Cover Stories
On Halloween 2009, around 7:00 p.m., a sugar-crazed group of costumed children and their adult chaperones works its way through one of those North County neighborhoods where the rows of prim two-story homes are painted …
Memories of my decade in Normal Heights came stumbling back when I received the following email from my old friend Hank, who still lives there: “Yo, I want to apologize for my rant yesterday. I …
When I signed my son up for dance and deportment lessons, I didn’t tell him. For one thing, it was called Mr. Benjamin’s Cotillion, and I couldn’t shake the image of Mr. Benjamin Bunny, Peter …
“They’re coming…” Carla stares at the computer screen. Her face is like a little girl’s. “That they’d come all this way,” she says, “just for my birthday. I can’t believe it.” I’m reading the email …
Inside the Live Wire, it was dark and dingy, and the music was cranked to 11, just the way I remembered the place. Only half of the six red vinyl booths were occupied. Five friends …
1. Beginnings When Miles the wannabe novelist sets out for his winey holiday in Sideways — the film that did for California Pinot Noir what E.T. did for Reese’s Pieces (kids, ask your parents) — …
At 3:39 a.m. on January 7, 2007, Columbia Street was almost deserted. Little Italy had been plagued with car burglaries — “It got where you couldn’t drive too many of the streets down there without …
Afra Khan, a grad student who recently emigrated from Hyderabad, India, wears jeans and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt that says SDSU across the front. Before I spend an afternoon with her in a tiny two-bedroom …
Brandon Stockwell, a film student at SDSU, climbs to the top of the border fence south of Campo and examines the rolling desert ridges of rural Mexico. The day is bright, the winter air clean …
From the Killing Fields to the Noodle House When Mark Lau was ten years old, he couldn’t add one plus one. On the day he began the fourth grade at Adams Elementary School in City …
November 21, 2009 — A gold-rimmed sea serpent undulates around a trident along the end of the narrow blue flag as it ripples in the morning breeze that blows across the gopher-pocked green of Lakeside’s …
I look at my boyfriend with such anger, but I feel a little sympathy too, as I notice a part of his chin dripping with blood. Tears stream down my face. I am scared out …
“It’s not for most people; I wouldn’t recommend it.” I asked Johnny and a selection of other freeway-side dwellers around San Diego County: With all the choices available in “America’s Finest City” (and outskirts), why …
We put out the call, “Tell us your HOA horror stories,” and you came back in your millions. Okay, your dozens. Okay, nearly a dozen. The issue was courage. How could people report on the …
The stucco-and-tile façade of the Chee Chee bar glares blackly out onto Broadway; inside, the stale air is tinged purple. A half-dozen men hunch over the bar; four of them are drinking from 24-oz. tallboys …
In the early 1970s, my late grandfather, an artist and retired San Diego State art professor, took me camping to a beautiful and remote setting along Baja’s northwest coast. While exploring the peninsula’s back roads, …