Adriana E. Ramírez

1 month 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.

1 month 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...

1 month 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.

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

This Mother’s Day, after my family inquired what I wanted as a gift, I requested a book. A few hours later, a friend of mine, firmly a Gen Zer and fifteen years my junior, asked how I was celebrating the holiday. “You know,” she texted me when I told her, “that you can just ask ChatGPT for a summary of the book, right? You don’t have to read it.” She knows that I’m a book critic, and wanted me to avoid “doing work for fun.”The problem, I explained, is that the summary doesn’t give me what I want.

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

In my life, I have loved someone with bipolar disorder. I have loved this person beyond comprehension, beyond what anyone would call reasonable, and beyond the limits of most television protagonists. I have loved someone with bipolar disorder to my own detriment at times. I know the highs and the lows. I know how impossible and how amazing it can be. I know well the moments when the heart thinks it can only take so much, and then circumstances prove the heart’s capacity is unfathomable.