The Decline of the Rust Belt and the Loss of Community

My immediate Pittsburgh neighbors believe we live on perhaps the loveliest block in Squirrel Hill, a street so semi-rural that it lacks sidewalks but hosts a seemingly 24-7 population of young deer. I don’t disagree, but I also know that I live in the Mon Valley, a.k.a. Steel Valley, named for the huge river—Monongahela—that allowed

Prognosis Negative

What is it with today’s octogenarians and big government jobs? Time was when a public servant approached his ninth decade, he had long since given up trying to remake the world. He was happy merely to be still alive, happily sitting back enjoying the fruits of his life and work and planning nothing more ambitious

Immortal Combat

Your reaction to the following lines in The Book of Elsewhere—which is about an unkillable warrior working with the American military-industrial-scientific complex in an attempt to discover whether he can die or at least achieve mortality—will be a decent gauge for how much of the book you can accept. And what you see in the