Lori Falce stories, Page 6

Pot pies have a split personality. On the one hand, you have the old-fashioned kind that speak of Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house: thick gravy, rich roasted chicken and tender vegetables all tucked into a pan under the delicious blanket of some buttery crust. It is the very definition of...

I often lament the way people try to harness language like a horse that just needs to be broken in an attempt to solve a problem rather than addressing the problem. Take the vocabulary surrounding people with developmental delays and other challenges. The words we have used over the years...

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is not new. The bombs falling and the hostage taking and the outright murder are this week’s problem, but the enmity is as old as the sands in this disputed land, despite Israel being just 75 years old and Hamas only 35. Could we...

The first Speaker of the House of Representatives was the son of a German immigrant. Frederick Muhlenberg was born in what would later become Montgomery County. He was a theologian and statesman. He served as speaker of the Continental Congress in 1780. He signed the Bill of Rights. And in...

At the end of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the benevolent wizard in charge of the magic school took the opportunity to deliver an object lesson. He upended the annual competition between the school’s four houses by delivering a few last-minute points to the main characters for saving the...

For almost two weeks, Pennsylvania State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, U.S. marshals and other law enforcement were combing Chester County for one man. Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante spider-walked up a wall in the county prison like a spy in an action movie. The man who brutally stabbed his...

For some kids, their childhood heroes were sports figures. For others, they might be actors or pop stars. For me? Well, mine was a local television host. I couldn’t get enough of Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille. His Saturday night film fest on WPXI wasn’t the beginning of my love affair...

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America really doesn’t back away from its reputation. Do you want to call the coterie of companies it represents Big Pharma? Fine. The trade group that lobbies for those companies leans into the name using its cheeky initials — PhRMA. The organization is so forthright...

If you are a politics nerd like me, you probably spent Wednesday night watching the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2024 election season. For some, this might be comparable to the other periodic ritual trial-by-combat going on right now — NFL preseason football. There definitely are parallels to...

Dessert is the beauty queen of the kitchen. Food magazines give us cover models of impossibly beautiful cakes. On television, sugar turns into masterpieces as if by magic. Social media does for pastries what airbrushing does for influencers — presenting the most perfect versions of the delicious truth possible. But...

People have an idea in their heads about what it is like to work for a newspaper. It’s an idea that, like many things, is shaped by movies and television. Editors bark orders and chew cigars like the Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson. Reporters flock on the steps of every...

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s health is at issue. Again. The California Democrat fell in her home and was sent to the hospital. A spokesman said everything was fine, and she was released and is now at home. I wish her well. But concerns about Feinstein’s health are rooted in her...

Victim impact statements are an important part of the criminal sentencing process. After guilt has been decided but before a sentence is delivered, there is a period when the depth of the damage is demonstrated via statements — written or read or bravely spoken — by those keenly affected. With...

Jason Aldean set off quite the brush fire with his latest video. The country singer’s single “Try That in a Small Town” plays to a regular trope of the genre: the inherent nobility of small-town life. Aldean talks about small towns a lot in his music. “Hicktown” was one of...

Hear the word “cake” and an image comes to mind. It’s usually a round, layer cake filled and coated with thick frosting and maybe finished with sprinkles. Cut a big, triangular wedge and you have an absolute textbook illustration of a piece of cake. Delicious to eat anytime — but...

I have a serious love of television, and so I take things that stand between me and my ability to binge-watch it personally. How dare someone make me wait an additional year to see what happens on “The Last of Us.” I’m not sure I can live in a world...

Whether or not Robert Bowers was guilty of the murders of 11 members of three Jewish congregations at a synagogue in Pittsburgh was never really in doubt. When the jury returned a guilty verdict in June, it was what everyone knew it was: the first milestone in a trial that...

The crowing came quickly after a routine political back-and-forth turned into an unexpected upset with long implications. On Wednesday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers took a pen to the state’s budget, meant to govern spending over a two-year period. He signed the plan into law — but not without a little...

My sister is a 5-foot, 2-inch walking encyclopedia of all things Titanic. She was about 6 when the obsession started. She was 8 when Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the wreck. That was when she began to carry around a coffee table book that was almost as tall as she was....

The Titanic often is thought of as the quintessential example of a shipwreck. It isn’t the only boat to sink. It isn’t the only ocean liner to meet a watery end. In fact, the famously “unsinkable” sunken ship was part of a family of three identical sisters of the White...

The justice system is an odd balancing act. It must be impartial, yet it weighs more than just guilt and innocence. It also takes into account harder-to-quantify qualities like remorse and regret, grief and loss — and perhaps the hardest of all, forgiveness. We are told to forgive and forget,...

Problems can get out of hand when you decide they don’t affect you. Maybe it’s because you don’t have the time or the money or the ability to do anything about them at the moment. I get it. That’s why my mail accumulates on the passenger seat of my car...

Everyone sees terrible things every day. We just see them from a safe distance. We see people die in horror movies in ways that make you question the sanity of the person who wrote the script. Television serves up the kind of fictional crime dramas that are a staple of...

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental health condition that arises for people who have been through events that are a tragic shock to the system. Just like an old injury to a bone can flare up when a wrong move or the right weather tweaks the spot and makes the...

I love a Venn diagram. You know, those charts made of overlapping circles that show what different spheres have in common? Take Democrats and Republicans, for example. The two parties have tons of differences that could make them seem miles apart on everything from taxation to regulation to immigration. But...