He liked his peanut butter and banana sandwiches grilled in butter. He wouldn't sunbathe without an electric fan blowing directly on his body. He saw the faces of Stalin and Jesus in cloud formations. These …

At the bottom of San Diego Bay, in the shadow of a huge SDG&E power station in Chula Vista, lives a colony of endangered sea turtles. They have been present, more or less, since the …

Allan Reta remembers October 14 as a night that was neither warm nor cool. He was standing in the front yard of his San Marcos home, holding his baby daughter in his arms. They had …

I AM SITTING AT TULIE TREJO’S kitchen table, watching her make gingerbread men and thinking about a story I read in the newspaper this morning. It was about a woman who allowed her boyfriend to …

Perhaps we're overreacting, but the idea of bullets flying through the wall of the San Diego Indoor Range earlier this month disturbed us. After all, someone could have gotten hurt. As it was, only a …

Rain is not good weather in which to take a bus tour of San Diego. The color of the air changes, and the crisp edges fall off trees, billboards, bodies of water. Windshield wipers sound …

It’s hard to watch the Stanley Tonight show without asking yourself at some point, “Is this guy for real?” Talk-show hosts are odd, as a rule, and Stanley Siegel is the excess to the rule. …

MEN, READ NO FURTHER. THIS STORY CONTAINS THINGS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, things you probably don’t care about anyway. The heaviness of face cream has never been a big concern of yours, for example. Coating one’s …

Sam Spital. He’s the attorney who advertises on television all the time, the one who asks in all sincerity if you’ve been in an auto accident lately. San Diegans may not be familiar with U.S. …

When Jeff Ward was seven years old, he could draw a map of the world from memory, correctly filling in the names of all the countries. Now that he’s in his forties, he entertains himself …

The following objects in Pernicanos Pizza House arce red: the candles, the booths, the cloth roses, the lamps, the waitresses’ shirts and aprons, the Chianti, and parts of the pizzas. The plastic tablecloths are red-and-white …

Life has its ugly little secrets, and sometimes it exposes them prematurely, before a pragmatic philosophy gleaned from age can act as insulation. One of these cruel insights: While an emptied spot in a romance …