalayas pierced the sky like Bowie blades. I was hiking in Nepal with my friend David Edgerton of Erie in the ...

I was born in Tlemcen, Algeria, a small city on the border with Morocco. My family is Jewish, of Spanish ancestry, and had been in Algeria for centuries. Both sides of my family were poor and ...