PITTSBURGH—When the Pittsburgh Pirates opened their season two weeks ago at PNC Park, Nathan Sibley, a York County, Pennsylvania, kid who struggled in high school and subsequently stood little chance to attend a four-year college had earned the job for the major league club that nearly every fan in the ballpark pays attention
Pete Buttigieg is many things. At just 37, he is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is a military veteran and a deeply religious gay man who is married but also enjoys sandwiches from (anti-same-sex marriage) Chick-fil-A. He is a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar who speaks eight languages. He is the first ever
LORDSTOWN, Ohio—No one exemplifies the spirit of American manufacturing more than United Auto Workers Local 1112 President David Green. Charismatic, humble and a relentless optimist, he is the everyman who guys like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel wrote ballads about in the 1980s. But Green also has to face a triple whammy: shifting
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Beto O'Rourke has refused to rule out abortions more than six months into a pregnancy. Asked by the Washington Examiner about his stance on third-trimester abortions, O'Rourke, who's battling with a crowded field of Democrats vying for the chance to unseat President Trump in 2020, said it is a
COLUMBUS, Miss.—At the First Pentecostal Church on Tuscaloosa Road, the last Saturday of February was a day filled with supposed-to-be's. Little Jereson McCool was supposed to be at the church hall surrounded by 60 members of his family and community to celebrate his fifth birthday, but his grandma's train from South Carolina was
PITTSBURGH—Baseball is always held up as a metaphor for life in America. The struggles and disappointments, along with the workaday perseverance, form clear parallels. Both require hope. Baseball historian David Pietrusza once told me that like baseball, America is all about hope, necessarily tied up with effort and disappointment. Baseball is a game
MIAMI—Ernesto Ackerman watched the horror in Venezuela play out on a large screen onstage at a rally he helped organize in support of the country's opposition leader, Juan Guaido. The event was initially meant to bring Venezuelans in the city together to coincide with the protests back home. It ended up being something
CHICAGO—The first thing that caused newsman Rafer Weigel to blink when reading the TMZ report on "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett being brutally attacked by Trump-supporting, noose-wielding, racial-slurring assailants was the neighborhood in which the attack was reported to have happened. The Streeterville neighborhood is not exactly "MAGA country" at any time, let alone
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—Tito Brown can't imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn't had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time. At least, a perfectly good thing the size and scope of the Amazon headquarters that ideological politics drove out of Long Island City on
WEBSTER SPRINGS, W.Va.—No sitting president has ever visited here before. So it was a pretty big deal when 14 local high school students in a civics class had President Trump talking to them in their classroom Wednesday, all thanks to a Skype video call that Sen. Joe Manchin was having with them. Senior
