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3 days ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
I am, among other unemployable qualities, a philosophy student. I have spent a good third of my time here reading and pondering and writing about the nature of knowledge, the persistence of identity, the distribution of resources and the pursuit of an ethically good life. On this last issue, Aristotle says the quality of a good harpist is their ability to perform well the function of a harpist — that is, playing the harp.
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3 days ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
Graduation is nigh, so it is time to wish the opinions desk’s graduating seniors off. We worked with these writers for the last year, and a few even longer. From goofing around in the office, to complaining about the state of American politics, to commiserating about what is next after we all graduate, we hope you all had a wonderful time working for The Pitt News and writing for the best desk — the opinions desk.
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2 weeks ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
I had been sitting in an IMAX theater at AMC Waterfront for an hour and ten minutes, watching Steve and his gang of Idahoan misfits journey to the Woodland Mansion, when it happened. Garrett, played by Jason Mamoa, stood before a blocky chicken in the pillagers’ wrestling ring while, to his utter fear, a crate lowered upon the chicken and deposited a baby zombie atop it.
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3 weeks ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
CEO, billionaire and puppetmaster of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk often parrots the idea of a “woke mind virus” that has infected the American people — one that is eating away at their brains and turning them into left-wing loons and zombies. Like everything else Musk says, the phrase is nonsense, and it only serves as a buzzword for him to lazily reject anything progressives say as the drivel of some brain worm.
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3 weeks ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
1:35 am GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest generative artificial intelligence system, released on March 14. Among many performative upgrades, it massively improved its image generation capabilities. The introduction of these new capabilities gave birth to an online trend of generating photos in the style of popular Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli.
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1 month ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley |Briana Bindus
On Monday afternoon, University leaders announced a full faculty and staff hiring freeze through the rest of the 2025 fiscal year, with a possible extension into the 2026 fiscal year. The freeze is meant to help the university “deliver” on its mission and continue progressing towards the 2028 Plan for Pitt, an initiative to improve Pitt’s campus and environment, and its established pillars, according to an email sent to faculty and staff.
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1 month ago | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
Back in 2024, I was on the fence about my decision to vote for Donald Trump. He was right — I was getting tired of winning, and I thought maybe it would be nice to throw the Democrats a bone and let them have another four years. But as November approached, it became clear that the stakes of this election were too high to wait until 2028 for a second Trump term.
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2 months ago | 
pittnews.com | Marissa Kelley |Thomas Riley
Language is a tricky thing. For as complicated as the English language is, our hundreds of thousands of words don’t mean much on their own. Even though saying “I love you” is a huge milestone in any relationship, those three short words hold practically no weight in comparison to that intense, insatiable yearning in your chest. Everyone uses the same word to describe that feeling — love — but everyone ascribes a very different meaning to it.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
Disney has always been last in line to introduce queer characters to their movies and TV shows — especially those aimed at children and families. Alex Hirsch, creator of “Gravity Falls,” hit a dead end trying to get Disney to allow any queer characters to appear in his show in the mid-2010s. Only after the turn of the decade did Dana Terrace manage to feature a lesbian relationship in the main cast of “The Owl House,” which also debuted Disney’s first-ever non-binary character.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
pittnews.com | Thomas Riley
Artwork generated by artificial intelligence is gradually getting better — far better than I would have expected since DALLE-2 swept the nation in 2022 with its iconic failure to generate the correct number of fingers. The technology has gotten so good that companies are now willing to air AI-generated advertisements on national television. These ads vary in quality.
