Cover Stories
It’s Hard to Eat With a Paper Bag Over My Head by Naomi Wise I arrived in San Diego nine years ago, a well-spoiled food snob coming down (pun intended) from San Francisco like the …
“Single mom seeks same to share my home,” Christine Bevilacqua’s Craigslist ad reads. “$700 includes all utilities, laundry, internet, [satellite] TV, master bedroom and bathroom. Depressed, uptight, or lazy women need not apply.” Bevilacqua isn’t …
"There’s some petroglyphs over in Pinto Canyon," Frank said as he passed me on the trail. Frank Johnson, a handsome 75-year-old man, with flowing white hair and a superb knowledge of hiking trails, is something …
“I couldn’t believe it,” says the veteran San Diego lifeguard. “A kid shouted, ‘Hey, look!’ And I saw two of them with their parents, and I suddenly realized, oh my God. On a day like …
Before visiting San Diego's Zirk Ubu, the last time I'd gone to the circus, I'd walked out with 50 pounds of elephant dung in a cardboard box on my shoulder.
A new view of the Middle East in local news coverage?
“Don’t,” says my stepmother. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” Her voice is tinny through the speakers of my cell phone. “Why not?” I ask. She pauses, considering. “The whole thing just sounds…dangerous,” …
I’ve been gone a long time. When I wake up in the morning and look out my window, the deep topaz sky over Carmel Valley is so inviting. Palm fronds clack at my window, beckoning …
There are times, sometimes in the midst of otherwise polite conversation, when it comes out that I make my living writing for the Reader. The follow-up to this revelation is almost never “Oh, that’s right, …
Our man finds a network of others like him: the World Superhero Registry
One man's search for Christianity's core.
Life in Tijuana goes on. The buses run, people go to work, kids go to school, traffic still jams the city’s arteries. But something has changed in the last year or so: the city’s residents …
I’m sitting on a leather couch in the middle of a darkened black-walled, black-ceilinged room talking to a man who, at taxpayer expense, takes hormones to become more like a woman yet is in the …
In the 2001 film Rock Star, former rapper and underwear model Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg fronts a tribute band that pays sonic homage to his favorite hard rockers, Steel Dragon. He takes the gig so …
The Hell’s Angel takes me aside. It’s 10:00, Saturday night. A bunch of them stand around outside their headquarters by a row of angle-parked Harleys, here where Palm meets El Cajon Boulevard. ”Look, we’ve had …
Here’s what you need to know before I begin this story. (A) I’d spent the week prior to all this camping out at an arts festival at which I’d inundated myself with an alphabet of …