Adriana E. Ramírez

1 week ago | post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez

In May 2015, when she sentenced Ross Ulbricht for hosting an illegal drug and services marketplace called Silk Road, District Judge Katherine Forrest said Ulbricht was “no better a person than any other drug dealer.”In his tenure running Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” Ulbricht’s company facilitated the anonymous sale of over $200 million worth of drugs — methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin accounted for most of its profits, according to prosecutors.

2 weeks ago | post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez

Pittsburgh has the potential to be a great city. Our city has that potential right now, in 2025, as much as it did back in 1868, when an English-born New Yorker named James Parton wrote about what was then “Pittsburg.”It is in this essay for the Atlantic Monthly that Parton coined the phrase “hell with the lid taken off,” describing the spectacle one could view from Cliff Street.

2 weeks ago | post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez

Every weekday morning, as I walk down the hallway of my daughter’s preschool, I greet my fellow parents. I’m friendly this way. “And how are you?,” they’ll reply, and I’ll often eschew the ordinary “fine” and instead go with something along the lines of “kicking it old-school,” or as I said this morning, “surviving.”“Aren’t we all?” one mother replied. “We live in strange times.”We do.

3 weeks ago | post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez

A friend of mine tied to the Peduto administration once told me that this year’s Democratic primary for the mayor of Pittsburgh would come down to “that undecided voter — young, professional, left-leaning, living in the 10th, 15th, 19th and 26th wards.” In his estimation, of the 90 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Morningside, Hazelwood, Beechview, Brookline, Perry North and Perry South would determine the winner of the Democratic primary, which in Pittsburgh, barring a tremendous upset from the...

3 weeks ago | post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez

“The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it,” says Karis Nemik to the eponymous Cassian Andor of the Disney+ series “Andor,” set in the “Star Wars” universe. “That is the real trick of the Imperial Thought Machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident.”It’s easy to see why so many people have noted the prescient nature of those words from the show’s 2022 first season.