Cover Stories
“A lifetime of provocation!” Defense attorney Bradley Patton, facing the jury, throws his arms wide to indicate what he calls “the spectrum of the relationship.” It is the first week of June 1993. The final …
Visiting the Tijuana dump is no different from visiting a friend at work. It is, after all, a factory. And the trash-pickers are busy — too busy to worry about lazy gringos wandering about.
Lorenzo Milam’s home sits at the edge of a deep canyon from where wild mustard floods up to his back yard. The mustard’s yellow edges up to willows, purple irises, to the red, pink, and …
Colin Wyatt suggests I talk with his colleague at Petoseed, Paul Thomas. Thomas is best known as breeder of gardeners’ now 30-year-old favorite, Better Boy. He also developed the tomato marketed locally as the San Diego Hybrid.
“Baseball in the ’50s, early ’60s.... Ted Williams was finishing and Mickey Mantle was starting and I got to see it. Willie Mays was starting, Stan Musial was finishing. Don Drysdale was pitching and Sandy Koufax was pitching."
“It’s a favorite dumpster raiding spot. People out wandering, it’s something you get used to. It’s not that I want to choose that lifestyle, but it’s not that I don’t want it around me either.”
Schwartz-Nobel responds that she took Betty’s word “on faith — because from my perspective, What was important here was not whether [Linda] was 19 or 21, but what was underneath. What really happened to these people....”
My thoughts drift to the squirrel woman. Where did she get those bruises? Where is she sleeping tonight? The other people. The little artist I met this morning, probably passing this night on El Cajon Boulevard.
These people have been among us for centuries. They can be found, emerging from the coal mines of a Zola novel, reaping the season’s harvest in a Millet painting, in any number of works by Van Gogh.
At the height of my ambition, I could write 12 or 14 hours straight. Afterward, I’d collapse and daydream while my mind decelerated. I might relive old times, check in on lost friends, brood about …
The house of death in Tijuana is the color of dusty bubble gum. Just off the Plaza Club de Leones, with its cathedral-like tower, where Revolucion curves away to the north, SEMEFO, the one-story coroner's …
The Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard seems at first an unlikely venue for a major alternative conference dealing with the “Truth About UFOs” — or to give it its proper title, the National New …
STREET GAMES The streets north of Tijuana’s Avenida Juarez are not the kind of neighborhood for people like me. So when I have reasons to walk there, I always learn things. Some of the things …
Imagine an eight-year-old English boy arriving at LAX for the first time in his life. Having taken off from a freezing, raining London, he arrives 14 hours later to a freezing, raining Los Angeles. He …
Plaintiffs’ personal injury attorneys have been called the entrepreneurs of adversity. It is they who initiate lawsuits on behalf of those who claim injuries for which the law awards money damages. The attorneys are entrepreneurial …
My connection, as it were, called to inform me there might be a "slight problem" with delivery because she was going out of town. To a "Southwestern beach resort." For her family's annual eight-day pheasant …