Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Today was the first day since the beginning of the pandemic that I went to a coffee shop and sat and wrote. It was an outside courtyard and I was seated at a metal table beside a little garden, but still.

While I was sitting there, something skittered across my vision. I tuned it out but a moment later this guy who was at the far end of the courtyard got up and approached the garden. When I looked up he said, “I think that was a spotted lanternfly.”

If you’re unfamiliar, spotted lanternflies are these invasive insects that destroy plants. I’m not super familiar with them myself because they have not previously made it to Pittsburgh, at least not that I have seen. Most of what I know I’ve heard from family in Philadelphia, where they are a much bigger nuisance. There and now here, if you see one of these bugs you are encouraged to kill them. (Seems kind of rough to me but that’s apparently the way it is.)

Anyway this stranger and I stomped around the garden for a minute or two, trying to flush this thing out so we could stomp it to death. It was a little funny and made me feel like a little boy, charging into the undergrowth, eager to wreak havoc. After the lanternfly disappeared, we each returned to our tables and I took the opportunity to ask the guy if he happened to know the wi-fi password.

Throughout the day today I had this sense of re-entering the world somehow. That doesn’t quite add up because nothing has changed, really, in terms of the pandemic. I’ve been fully vaccinated since early May, and everywhere that I had to go indoors I wore a mask.

But it’s true. Or rather maybe it’s that I felt a curious sense of aliveness, of weirdness, that I had been missing without ever realizing it was gone. Later I took my daughter for a walk and I saw a woman physically lifting her older daughter, who likely had cerebral palsy, into the backseat of her car.

I test drove a minivan in the afternoon and as I waited at a stoplight at the edge of Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood, a man selling roses to the idling cars walked past all the other cars at the light and looked in the van (a Honda Odyssey that seems pretty cool) and asked the time. I didn’t know where to look on the van’s console to tell him and the salesman barked, “4:30.” I’d just been thinking that the salesman and the rose peddler seemed like two sides of the same coin: weathered, hardened men working long hours. The rose peddler said, “Is that all?” and walked back to his table on the sidewalk. A few blocks from the dealership I saw a man loading a cage full of tiny puppies into the back of his car. Later, driving to pick my daughters up from daycare, there was a soaking rain and I saw a woman with one leg, her loose pant leg hanging down beside her, struggle to get from the pavement around to the driver’s side door.

My first infatuation with Pittsburgh came via my sense of its deep strangeness. I’d moved from Philadelphia and it struck me that here was a place where the weirdness had a chance to spread out, where there was room for it. I was living in a tiny apartment in Greenfield, at the bottom of a long winding road and across the street from a cemetery. Even before I moved to Pittsburgh, just visiting, I had a sense that this was a place I could get writing done. Maybe that’s just a feature of going somewhere on your own as an adult, someplace that isn’t the town where you live in a dorm and isn’t the place you grew up, but is in some way all your own. Pittsburgh always felt like my own, and that perceived strangeness was at the heart of that feeling. So many of the city’s great amenities feel random, for lack of a better word: why is the National Aviary in Pittsburgh? Why is the library system so great? Why do they hold the furry convention here? Why is there a museum for Andy Warhol, who lived here but left as soon as he could, and one for Roberto Clemente, who isn’t from here? There are answers to all these questions, of course, but the cumulative weight of so many questions of this nature has always felt like something important and substantial, deliciously pleasurable.

All this just to say that I missed this feeling. I don’t expect it to be sustained, and I don’t think it’s a true marker of any turning tides, any safety reached in terms of the pandemic. For one thing, I think the lack of weirdness in my life has much more to do with staying home nearly every day with anywhere from one to three little girls, of my focus being directed toward them and not at the weird world around me. But it was a wonderful reminder of what I’ve always found so charming about this place, and a lovely affirmation that that world never went anywhere.

Like everyone else, I had an interesting 2020. Among many other things, my wife and I welcomed our third baby to the world.

. . . And I also continued to stay busy as a freelance writer. Below are some of my favorite pieces from an eventful year.

-“What We Can Learn from Each Other,” the cover story of the Spring 2020 issue of Bridges magazine, was a delight to work on. The piece, for the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work (SSW), focuses on international and internationally focused alumni of the School. Check out the whole issue here.

-And I also got to write “A Year Like No Other,” the cover story of Bridges‘ Winter 2021 issue. (Article here.) For this piece I spoke to a number of SSW alumni doing important work and doing it under unimaginably difficult circumstances.

-For the most recent issue of Pitt Nurse magazine, I was thrilled to write “Collaborating to Make Sure Nurses Look like the Community,” on the UPMC Scholars program, which seeks to provide opportunities for nursing students from underrepresented groups to attend Pitt’s School of Nursing.

-And for Pitt’s School of Computing Science, I spoke to a number of outstanding SCI students about their experiences to create a series of short profiles now up on the School’s website. As always when speaking to Pitt students, I was deeply impressed by how much they have already accomplished and by how focused and articulate they are when considering their academic interests and career ambitions. The students whose profiles appear on the SCI site are Winnie Mutunga, Van Pierce, Pat Healy, and Erin O’Rourke.

-I also had the pleasure of talking with Shan Bagby, chief dental officer of the U.S. Army (and a Pitt grad) for this story, “Oral History,” for Pitt Magazine.

-And for Pitt Med Magazine, I was honored to write this obituary of legendary radiologist Carl Fuhrman, and this “Investigations” piece on fetal immune system tissue and its possible uses.

-And last but not least, just a month or so ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Pitt alum and former NFL fullback Lousaka Polite for a profile piece in the inaugural issue of H2P, the publication of Pitt Athletics. Check out the whole issue here.

There is more that I am forgetting, and I continued to work as a ghostwriter and teacher throughout the year.

On a more administrative note, I’ve recently pared down this website to be a bit more focused. As part of that, I’m transforming this page of the site from a blog, which it once was, to a “news and updates” page. Unfortunately over the last several years it had become one of those mostly abandoned blogs, so I decided it would be better just to own up to the fact that this is a page where I’ll share recent work, rather than my sporadic responses to pop-culture detritus or oddball reactions to random events in my life.

As always, thanks for reading.

I had a busy 2019, though as usual you wouldn’t know it by monitoring this blog. A quick round-up of some of my favorite pieces and projects from the year:

-I had the pleasure of working with Root + All on a series of blog posts for Remake Learning, focused on the Personalized Learning Squared project, which uses artificial intelligence to help dedicated mentors overcome entrenched inequities in working with their students. I got to visit a range of interesting school programs and to talk to Ken Koedinger and Cassandra Brentley, who are spearheading PL Squared. Here’s an overview of the project, and “field reports” from Propel Homestead, UPrep, Shaler Reserve Primary School, and Elizabeth Forward School District.

-A feature story for Pitt Nurse, the magazine of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Nursing. The story covers some important and weighty subject matter and after realizing how amazing nurses are during the birth of my two daughters, it was great to talk to some nurses and nursing-school faculty members and have that impression confirmed.

-Three feature pieces for momacs, an incredible institute within Pitt’s School of Computing and Information. (“momacs” stands for “modeling and managing complicated systems.”) I was fortunate to speak with three scholars who were excellent at translating their work so a layman like me could understand it. I spoke to Tomek Loboda for a piece on probabilistic relational agent-based models; and to faculty members Seong Jae Hwang and Xulong Tang about their very interesting work at momacs.

-In 2019, too, I continued to really enjoy writing for Pitt Magazine, the University of Pittsburgh’s flagship alumni magazine. Of the work I did there, I’m especially proud of this piece on the artificial intelligence–driven work of Justin Kitzes, assistant professor of spatial macroecology. (The article explains more about what exactly spatial macroecology is!) It was also great fun to sit in on a student announcer calling a women’s soccer game that was streamed via the ESPN-affiliated ACC Network and write this “Commons Room” piece for the magazine.

-Last but not least, I was immensely pleased to begin writing for Pitt Med Magazine, the alumni publication of Pitt’s School of Medicine. The magazine has been a staple in my household for most of the last decade as my wife is a Pitt Med alumnus and I’ve always admired how interesting and engaging its stories are, even to a non-medical person like myself. Of a number of stories there, I’m especially proud of this one, “Nitty Gritty,” about some amazingly interesting research into life span versus “health span” carried out using  the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (so named because of its consummate elegance).