I have always loved the fact that, as a young man, James Joyce was so enamored of Henrik Ibsen that he learned Dano-Norwegian ...

The Pittsburgh Quarterly team has interviewed many of the most interesting and noteworthy people in our “city-state of Pittsburgh” as my old editor and friend John Craig used to call this area. 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 ...

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 ...

My twin brother, Allan Block, and I are the third generation in a family business that’s more than 100 years old. My grandfather, Paul Block, was an immigrant from East Prussia, and grew up, through ...

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 ...

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, ...

When I was growing up, my parents used to take me by trolley to East Liberty for a Saturday night treat, dinner at Gammon’s restaurant. In those days, East Liberty was considered our “second downtown” ...

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 ...

All of us in higher education in the Pittsburgh region are acutely aware of the trends showing a continued decline in K-12 enrollment that is impacting, and will continue to impact, the number of ...

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 ...