Joseph Sabino Mistick Columns category, Page 12

Since just after the Civil War, Americans have set aside one day to honor the men and women who died while serving in the military. As our country fought new wars, newly fallen soldiers were added to the day of remembrance, starting with World War I and then World War...

The danse macabre was a theme in medieval art that provided some comfort to regular folks during wars and plagues by portraying people from all walks of life dancing together towards their final resting place. It was clear then that death did not discriminate during a catastrophe. Aristocrats and paupers...

“I’ll take Duquesne minus seven for a nickel.” With those words, spoken by gambler Charlie Katz in a phone booth on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in 1965, Duquesne University’s basketball team came to play an inadvertent but key role in Katz v. U.S., the leading U.S. Supreme Court case...

There are different types of hunger. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from is what we think of first, and there is a lot of that going on now. But it is just as important to feed the soul as it is to feed the body, and that’s...

Mr. President, people need your help right now. This is not the time for you to remind us how you “cut off” China at the end of January or how “people are surprised” that you understand the medical issues surrounding the pandemic. You are constantly trying to play catch-up, instead...

When the Lake Conemaugh dam broke in 1889 and sent 20 million tons of water rushing into the valley below, the town of Johnstown, Pa., and over 2,200 of its residents were washed away in minutes. The devastation was complete, leaving 25,000 homeless survivors not knowing where their next meal...

Out the window of my second-floor home office I can see the magnolia tree at the bottom of the drive, in full bloom now. It is a feathery mass of bright pink flowers, nestled where the trunk meets the ground by a bed of blue star-shaped Siberian squill. Some years,...

Talking politics at a time like this is tricky, but politics has made the coronavirus more deadly, and it will take politics to bring us back after the death and destruction passes. Until last week, when Donald Trump had to cave and show that he had been wrong all along...

The people of L’Aquila, Italy, went about their business as usual in the first week of April 2009. It was a city of around 70,000 residents and the capital of the Abruzzo region — a busy center for government, commerce, education and culture. Abruzzo has a history of plagues and...

Here’s a story for our time. In 1849, halfway up the hill that would later become Pittsburgh’s South Side Slopes, the parishioners of a German Catholic congregation turned to a 14th-century saint for help during the cholera plague. And they believed that he came through for them. As the story...

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” That is the advice that the Sicilian aristocrat Don Fabrizio received from his populist nephew in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard.” During the late 1800s, the old don was struggling with changes in Italian...

Last Tuesday night, as many of us watched the Democratic Party primary election returns, we got a taste of how our parents must have felt in November 1948. They remembered President Harry S. Truman, grinning broadly, while holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline...

Americans have become far too familiar with the big lie. It is usually used to cover up a devastating truth or to sell us some public policy that was dreamed up by ideologues or business tycoons. By the time the last Americans were airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975, nearly...

No one seems happy with half a loaf anymore. And that was the big takeaway from the Democratic Party’s presidential debate in Nevada last week. Half a loaf for Democrats would be defeating Donald Trump, even if it means that some Democratic candidates have to put their personal glory on...

Any time a movie star dies, we tend to remember them for the fictional roles they played, with little time spent on their real lives. When Kirk Douglas died last week at 103, it was easy enough to think of him as he was in the movies. But Douglas did...

“Hit him in the labonza!” As we gathered around the tiny black-and-white television for the “Friday Night Fights” in the 1950s, Pap and the uncles shouted at the smaller boxers to go inside and work the bellies of their much bigger opponents. Body punches — focused, repeated, unrelenting — take...

If you’re a Democrat, it’s getting hard to figure out who you’re supposed to be rooting for these days. And it’s a safe bet that you never thought you would hear some of your own people chanting, “Go, John Bolton, go!” But that is what’s happening. The New York Times...

If you are one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason, the popular resurgence of Alexander Hamilton over the past two decades must make perfect sense these days. “Alexander Hamilton,” Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of one of our nation’s founders and the first secretary of the...

When Dennis Towne, a Google engineer from Pittsburgh’s East End, publicly proclaimed this month that he was leaving Pittsburgh because the air sometimes smelled bad in his neighborhood, he quickly caught the attention of politicians, bureaucrats and average Pittsburghers. A Pittsburgh resident since 2017, Towne acknowledged that Pittsburgh “has made...

When Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary in Sarajevo in 1914, the Serbian nationalist had no idea that his singular act would eventually consume the world. But sometimes assassinations do not end with the end of one life. If Princip thought that the archduke’s death would simply rid...

When Christianity Today recently published an editorial calling for the removal of Donald Trump from office either “by the Senate or by popular vote next election,” it showed a first public crack in Trump’s evangelical Christian support. Trump’s detractors have always been astonished that evangelical Christians have embraced and defended...

Every now and then a new year seems sure to mark significant change. And 2020 is one of those years — a presidential election year — and it is not without some meaningless controversy straight out of the gate. Astronomer Joe Rao writes in the Farmers’ Almanac that we should...

It is another wonderful Christmas in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, as thousands of daily shoppers pour into the mecca for ethnic food and sidewalk bargains. Whole families arrive together, as part of their holiday tradition. It should be a time of celebration for the merchants, too, but instead they have been...

Sometimes it would be nice to treat the United States Constitution like a buffet. Imagine if you could take the parts you want and leave the rest behind. But that’s just not the nature of our Constitution. Donald Trump always gets cheers at his rallies when he promises to protect...

There have been some great speeches made by presidents of the United States, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is at the top of most lists. On his train ride to the bloodied Civil War battlefield in central Pennsylvania, Lincoln wrote 272 words that continue to inspire and serve us. Franklin...