Cover Stories
The unsmiling man in the Hawaiian shirt takes your money.
Most stories begin with a person or an event. This one begins with a book. Last summer I read The Brain That Changes Itself by research psychiatrist and psychologist Norman Doidge, M.D., which discusses developments …
In each of the last three years, there were roughly 17,000 murders in the United States. Of these, about 11 percent were committed by women. In most cases women kill to defend themselves during a …
Half of a “nutrition bar” sat before me on the wobbly café table. I couldn’t eat the rest because it was oily yet granular but also couldn’t force myself to throw it out. I had …
Grace Carroll is the kind of girl you’d trust for a scoop on the San Diego scene. She’s pretty, blonde, smart. She tends bar in one of La Jolla’s hottest restaurants, where the clientele isn’t …
On a Saturday spring morning, in a small fenced-in backyard in San Marcos, 40 or so rather dangerous-looking men (and a few women and children) have gathered to celebrate arm wrestler Harold “the Rattlesnake” Ryden’s …
March 6 started out pretty much like any other day. Work was busy. I got off a little late, went home, got in the shower, and when I got out, my son Marshal told me …
The Sunrise Powerlink gleamed for the first time in Sempra Energy’s eye on November 1, 2002. At the company’s San Diego headquarters, an energy-management expert from Shell Trading gave a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the potential …
We don’t see each other much, and we’ve maintained the loosest of contacts over the 30-plus years we’ve known each other. I hadn’t heard from him for about 3 years when he called me last …
Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Turkey, the Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Guyana, and Eritrea
Being in the Navy seems like the perfect time to be single. Sailors are young, many just out of high school. They’re always traveling the world. Reaching a foreign port is one of the craziest …
Perhaps the most prized piece of real estate throughout the University of California, San Diego, is the seven-acre site of University House, home to the UCSD chancellor. The rambling adobe home, with its row of …
“First of all,” says Dave Huie, “it should really be called the exotic fish hobby, not the tropical fish hobby.” Beneath his glasses, Huie’s face is scrunched into a look of bemusement. “Although, even that …
The two small Victorian homes on 20th Street in Sherman Heights that Louise Torio and her husband Steve Veach have restored are examples of how the Mills Act can benefit the owners, their neighborhood, and …
People Buy You Booze D. is dressed as if he is off to the ComicCon or a Clockwork Orange theme party: boots laced up to his knees, raggedy black and red clothes, an old leather …
I never wanted to move to Scripps Ranch — not with its swarming real-estate agents and white-bread, attend-the-church-of-your-choice ethos, its compliant shrubs, its matrons in SUVs, that whole lifeless suburban drone. And where the hell …