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Giving Voice to the Disappeared
Pittsburgh activist Julia Whiteker bears witness for those disappeared by ICE.
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Shining Gleaming Flaxen Waxen
“One time…at a $5 punk salon… a guy with jiggy clippers… said, ‘Are you a model?’ and I, feeling model beautiful, indestructible, let him do whatever and ended up looking like a city rat gnawed my scalp bloody on one side.”
Every Part Strengthens a Part
Max Callimanopulos reviews and reflects on James Salter’s “Light Years” for its fiftieth anniversary.
Requiem for the Post-Gazette
“The Blocks set fire to the 125-year-old legacy established two generations earlier by journalists who bore the same family name, but took their mission to be bulwarks against civic ignorance and misinformation more seriously than their descendants.”
No Punches Pulled; No Kinks Shamed
Discovering Pittsburgh’s raunchiest and most welcoming book club: Sex and Death.
Meaning in Minneapolis
“Abernathy may be outnumbered, but he is not alone. This is a picture of two [...]
Author Joseph Bathanti’s East Liberty
“As with Joyce’s Dublin, place isn’t simply geographical–it is inherent in the working-class culture in which characters live. The tension remains across stories because it is, at root, based in economics and class status.”
“Noises Off” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater
“Noises Off is a delicate and complicated machine of a play, and director Margot Bordelon has assembled its many moving parts with finesse.”
“Art is [still] a Weapon”: A Brief History of the Protest Novel
“Every time he saw another building in Pittsburgh being spray washed to remove the decades of soot… he would think of their legacies being slowly erased.”
Unruly Humor: Damon Young on the Truth in Black Humor
“That this is bloody and Black-as-fuck honesty is where the best comedy is born. It’s lowbrow. It’s midbrow, it’s highbrow. It’s every brow.”
December 2025
By Ed Simon As temperatures drop and the days get shorter, with the end of [...]
Inside Stewart O’Nan’s Eclectic Imagination
“Every city is about change—even Pittsburgh, which for so long we thought of as stuck or static.”
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