"Moore wants more," I would joke to myself.Busy Fingers Are Happy Fingers — Joe DeeganI couldn't find an angle to get my story started, I told her. "Forget all about angles," she then said with …
May 12, 2026
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Stories by Thomas Larson
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Judith Moore's tough-fisted regime at the Reader
Reader writers – music that shaped their lives
The Woes Of A Woman In Love — Barbarella....We've reached the end of the line. I hope your dreams turn out fine.Notes Give Pathos to Clouds — Laura McNeal.... I played Beethoven's sonatas until the …
May 5, 2026
The sad life of Mark Twain's daughter ends in Mission Beach
In 1940, the recently widowed and wealthy Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch bought a small estate in the Hollywood hills and sought counsel from a medium named Sardoney about her love life. Known also by his epithet …
April 20, 2026
Unlikely murder of Voice and Viewpoint publisher
In September 2003, Brian Burritt rode the elevator down to the basement of the San Diego Police Department where the "murder books," the binders of the department's cold cases, many decades old, are kept in …
March 9, 2026
Marilyn Monroe becomes Coronado icon
The Reader has started this series of its best stories from the past 52 years — 2600 cover stories and some remarkable interior features — to help make up for the loss of its physical …
February 19, 2026
What makes the light in San Diego different?
The Reader has started this series of its best stories from the past 52 years — 2600 cover stories and some remarkable interior features — to help make up for the loss of its physical …
Writer Jim Thompson – San Diego's metaphysical Okie
Solar Aircraft Company during World War II. "An average of only one out of 25 applicants is given a job, and fully a fourth of those are discharged during or at the end of the …
August 29, 2025
More good writers in San Diego than you thought
God’s Country RememberedMy wife and I are driving up El Cajon Boulevard. It hasn’t changed much, not really. Businesses come and go (there wasn’t anything remotely like the Hung Vuong Pho restaurant back then), but …
August 25, 2025
Can faith melt ICE?
The website for Our Lady of Guadalupe parish describes the church this way: “Founded in 1917, Our Lady of Guadalupe is a Jesuit parish in San Diego, whose mission is to accompany, inspire, and educate …
August 21, 2025
Parole and possibility in the Andy Williams case
Last September, San Diego’s most notorious school shooter had his first parole hearing. On March 5, 2001, 15-year-old Charles Andrew “Andy” Williams, used a stolen .22-caliber revolver to kill two of his fellow students and …
April 16, 2025
What Is the Whole Story?
For a couple of decades now, I’ve worked in the memoir trade — writing about the form, teaching and facilitating the craft to hundreds, and yes, actually writing one of my own. My students were …
February 12, 2025
Now what can they do with Encinitas unstable cliffs?
Life guardsAt the top of the Grandview stairway sits a bench, dedicated to the memory of the three women who died under the weight of a 50-ton blockfall in 2019. In a late-July meetup, Dr. …
November 20, 2024
Fateful picnic at Grandview beach in Encinitas
The cliff collapseOn August 2, 2019, at around 1 pm, Dr. J. Patrick Davis, his wife, Julie Davis, Julie’s sister, Elizabeth Charles Cox, and Pat and Julie’s daughter, Annie Davis Clave — all three of …
November 13, 2024
The Pete Wilson legacy in 30 pieces
1. No California politician gets more blame for the denigration of the migrant than Peter Barton Wilson, now 91, last century’s Mr. San Diego. Now, in a political year that has been inflamed by another crisis at …
May 8, 2024
New San Diego dads run to therapists
Many fathers, including myself, know the feeling: a strange and heady mix of joy, wonder, and fear, brought on by the first meeting with our progeny. We went into the hospital as supportive partners for …
February 14, 2024
Six-week prep school at Miramar for therapy dogs
It’s an evening in early October, and Charli King, co-founder of Pawsitive Teams, is opening a new class for dog owners, canines in tow, who aspire to help people in need. That need is great …
January 10, 2024
Padres bribe city council
Masters of DeceitPadres' bribes of councilwoman Valerie Stallings“On December 14, 1999, despite urgings from the San Diego Taxpayers Association and others to delay its vote, the city council voted to push ahead with bonds for …
November 27, 2023
San Diego book clubs – only for girls?
San Diego book clubs – what's the point?Perhaps it’s the idea of the book club book that we find unbearable. It brings to mind that women’s marketing motto, “Pink it and shrink it.” Pink it: …
November 26, 2023
Blood purity fight among Pala Mission Indians
Pala tribe cuts dissident members off rollsThe cited cause of tribal disenrollment is a blood-purity dispute. All 164 disenrolled members are relatives of the late Margarita Brittain, a woman whose lineage has long been questioned …
November 4, 2023
Alleys are San Diego's last frontier
A tour of San Diego alleysJack Whalen hands me a beer. “I’m king of this alley,” Whalen says, then points west. “Down there, the king of that next alley is Tom Sweet. He’s 97.” Whalen …
October 16, 2023
Stick figures of men and a tall sailing ship – close to the Mexican border
Pictographs of Cabrillo's San Salvador east of Jacumba"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 …
October 15, 2023
Border Angels strew water bottles for migrants
Border angelsI wanted to learn about a group called Border Angels that, among other things, sets out water in the desert areas of the 66-mile San Diego sector. Usually, gallon bottles of water are placed …
October 7, 2023
Mercy Air's intrepid pilots
Board up and go"What had happened was one of the SANDAG tow truck drivers had stopped to help this fellow and the guy had shot him. Four or five or six times. A Marine saw …
September 25, 2023
Mark Twain's daughter ends up tragically in San Diego
Decent men elude Mark Twain’s daughterDespite Clemens’s preferring one daughter over the others, all three sisters experienced the frequently tyrannical side of their father. Caroline Harnsberger, Clara’s biographer, has written that Clemens’s daughters were afraid …
September 18, 2023
San Diego's rare fruit and vegetable growers
• Stephen Facciola's edible worldHe and Caplan started to swap names, to compare notes on big players in the exotic fruits and vegetables community. (“I’m sure you’re acquainted with Paul Thomas in …
September 2, 2023
The San Diego look, according to painters
What distinguishes San Diego landscape to paintersIn Coronado one day, after lunch with a friend, he went into a CD shop while his friend waited outside on a bench. When Crooks came out, he noticed …
August 27, 2023
How will the Padres fix Gallagher Square?
Daniel Hendy, in his book Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, writes of the aural confusion in an airport terminal, “its burbled announcements, the steady tread of feet on linoleum floors, the squeak …
August 23, 2023
There are two Sorrento Valleys
Sorrento Valley lacks stickiness It’s among the safest of neighborhoods. A glance at crime statistics shows negligible amounts in Sorrento Valley proper (most months: no murder, no rape, 20 nonresidential burglaries). The place is either …
May 1, 2023
Poolside shooting near UTC involving Selis and Wilf clans
University City massacre done by developer family donor They are the crème de crème of San Diego business and political society, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to both Democrats and Republicans, and in turn …
March 20, 2023
San Diego State math guy, South Bay realtor, North Coast Rep actor, UCSD cognitive scientist
The first thing you realize once you start investigating “intelligence” is that it seems like no two people — people whose personalities, abilities, capacities, and traits are as different as their DNA — use the …
February 8, 2023
Nathanael West killed near El Centro
Almost Beautiful: the death in El Centro of Nathanael West, one of America’s most mordant authors Fifteen minutes ago, a bit after 2:30, they started driving north from the grand, desert-white De Anza Hotel in …
January 14, 2023
Will you understand this Murrieta and Lemon Grove casual killer?
In the infinite flatness of southern California’s Imperial Valley, an irrigated desert of cropland and skin-frying heat, lies Calipatria State Prison, a mostly maximum-security Level IV warren of cellblocks, surrounded for miles by massive ag …
August 31, 2022
San Diego crime boss gunned down on Lamont St.
How Frank Bompensiero met his fate "Bomp kicked the door shut, Mirabile wrapped his arms around Borgia just as Jimmy dropped the garrote over his head, handing the other end of the rope to Bompensiero. …
July 17, 2022
USD students look back at high school, the campus's Catholicism
Class Struggle “We had a lot of cliques at my school. There were the drama kids, and we had a group we actually called the Clique. It was just the people that seemed to party …
February 7, 2022
Judith Moore feels her daughters' pain, Reader writer marries Cynthis Heimel
Lines of Love, Lines of Pain We lived by the hospital. I heard sirens every day. When both girls were with me in the house, I felt a smug assurance when I heard the sirens …
January 30, 2022
Where is San Diego's local news going now?
It’s been a couple years since the alt-weekly San Diego CityBeat and its blend of local news, irreverent columns, and cultural coverage went silent. The paper disappeared after a cascade of events, starting when Times …
I-15 mimics L.A traffic, when there were quail in Bonita
Traffic spares no one “People say, ‘You got a real transportation problem on the 15.’ Well, it’s less a transportation problem than it is a land-use problem. A lot of the people, because they can’t …
January 24, 2022
Nathanael West, Jim Thompson, Max Miller
Janet, My Mother, and Me “We went out to Belmont, and Harry couldn’t stop picking winners. We went to the 21 Club for dinner, and we scalped tickets for a Broadway musical in the fourth …
November 20, 2021
Where do San Diego’s ex-Christians go?
Sojourn Grace Collective’s Pastor Colby Martin has “a love/hate relationship with the Bible.”Photograph by Matthew SuárezChristianity in America is waning. In 2016, only 26 percent of weddings took place in a church, which seems to …
September 1, 2021
The Hemet-San Diego State commute, bulldozing Mexicans out of central Escondido
Chinaberry Farm: Finding Home Half our belongings still packed in the barn, paths form a quotidian maze between stacked boxes. The house livable, anyway. A rat takes up residence in Cindy’s paintings stored in the …
July 12, 2021
Jack Kemp and the fugitive, U.S. Grant's son, Seals ambivalent about Jesse Ventura
Kemp and the Fugitive Fotomat also gave Graham a political base. One of the first beneficiaries was Jack Kemp. On May 23, 1968, the San Diego Union reported that Kemp had “joined Fotomat Corp., La …
July 5, 2021
San Diego stupid
Sign of the Times: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla, written and published privately in 1976 and reissued in April, is a sudden bestseller. Hardly unexpected, given the times. If you’ve …
June 30, 2021
San Diego's worst white collar crime these days
White-collar criminals come in all sizes and styles, but they share a motive: to steal money. Anyone’s stash will do. According to the FBI, they are experts at “deceit, concealment, [and] violation of trust.” Of …
May 5, 2021
SEALs talk war atrocities, Rolling Stone embeds at Camp Pendleton
A Soldier's Pay Bradley is an animated woman of 36, whose tousled long black hair and French accent give her an exotic cast. When I acknowledge her accent, she replies, “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m from …
February 27, 2021
Will sand save San Diego North County's bluffs?
The Sand at EncinitasJayme Timberlake — tide-watcher, restoration ecologist, avid surfer — light-foots it down Encinitas’s iconic Stone Steps. She’s barefoot, having kicked off her shoes and left them on the sand-dusted floor of her …
January 13, 2021
San Diego's shadiest characters: John Moores, David Malcolm, Dick Silberman
UCSD, Big Money, and the Ball Club When Gray Davis appointed Padres owner John Moores to the Board of Regents of the University of California, Dynes said, “I’m really looking forward to working with him…I’m …
January 4, 2021
San Diego's gay bathhouses, wild life of our foreign cabbies, best light in the city
Bathhouse Quagmire "I was in those San Francisco bathhouses in the late 1970s," says James Hartline, an HIV-positive Hillcrest man who is campaigning to get San Diego's three bathhouses shut down. "Those bathhouses were a …
November 23, 2020
Border Angels, being Muslim in San Diego, what's a green card worth?
Border Angels "We know the kind of people we catch here. They're horrible people." The Border Patrol agent's tone was no more than blandly informative. It was 7:00 p.m. July 16, and we were at …
November 14, 2020
Tijuana country club kidnapping, shootout near school, nostalgia for Jai Alai, casino, racetrack
Don't look now Abduction and murder at T.J.’s Camp Campestre Under normal circumstances, it would be difficult not to stare at ten men dressed in black who brandished submachine guns. Under normal circumstances, ten men …
November 9, 2020
Local rocker Chris Squire troubles, intimate murder, abortionist Bertha Bugarin
He Should Have Known Better It had been another sleepless night for Chris Squire, pedaling around San Diego delivering drugs. When the sun rolled into the sky on August 14, 2006, he knew he was …
November 2, 2020