Pittsburgh

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Reflecting on Trumpism in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh  Over the past few decades, Pittsburgh has become the poster boy for industrial transformation, going from Steel City to shiny hi-tech hub. Butone thing that has not changed is the local argot. “I have landed among the Yinzers,” my friend Damir Marusic, who is an op-ed editor at the Washington Post, proudly texted me when he arrived in Pittsburgh. Marusic is a fast learner. “Yinzer” remains the endonym of preference in Pittsburgh, where it was derived more than a century ago from the second-person plural pronoun by Ulster immigrants and shared with the later blue-collar workers from Central and Eastern Europe who labored in the hulking mills along the Monongahela.

Pittsburgh

Thursday

Teresa Mull

How Fetterman appealed to a suffering Pennsylvania

Dr. Mehmet Oz has conceded to John Fetterman but has yet to say anything publicly, probably because, like many Republicans — myself included — he’s just not sure what to say. How could Fetterman, a tattooed, scowling, sloppily dressed goon with a concerning and unsightly neck lump (when I Googled his name, “Fetterman neck” was the third suggested search term), whose debate performance a mere two weeks ago was nothing short of pathetic, possibly have defeated a polished, successful, well-spoken heart surgeon for US Senate? Fetterman’s victory is almost unbelievable, until you zoom out and look at the state of Pennsylvania and most of the country.

fetterman

Monday

Damian Thompson

Messing up Beethoven’s Ninth

I'm sorry to start this blog with a lament, but something sad has happened in Pittsburgh. Its maestro — whom some critics believe to be the finest orchestral conductor in the world — has recorded Beethoven's Ninth and unexpectedly messed it up. Since becoming music director in 2008, the 62-year-old Austrian Manfred Honeck has transformed the reputation of the Pittsburgh Symphony to the point where no one still refers to the 'Big Five' American orchestras, traditionally those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia. It's happened fast, too. In 2013, the New York Times reported that the Big Five were being swept away by 'the great western migration' of musical excellence to Los Angeles and San Francisco. No mention of Pittsburgh.

beethoven ninth

Tuesday

Heather Robinson

Pre-election perspectives from Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

pittsburgh

Friday

Michael Millner

Magus of mass production

‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,’ the artist said in the East Village Other in 1966, ‘just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This quotation re-appeared in 2002 on the US Post Office’s commemorative Warhol stamp. It’s fabulously fitting for a stamp that reproduced a self-portrait, but when scholars recently compared the audiotapes of the interview with the printed version, the passage wasn’t on the tapes. Warhol sometimes invented interviews from whole cloth. He answered questions with a gnomic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or, refusing to speak at all, allowed proxies like his ‘superstar’ Edie Sedgwick to answer for him.

warhol

Tuesday

Leon Hadar

America’s first quantum president

Talmudic tradition establishes a practice of providing a variety of voices and understandings, which could lead to multiple versions of any position. Or as the old saying goes, ‘ask two Jews, you’ll get three opinions.’ Recently, in the aftermath of the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the earlier bomb-spree scare, I had the opportunity to test the validity of this famous aphorism, when as a libertarian-conservative Jew, adhering to classical liberal positions, who decided to cast his vote for Donald Trump in 2016 (after considering voting for Gary Johnson), I had a somewhat long and scorching email exchange with a liberal Jewish friend who also happens to be an enraged anti-Trumpist.

donald trump quantum president

Sunday

Philip Jenkins

The dangerous politics of guilt by association

Pittsburgh is less a city than a loose federation of urban villages, of which Squirrel Hill provides a classic example. A long-thriving heart of Jewish life and culture, an authentically rooted community, Squirrel Hill is now irrevocably scarred by the murderous actions of one monster, whose crimes will leave a legacy of social harm and intimidation for a generation. Robert Bowers’s attributed words about wishing to kill Jews leave no doubt of the explicitly political character of the act. No worthwhile definition of terrorism could fail to include an act like this. But as in any case of terrorism, identifying an act is only the first stage in a much larger process of interpretation and rhetorical expansion.

pittsburgh shooting vigil guilt by association
donald trump illinois civil
Daniel McCarthy

Liberals don’t want Donald Trump to be civil. They want him to lose

Independence of mind is nowadays in short supply among the commentariat. Certain big background concepts have been propagated thoroughly enough that everyone knows just what to write as soon as anything happens. If there’s any doubt — or worse, any resistance — wave upon wave of goodthink browbeating will put a quick end to it. And if that fails, a dissenter’s sheer sense of futility may do the trick. What’s the point of insisting that two and two is four when everyone else in the clever class insists it’s five? Edmund Burke never gave up.