Jonathan Barnes at Barnestorming thinks Pittsburgh should get over its embarrassing lack of self confidence, which was on full display when some in the national press snickered as Pittsburgh was chosen to host the September G-20 meeting:

"The snickering was news in Pittsburgh for several print and TV news cycles. Maybe that small-town, smoky-city feeling is tough to overcome here.

"Perhaps it's surprising that some here in Pittsburgh, the City of Champions, home of the Super Bowl Steelers and the Stanley Cup Penguins, are a bit insecure about our city's current place in the world. We are prone to perceive insults, and to detect snobbery of Big City press, like working class kids at a prep school party. We try to impress too hard sometimes."

Latest example cited by Mr. Barnes: City official Kristen Baginski's remarks at the recent International Bridge Conference, where "she waxed about the [marketing] opportunity presented by the upcoming G-20 summit."

Mike Madison on Pittsblog says "the little brouhaha over appointments to Pittsburgh's Stadium Authority and Zoning Board of Adjustment portends bad things for the city." Citing the substantial land-use experience of the two outgoing members and the paucity of similar experience of the two incoming members, Mr. Madison comments:

"It's not just that by making personal loyalty a sine qua non of service on a city board, the mayor echoes the worst traits of government at any and every level [and indirectly questions the integrity of all remaining board and commission members. Well done!].

"It's possible, in theory, to align loyalty and competence in personal appointments. Here, though, the mayor shows that he just doesn't care about the competence side. When the G-20 leaders show up, will they find a more or less new, gleaming, recovering city -- with a musty, old-style city government at its core? My earlier Oreo cookie metaphor for Pittsburgh takes on an additional life. Impressive on the outside, mushy and forgettable on the inside."

Geographer Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora notes this defense of suburbs from New Geography:

"Progressives clearly feel a need to delegitimize suburban life. This stems from their barely suppressed rage against people they can't control. Like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, suburban people have strayed too far from civilization, they contend, and will lose their minds. Yet they fail to explain why surveys indicate an overwhelming preference for detached housing on sizeable blocks, or why the latest Australian Unity Wellbeing Index registers higher rates of happiness amongst suburban people than their inner-city counterparts."

Journalist Anthony Shadid worries at ForeignPolicy.com that the U.S. public is paying too little attention to Iraq now even though the country could blow apart as U.S. forces withdraw:

"Like 2003, everything is in play, as the country's forces -- the men around Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, sectarian Shiite parties, remnants of the Sunni Awakening, the Kurds, the street movement of Moqtada Sadr and so on -- try to figure out the grand coalition that can make power stick as the Americans ostensibly leave.

"For the first time in years, [due to reduced violence] we can cover that struggle, fought on a landscape as confusing, complicated and nuanced as it was after the invasion. Sadly, there are far fewer journalists to do it, a fraction of the hundreds who arrived in 2003 with the Americans. As an administration, as journalists, as a public, we are disengaged from Iraq, and nothing short of another foreign invasion will probably change that. We are withdrawing, in more ways than one, even as the mud gets wetter."

Emily Raboteau takes a tour of civil rights sites in the South and recounts in Oxford American this story from "journey specialist" Joanne Bland in Selma, Ala.:

"By the time I was 11 years old, I'd been to jail 13 times. They'd stick 40 or more of us children into a cell meant for two. They fed us dry beans with rocks as punishment for demonstrating to get our parents the right to vote. They meant to break our spirit. You have to understand how many foot soldiers of the movement were children, and that the movement was a revolution. We were at war. There isn't a slab of marble big enough to fit the names of all the ordinary people who fought. Follow me."