It’s an August midafternoon in El Cajon. It’s 100 degrees, and the sane people are in the shade, keeping still. Not Mike Davis. For an hour, the most famous social historian of Southern California has …
October 16, 2003
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Stories by Thomas Larson
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Mike Davis's Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See
Marilyn Monroe acts in Some Like It Hot at the Hotel Del Coronado
“There was no connection. No more mystery to it than that. She was not the kind of woman a sex bomb is supposed to be, and it wore her out. She never found anyone who understood her.”
September 4, 2003
Some San Diego military families go hungry
It may be the ultimate irony of the conflict with Iraq that to glimpse the difficult home lives of our soldiers, their spouses, and their children, America needs a foreign war. And even as those …
August 21, 2003
North County's sex slaves: Palomar Airport Road in Carlsbad, next to strawberry fields in Carlsbad, and next to San Luis Rey River
In April 2001, 15-year-old Reina was leaving her home in Tenancingo, a high-plateau town west of Mexico City. She was happier than she’d been in a while, traveling north to Tijuana, in the company of …
August 7, 2003
Decent men elude Mark Twain’s child – she ends up at Bahia 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 …
May 8, 2003
El Cajon Mojo Master Lectures Spielberg
It was no accident, said San Diego clairvoyant Dr. James Capers, that movie mogul and occult aficionado Steven Spielberg attended his lecture in February, when Capers demonstrated his "spiritual gifts" at the Los Angeles Conscious …
April 24, 2003
San Diegans who use too much water
In recent years, the 855 employees of the San Diego Water Department have faced scandals, alleged mismanagement, media scrutiny, and the rebuke of the city council. All this began in 1999 when news stories appeared …
October 3, 2002
Almost beautiful
They were distraught, talking incessantly, since they had just learned West’s dear friend F.Scott Fitzgerald had died. Dateline Hollywood. Sad news to report today, the voice of the flapper generation has been silenced.
June 27, 2002
Writer, interupted
Believe it or not, with this piece, the University of California, San Diego, accepted me into its Ph.D. program in composition. So family and I came west in 1982. You’d think I would have been ecstatic.
May 30, 2002
Cerro Prieto, the world’s third-largest geothermal field
Who among us has not twitched a little during this, the year of California’s power crisis, upon hearing Tales of the End Time of the Fossil Fuel. For more than a billion years, the planet’s …
December 6, 2001
San Diegans who go after child porn: prosecutor, expert, internet "cleaner"
At the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, David Provost loads the Megan’s Law CD of California’s serious and high-risk sex offenders, all 86,000 of them — that is, all the convicted ones — into a computer. …
July 12, 2001
Swords Unsheathed
Next week's runoff election in District 6 for the city council seat vacated by Valerie Stallings last January will close a match between first-time candidates Steve Danon -- former chief of staff to Ron Roberts …
May 31, 2001
Why did Valerie Stallings take the fall for Padres owner John Moores?
The grimy facts behind Valerie Stallings' guilty plea.
April 12, 2001
Ken Druck loses daughter, suffers waves of grief
Last spring I had only begun to follow the renowned psychologist Ken Druck and the grief he bears for losing his 21-year-old daughter, Jenna, when he called one day to say he was with two …
January 11, 2001
Rancho Peñasquitos boys, 14 to 17, charged with hate crime against Mexican nursery workers
Last March California voters approved Proposition 21, the anti-juvenile crime initiative, by a gang-busting 62 percent. San Diegans passed the measure by a full two-thirds. To date it’s been a galvanizing nine months for local …
December 7, 2000
How San Diego's Channel 10, Channel 51, Channel 8, Channel 39, Channel 6, Channel 69 make news local
Day-of-Air Today at the East County Community Health Services clinic in El Cajon, Supervisor Dianne Jacob is holding a “newser,” an announcement directed at the media. Because Scripps East Hospital in El Cajon has recently …
September 14, 2000
29 Reader writers on their fathers
To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …
June 15, 2000
Real Parents
At breakfast my father asked me what I thought we should do if, in Grandma and Grandpa’s safety deposit box, we found the document identifying his real parents. The year was 1967, and he and …
June 15, 2000
Fairy Shrimp, the City of San Diego, and the Mayor of Poway
“Oooh, what’s that?” Kelly says, touching the water. “There’s a shrimp.” He says it’s long and translucent. “See it?” What I can make out looks like a near-invisible minnow. Shrimp swim upside down, Kelly explains.
April 20, 2000
The down side of in vitro fertilization at UCSD
Like many newly married couples, Cristen and Jeffry Hays wanted to get pregnant soon after their wedding in 1992 but felt it best to wait. They used birth control until Jeffry finished three years of …
March 23, 2000
California, Here I Come
I froze, shut my eyes, while the steam rose. How many times had she pecked at me to drive off the beaten path, search for a restaurant, an antique shop, a flea market. “Stop!” she’d say.
February 24, 2000
San Diego Convention Center board votes down public art
The San Diego Convention Center board of director's vote was tied Friday, November 19, three for Nancy Rubins's proposed Harbor Drive sculpture -- the 102-foot-high, 100-ton arch of 60 cabled-together fiberglass boats -- and three …
December 2, 1999
What distinguishes San Diego landscape to painters
He compares California light to New England’s or the Pacific Northwest’s, where “there’s a haziness to the light that you don’t have here. Here it’s sharp, almost desert-like, but it still has the moisture.”
August 26, 1999
How I became a Marxist at UCSD
I was aghast to find that UC grad students who have chosen their specialization do not devote themselves to the “primary” literature — a poem, a novel, or a genre—but to the “secondary” literature.
January 7, 1999