Cover Stories
One thing I’ve learned: go looking for fire eaters and you don’t know what you’ll find. After putting out the word that I was looking for fire eaters (I have a few, um, unique friends …
When it was announced in March that Kristin Shott, a 36-year-old welder at the Naval Air Depot on North Island, had won an award for blowing the whistle on a long history of faulty welds …
They’re young, most of them, and love teaching. They’re also hurt, many of them, and mad. They are the hundreds of teachers in San Diego County who have been laid off. This spring over 1400 …
Natasha Monahan Papousek is not Iranian. She is not Lebanese, Moroccan, Indian, or Pakistani. She lives in La Mesa, she has the red hair and pale skin of her Irish-Czech-Norwegian-American parents, but she’s a henna …
In 1940, the recently widowed and wealthy Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch bought a small estate in the Hollywood hills and sought counsel from a medium named Sardoney about her love life. Known also by his epithet …
Richard Russell makes no bones about it. He feels like an old man these days, though he won't say quite how old. The same goes for a lot of what Russell says about himself and …
But even if they were not big, they seemed to me very real and salient: there’s a breast. It was hard to imagine my flat front being sculpted into such fullness
“I can tell you up front, it’s not an addiction. Everybody says it’s an addiction, and I don’t believe that at all. It’s a sickness. Seriously.” Gary Pierwola is speaking. A retired National City cop, …
"The best thing we can do is to tell people to stay inside. They’re going to be better off there than if they tried to get out of Coronado.” This is especially true if it’s an airborne hazard.
T. Jefferson Parker stares out the window of his Fallbrook office. What he sees is eucalyptus. “And then,” he said, “beyond the eucalyptus, there’s the tangerine tree and the two orange trees and a lemon …
In an interview published in the Reader on December 16, 1999, former San Diego city councilman Bruce Henderson put his finger on the trigger clause, a loophole in the city's 1995 contract with the Chargers. …
No one seems to know where San Diego’s worst potholes are. A pothole is forgotten unless it’s driven over frequently, and then it is instinctively avoided. Drivers swerve into the next lane, then back again …
"I live a perfect life,” Lester Tenney told me. “I’ve been a very fortunate man.” We were sitting in the sunshine on his patio on Mount Soledad. Betty, his wife of over 40 years, had …
It was supposed to be a showcase for the dot-com era, dedicated to the proposition that students from kindergarten to 12th grade didn't need a "brick and mortar" school with old-fashioned teachers but instead could …
There is no night anymore. In or around cities, in suburbs and small towns, there is no night. It still gets dark, and the days still get longer or shorter. Lights are everywhere — large, …
When Judge William Mudd sentenced David Westerfield to death on January 3 of this year, Westerfield joined a special subset of San Diegans. Of the 616 inmates on California’s death row, 31, including Westerfield, were …