Despair is a Luxury That We Can’t Afford
What is there now? There is the power of hope, the power of community, of solidarity, of neighborly commitment.
Carnegie Mellon’s Demarest Metals
Few exhibitions would be more appropriate for me to walk past on my way to work than the Demarest Metals, a reminder that Belt Magazine is grounded in the history – and the future – of this region, that labor deserves to be honored, that there are complicated, beautiful, and essential stories being written about and by people in areas too often passed over.
15 Summer Reads for Our Vacation
Fifteen of our favorites for our summer hiatus.
The Pittsburgh School
Yet part of what defines the Pittsburgh School, from Brackenridge onward, is the mystical kernel of something beyond mere matter that animates any consideration of this place: the transcendent in the prosaic, the sacred in the profane. An intimation of beauty amid a kingdom of ugliness.
May Day is a Rust Belt Holiday
May Day isn’t just an estimably American holiday, it’s a particularly Rust Belt holiday, forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
Botticelli in the Burgh
All of these paintings, the originals in Tuscany, are also viewable down to the most granular detail, by the most strict parameters of verisimilitude, in an Italianate building of white granite and red terra cotta roof in the middle of Pittsburgh.
Singing Rust Belt Union Blues
A discussion with Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman about their book "Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party."
Belt’s Top Stories of 2023
When trying to describe what exactly I envision the magazine to be, I often joke with people that I aspire for Belt to be The New Yorker of the Rust Belt (except that I’m not really joking).
Bard in the Belt
That observation made me wonder if there might not be something particularly “Shakespearean” about the Rust Belt, the arc of success and devastation, the clashing of all of those villainous characters during the Gilded Age and the nobility of those who resisted them, and the narrative culmination of the post-industrial landscape as blasted as Lear’s heath.
Bethlehem Fortune, Bethlehem Elegy
The center didn’t hold. Things fell apart. For the second time in its history, a faith was betrayed and the gates of Eden were soldered shut.
Paradise Lost in Pittsburgh
To walk through Frick Park – at least for me – is a pilgrimage into Milton's Paradise Lost, read not in words, lines, and stanzas, but rather rocks, trees, and water.
Charting the Pittsburgh Novel with Jake Oresick
"I do appreciate titles that use the terrain instead of making their characters sit inside. I also enjoy titles that reveal the parts of our region that outsiders are unlikely to see, like Homewood, Butler, or old school, residential Oakland. Yinzers don't gaze down from Grandview Avenue all day like the movies would have you believe."