Artist Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ served as my proper introduction to the meaning of free speech. Serrano, a Catholic, intended it to be a comment on the commercialization of Christian icons — the …

Look for the online list of Best Of voting winners soon. We have printed and re-stocked extra copies of this week's print version where the Best Of voting winners are listed. Best place in San …

I started writing for the Reader 25 years ago; Joseph Mitchell is one of the big reasons why I wanted to do so. The summer before my senior year of college, I visited Thidwick’s Books …

Just under a year ago, I was given the honor of working as the Reader’s theater critic. For a while, I joked that God was so horrified at the prospect that he killed the entire …

Cheerleading Is More Dangerous than Fighting Cage-fightin’ rock stars. It’s Wednesday at 1:00 p.m., and I am waiting for amateur mixed martial arts fighter Jaime Reyes at the Lakeside Cafe. When he walks past me, …

Winding my way up La Mesa’s Mount Nebo on a Sunday morning, I wound up on the Summit Drive cul-de-sac. All but one of the houses sported a tasteful Biden/Harris 2020 sign in the front …

The pale blue, two-story stucco and cinderblock building squats in a parking lot along Broadway in Lemon Grove between a Walgreen’s and an Eyeglass World. It houses Rock Liquor (Beer Wine Grocery) and a Western …

The Ugly Trailer Park Across the Water Beauty and the blight on Mission Bay. Cityzella terrorizes humble trailer folk at De Anza Cove. By Ollie, Sept. 14, 2011 | Read full article What am I …

Church on Sunday? If not, did you ever wonder why people do? One man's search for Christianity's core. By Matthew Lickona, April 8, 2009 | Read the full article Joy to the Screen Isn’t the …

On August 27, San Diego’s chapter of Black Lives Matter held a protest in the Poway cul de sac that is home to San Diego Chief of Police David Nisleit. The “black women and femmes” …

“What I was doing before wasn’t nearly as cool,” says Jeff Coleman, CEO of BrainLeap Technologies, the company he co-founded with his wife, UCSD researcher Leanne Chukoskie and her colleague, UCSD professor Jeanne Townsend. “This …

Amy Lowell: Selected Poems "I've had amazing experiences since I started working on this, saying to people 'Amy Lowell,' and they say, 'Oh, I love Amy Lowell.' Or, 'When I was young, I always read …

“Right now, people who come here with no masks, with no distancing, are being irresponsible, and they could get sick — deathly sick — and die. We have to get tough, and I’m telling you, …

Maple muse “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” — W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” “And you know something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” — Bob Dylan, “Ballad …

What Windansea surfers said about Tom Wolfe Eight summers have drifted by since Tom Wolfe (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) traveled to California to write a series on “The New Life Out There” …

No cross tops the spire attached to the Legacy International Center, Christian evangelist Morris Cerullo’s new, nearly $200 million campus in the heart of Mission Valley. Instead, the spire’s gray façade, set among limestone blocks …

A big white banner hangs on the La Mesa Police Department’s headquarters; the blue letters read, “We are one strong community.” There is something to the claim of community. It was impressive to see people, …

I was late to the protest in La Mesa on Saturday night. I hadn’t intended to go at all — what could I possibly add that social media and TV news would not have covered? …

Ice cream is a sauce. I’m not going to refer you to Webster’s or any such thing, just so I can hear you protest that sauces are, by definition, fluid. First, because I stopped trusting …

AV Builder Corp President Tony Madureira is frustrated, and not just because he doesn’t have enough general contracting work for his employees during the shutdown. “I picked up some takeout fast food the other day,” …

The Ugly Trailer Park Across the Water Cityzella terrorizes humble trailer folk at De Anza Cove. By Ollie, Sept. 14, 2011 What am I doing in Eastlake? I'm telling you it's a trap. And we're …

There Is One God "The equality of all people and all religions is central to our faith. We didn't want to seem as though we were saying, 'No! We're not Muslims! Don't attack us! Those …

Gather ‘round, my children. I want you to hear what a success story sounds like. It begins with a challenge; sometimes, that challenge is a crisis. “It was supposed to be a simple gall bladder …

So, my dear family, here we are. We’ve found a limit: the number at which you can’t necessarily hold a single conversation together at table. But I’m going to propose a topic anyway: something you’ve …

Author Jordan Kisner’s recently released essay collection Thin Places: Essays from In Between takes its title from a Celtic proverb that says, “Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places …

Tiny rooms in Little Italy On a Little Italy plot where a Victorian house stood for more than a century, construction of tiny apartments is underway. The house, built in the 1890s at the corner …

Did you ever hear the one about the guy who started up a new gig as a theater critic right as a global pandemic made public gatherings immoral and possibly even illegal? No? Just as …

My wife is afraid of the family dog, a Shih Tzu-Jack Russell named Oreo who arrived 10 years ago after our neighbor rescued Oreo’s pregnant mother and my eight-year-old daughter got a look at the …

I spotted the poster for the 2020 San Diego Comic Fest during a visit to Gelato Vero last December. Or rather, I spotted Bill Sienkiewicz’s name on the poster; he was to be this year’s …

Here, in the third show of its ninth season, the Oceanside Theatre Company decided to do something they hadn’t done before, not even during their first-ever musical, last year’s Man of La Mancha: big production …

My friend Bill used to pay for the NFL Sunday Ticket. Then, “in January of 2017, the Chargers announced they were leaving, the Patriots won the Super Bowl again, and I said, ‘That’s it. I’m …

Kid, the handsome, frenetic young trans writer surprised by a visit from his father Grey at the outset of Sylvan Oswald’s A Kind of Weather, is not the play’s main character. This is not a …

A San Diego Charger football game is one thing, fandom is something elseSilva's powder blue coffin was trimmed with gold — Charger colors. His body was dressed in a jersey honoring his favorite player, Lance …

There are many amusing moments in Madeleine George’s Hurricane Diane. That's to be expected, given its premise: sending the Greek god Dionysus — here rendered as the butch lesbian Diane — on a mission to …

Does Christmas offend you? Christmas has to start with the Jews, I guess, no matter where you start. It was Jews who were killed by Herod and Jews who were chased into Egypt by him, …

Playwright August Wilson is rightly celebrated for his wordsmithing — or maybe word-weaving would be better, or word-spinning. The talk that animates his late-’70s work Jitney (though it wasn’t produced until 1996) doesn’t feel worked-over …

Nobody watched the Oscars on February 9. But lots of people watched Connie Sundstrom at the San Diego Film Foundation’s Oscar Party, held this year in four ninth-floor penthouses at 41 West in Banker’s Hill. …

Luke Halmay started fishing with his father Peter when he was still a kid. “He’d take us to San Clemente Island, Catalina. Now, he won’t even go to the beach.” Forty-odd years of commercial fishing …

Rob Lufty’s “From the Director” letter in the program for Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap notes that “Lauren often talks about how every playwright has one basic story that they are trying to perfect with …

No full review this week, but I did stop by Jitney at the Old Globe and Italian-American Reconciliation at Scripps Ranch Theatre. Cheers!

Grabby headline, no? Not quite as gloriously specific as “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar,” but still eye-catching. And catching eyes is how you stay alive in these dread latter days of content overload. So, …

G. K. Chesterton, in his poem The Ballad of the White Horse, famously wrote that “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry and all …

Rancho Peñasquitos boys, charged with hate crime The teenagers shot at Roman from the Subaru with the BB gun during three or four passes. They took turns shooting at him as they drove by, but …

San Diego Repertory Theatre’s production of Stephen Karam’s The Humans does a good deal of stage-setting before you even take your seat. A display by the box office provides “a behind-the scenes glimpse of the …

Brad Taylor does his homework. Twenty-one years in the Army (including eight with Delta Force) is an education in itself, but it’s research that has helped make his Pike Logan novels bestsellers. “Newsfeeds,” he told …

On January 10, University of San Diego law professor Steven Smith shared a lunchtime lecture stage at the American Enterprise Institute with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and novelist/reporter Tara Isabella Burton. The topic …

Toward the end of the Nervous Theatre’s production of Jean Genet’s The Maids — which, by the time you read this, will have departed for Seattle after a one-weekend run at the Tenth Avenue Arts …

Permit me a wry grimace as I imagine theatrical legend Alec Guinness’ reaction upon learning that a theater critic’s first memory of him — of any sort of performance, really — came from Star Wars. …

Book-lovers chew the fat at the Mission Hills Library His watch tells him 6:45. This Mission Hills branch stays open tonight — it’s Monday. He slaps the book closed, reshelves it, glances to his left. …

Sister Santa’s once-a-year smile I fell in love with America for the first time on a sweaty night in a Bangkok refugee center in March 1991. “In America people have meat with every meal,” my …