The end of anything is the beginning of something — Developers encouraged by San Diego’s construction-friendly zoning reform might soon come for The Terrace in Del Mar. They’ll inform its 52 households about relocation assistance. Workers will raze the henna-red mid-century structure, and replace it with something taller, contemporary, with solar panels and smart appliances. I’ll have no just cause…

A beat reporter’s notes on an urban lake’s deadly history — Gatsby-esque mansions line the southern shore of Dallas’ White Rock Lake. Runners and cyclists flock there for scenery and smooth paved trails. Anglers go for largemouth bass and fishing-friendly piers. Growing up here, I heard the lore. Lady of The Lake, drownings, cold spots. But when I took a job…

Like genre masters before him, director Mike Flanagan’s personal addictions inform his storytelling, to a terrifying effect — Anyone who’s been hooked on opioids and weathered withdrawal can tell you it’s the stuff of nightmares. Hell. I’m haunted by my own addiction, which, the therapist and anonymous oldtimers say, is lurking around a dark corner, getting stronger, “doing push-ups,” waiting to meet me unawares.

Trips to the pain clinic lead down messed-up Memory Lane — CW: self-harm, ED, suicide One unseasonably muggy day after last Christmas, I sat wide-eyed and blinking as my grandmother’s doctor spoke of conspiracy theories. Casket sales increasing, he said. “By thirty, maybe forty percent, since the vaccines came out.” I want to holler at his administrator, “Are you hearing this?”…

Difficult relationships are our greatest teachers — Times in 2021 were so trying that us writers were told to avoid the phrase “trying times” (the words were so ubiquitous they had become a joke). At the job I had then, such practical instruction was rare. But, hey, I would not dare complain. I’d landed a full-time gig…

About those 12 steps — Content note: This article mentions suicidal ideation and abuse I decided to give the 12 steps a try in the spring of 2021, right after the guy I was living with asked me to move out. I’d been sober for one year and 29 days. I was surviving. But that…

This is torture. I’d been a reporter for a few years when instantaneous feedback became a thing. By then I had already endured a startling end to my first journalism job, three months in, when the paper shuttered. I was toughening to crime scenes, sources hanging up on me and…

Calls from ‘20/20’ and ‘Snapped’ have me questioning our obsession with the genre. — NO! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! A man’s shout, a barrage of gunfire, a woman’s screams and a din of canine calls echoed through a Dallas neighborhood the morning James Faith was killed. October 9, 2020, the popular 49-year-old American Airlines executive, home during the pandemic, had just…

15 years ago I was arrested for forging prescriptions, which saved my life — As the fog of stupor lifts, my waking nightmare comes into focus. With bony arms, I hold myself together, shivering, my body velcroed up inside a jumpsuit, on a cold concrete slab. Angry chatter and slamming doors — doors that lock from the outside — seep into expanding awareness. …