Cover Stories
Buckle UpSlide into the passenger seat and buckle up: we’re about to take a driving tour down a decidedly rocky road. Yes, California’s second-largest city will always take a backseat to Los Angeles, which gave …
In the infinite flatness of southern California’s Imperial Valley, an irrigated desert of cropland and skin-frying heat, lies Calipatria State Prison, a mostly maximum-security Level IV warren of cellblocks, surrounded for miles by massive ag …
One day in late March, I got a call from Louise Wyatt. I had just interviewed her for a story on how genetic genealogy had enabled detectives to solve the murder of her daughter Michelle, …
From Disney to DareOnlyFans star Dare Taylor began posing in front of a camera when she was 18 and working as a Disney World princess. Theme park fans approached her about doing photoshoots and modeling, …
The whaleAs we pass the furthermost finger of Hospitality Point, where the cobbled jetties are populated with pelicans and cormorants, a gray whale erupts from the waters and draws sudden breath. That’s when Yippers, in …
In Tijuana, you ride the rollercoaster that is the city and then you wait in line to leave. The journey out of one of the most chaotic cities in the world culminates in an equally …
Between 2016 and 2020, San Diego County saw a 92% increase in methamphetamine-related deaths. According to the San Diego Medical Examiner’s Office, many of those deaths occurred in people over the age of 45. My …
The first time he knocked, my wife and I were brainstorming dinner ideas. He must have approached cautiously, or the creaky porch would have given him away. As it was, our conversation choked to a …
Alternative medicine has been defined as “Medical therapies not regarded as orthodox by the medical profession, such as herbalism, homeopathy, and acupuncture.” But while those practices may have been filtered out from the mainstream of …
Murphy is an eleven-year-old, second-generation golden doodle, jet black, whom my wife and I nicknamed Velcro because he sticks to our sides. Every the morning he rubs up against my wife or me, whoever gets …
On September 19,1959, six of America’s first spacemen settled in at the Kona Kai Club on San Diego’s palm-bedecked Shelter Island for a week designed to feature the Atlas rocket that would blast their Mercury …
As Lakeside fades in my rearview and Ramona’s foothills loom in before me, I inhale my surroundings. Despite 20 years of living in San Diego, my Midwestern heart has yet to normalize the Western movie …
In the Middle East of San Diego County, there lies a kind of marijuana Mecca, a place to which pot pilgrims may peregrinate on a high hajj in their quest to elevate themselves — not through …
KAHLEEI rock a dark hoodie when I walk these streets.A scribe with streaks, no heat. My steps discrete.Brass knuckles for these suckas with beef.I need graffiti in cities surrounding me to make my life complete.Photograph …
Forty years ago, in March 1982, I wrote a Reader cover story about the brutal rape and murder of a 20-year-old college student named Michelle Wyatt in her Santee condominium. Part of that story concerned …
The other night at dinner, the Young People asked the Old People, “How do you know when you’re an adult?” Your humble Editor’s answer: “When you realize that life is no longer play that gets …