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3 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez
A few days ago, I was the third car waiting for the light to change. After about a minute, it did, yet neither of the two vehicles in front of me moved. I waited a solid ten seconds. Then I honked softly — a half honk, designed to get the folks moving without being too much of a jerk. Neither car moved. The crosswalk counter was approaching zero and I honked again, this time significantly louder. I saw, through the rear window of the car in front of me, the driver moving their head upwards.
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3 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez
I remember the weekends I had before my children existed. Some Saturday mornings, I would wake up and before I even got my coffee, I would spend an hour in bed just reading. It was majestic — the pillows arranged into a throne, the puppy asleep on the floor beside me, dog-eared pages welcoming me back into the story or narrative with open arms. My copies of paperback Nero Wolfe detective stories have more creased than crisp pages, more markings than unadorned text.
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4 weeks ago | 
post-gazette.com | Adriana Ramirez |Adriana E. Ramírez
My high school civics teacher often intoned that government works best when it moves slowly. As we studied different governmental structures, we often discussed the relationship between change and revolution. She cited the women’s suffrage movement, which took 60 years, from Seneca Falls to the 19th Amendment. She pointed to the struggles of the Equal Rights Amendment — which was not ratified by the 38 required states before its 1979 deadline.
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1 month 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.
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1 month 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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
