December 2025
By Ed Simon As temperatures drop and the days get shorter, with the end of the year rapidly approaching, stay [...]
The Kobold of Carbon County
By Ed Simon “Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness.” Matthew Arnold, [...]
Introducing the Pittsburgh Review of Books
Belt Magazine Becomes Rust Belt Magazine While Getting a New Publishing Partner.
Belt’s Top Stories of 2024
Articles about Ohio protesters pushing the Klan out of their community to the founding of Ebony Magazine, the sulphury flames beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania and the radioactive waste buried in Bridgeton, Missouri, the wooden skyscrapers of Wisconsin and the Frank Lloyd Wright trail in that same state, actress Colleen Moore's magical fairytale castle delighting generations of Chicagoans and discovering Northern Appalachian literature. Along the way, we picked some fresh apples and enjoyed the Appalachian delicacy of the pawpaw.
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).