It can be so difficult, the 40-something mother of two was telling me, to know what to believe. Reliable, undistorted information is in such short supply. People will just take as fact whatever they see on TikTok or the news ...

Never forget.

Among my bad habits is my willingness, in weak moments, to engage in long-distance digital debates with friends and perfect strangers over this evil hoax that Bill Gates and New World Order schemers are attempting to foist on the gullible, docile masses.

It was New Year’s Eve 2018 and three women, all Bakersfield expatriates, were sitting around the living room of a Huntington Beach home exchanging whatever-happened-to stories about their hometown.

Jarred Jensen wasn’t in Afghanistan when, in October 2001, the U.S. military swept in to avenge the single most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil in history.

One could look at the ambitious plans for the downtown block of Bakersfield bounded by 21st, 22nd, H and Eye streets and say they are appropriate and overdue, and one would be correct.

Jeremy Adams plays a little game with new students at the start of each semester. He projects faces on the wall of his classroom, one after another, and asks students to identify them.

It might be 9 at night and Johnny Tirado would be out somewhere with his girlfriend. Or 7 in the morning and he’d be getting ready for work.

Tell me this doesn’t make you crazy too.

George Masud is not Irish. Neither is his business partner, George Masud. Not a freckle or a red hair between them.

When Robin Lindsey’s father died in 1989, it inspired in her, as it does many of us at such times, a reevaluation.

Forty-five years, and the only thing Scot Burk ever learned to play on the guitar was that four-chord riff from “Smoke on the Water.”

The desktop computer is gone, the bookcase has been cleared of nearly all of its books and assorted objects of significance, and Tom Burke can’t even find a pen in his desk.

Armando Guerrero had a cold.

Carrie Walker doesn’t just keep her boys in her heart. She keeps them on her calf, too.

It was 1991 and Chris Vanderlei just wanted to replenish his stockpile of vitamin supplements.

In another example of my finely tuned prognosticative powers, I forecast a year ago that the country would see a spike in births around this time. A year of semi-isolation with spouses and others appropriately significant, with Netflix, Zoom and little else to distract, would surely mean a b…

Every once in a while, but not nearly often enough, Roger Berry will hear an unfamiliar voice coming from a line at the store or at a table in a restaurant. A voice not remotely like the high-pitched intonations he was accustomed to hearing every nonsummer weekday for 40 years. An adult voice.

You would think Joey Reed cringes at every new development in the increasingly tense series of cyber aggressions by Russia toward the United States. And you would be right — but also wrong.

This Easter, in addition to everything else it represents, is a pretty good gauge of the past year’s trajectory.

You might say Shawanna Vaughn got off to a bad start.

America has a fascination with trains, with history, and with food, not necessarily in that order. Little wonder, then, that literally hundreds of U.S. train stations have been transformed, in whole or in part, into places that celebrate some combination of those things.

I want my year back.

Well, that was a brief lull. Even more brief than usual.

The sturdy man in the blue batting helmet, hands thrust deep into his blue windbreaker against the blustery February chill, strolls at a tourist’s pace across the thick green grass. All around him, two dozen young men in blue ball caps are going through their paces: step, step, high kick, st…

Among its many casualties, the pandemic has silenced cash registers at Kern County businesses that cater to two noteworthy species of tourists: adventure-oriented outdoorsy types drawn to the Sierra Nevada and upper Kern River, and pilgrims fascinated by that local canon of uniquely American…

The outrage still wells up in Pastor Ralph Anthony’s voice more than half a century later. The pain, the disbelief, the discouragement.

I was pumping gas in Mesquite, Nev., when I learned that the U.S. Capitol had been breached by a renegade mob. Aside from the staggering sense of dismay and anger that that previously unimaginable event provoked in me, I was struck by two things.

In three days, America will hear one of the most consequential speeches in the nation’s history.

As part of my campaign to point out things that actually went right in 2020, I call your attention to Measure N, the 1-cent sales tax increase that Bakersfield voters approved … in November 2018.

Leave it better than you found it.

Cassie Bittle was keeping it together pretty well until she saw the tree.

We no longer need evidence that Bakersfield’s Historic Preservation Commission is a toothless entity ignored by all but a passionate few.

Can we be friends again now? No, I suppose not. Certainly not this week, and probably not anytime soon. Those more sophisticated than I — and that’s a serious chunk of the population — will insist it can never happen. Not when more than 70 million Americans somehow voted for that guy despite…