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Ed Puskas

Another season ends with a Cleveland World Series win

Now that the Cleveland Guardians are long out of the playoffs, I have to admit that I had a bad feeling about their wildcard series matchup against the Detroit Tigers. Sure, the Guardians’ epic comeback from a 15½-game deficit to win the division was historic and called to mind the New York Yankees’ rally from way back to catch and pass the Boston Red Sox in 1978. But the Yankees went on to win their second World Series in a row that year, while the 2025 Guardians couldn’t duplicate their late-season mastery of the Tigers that helped Cleveland win the American League Central. ...

Grand theft auto or something more comical?

We all seem to have that one friend who always gets into weird, sitcom-like situations. Their lives seem like an episode of “Three’s Company,” with all kinds of hijinks and misunderstandings. Their theme song should be “Yakety Sax,” the 1963 novelty instrumental most closely associated with the long-running UK ribald comedy series, “The Benny Hill Show.” Sometimes, I’m that friend. Who else but yours truly would order Door Dash at work, leave his phone on silent, forget about the order and then suddenly remember … only to discover a big, fat raccoon feasting on his ...

Suddenly, we’re all spouting off on free speech

EDITOR’S NOTE: This From the editor’s desk column was not published in its entirety last weekend, so the full column is being republished today. Free speech has been on the minds of many in the two-plus weeks since the assassination of conservative Christian firebrand Charlie Kirk. Fellow conservatives have framed Kirk’s murder as an act designed to chill free speech by those who shared his traditional values of God, family and country. The motives of the coward who took Kirk’s life aren’t yet fully known, but he clearly did not appreciate the message the Turning Point USA ...

Suddenly, we’re all spouting off on free speech

Free speech has been on the minds of many in the two-plus weeks since the assassination of conservative Christian firebrand Charlie Kirk. Fellow conservatives have framed Kirk’s murder as an act designed to chill free speech by those who shared his traditional values of God, family and country. The motives of the coward who took Kirk’s life aren’t yet fully known, but he clearly did not appreciate the message the Turning Point USA CEO delivered on college campuses across the United States. Some Democrats have rushed to defend their own version of free speech in the days since a ...

Where can I find the best emergency-backup pizza?

I’m sending out an SOS … for pizza. It’s not that I can’t find any. This is, after all, the Mahoning Valley and pizza is one of the things that we do better than 98.6% of the United States. But despite spending 30 years living and working here — and eating more than my share of pizza from Warren, Youngstown and various other points on the map — my pizza-loving heart belongs up north. No, not Ann Arbor, Michigan. Are you crazy? Who would spend money up there if they didn’t already live there and had no other choice? I’m talking about Jefferson, in the heart of ...

On DNA, the Mad Hungarian and where I came from

You would think that spending 40 years in a deadline-oriented business would eventually cure a case of raging procrastination. But you’d be wrong. My 40-year anniversary in newspapers is sometime in October. But after all those years of deadlines and commitments and determining what to leave in and what to leave out — apologies to Bob Seger — the notion of “why do today what you can do tomorrow?” is still sometimes problematic. So it took me more than six months to actually make use of the Ancestry DNA kit that The Princess got me for Christmas. It wasn’t so much laziness ...