It appears the local race for San Mateo County assessor-clerk-recorder-elections chief is going to come down to a last-minute decision, at least, by local political insiders as the race between Assistant Assessor, etc., Jim Irizarry, and Supervisor David Canepa grows increasingly intense, an…

Richard Holober has become almost an institution. He has served on the San Mateo County Community College District Board of Trustees since 1997 during the Clinton administration, more than a full generation (and spanning the terms of five U.S. presidents) so far.

I was in my garden over the weekend when I found a monarch butterfly caterpillar on the milkweed I seeded last season, striped in white and black and yellow, all chubby and absolutely adorable, munching away. A future pollinator. Seeing one in real life felt like I had won the lottery.

As a bookseller, I’m always on the lookout for titles that feature the wonderful diversity of the types of people with whom we share the planet.

These days, my walks almost always involve some part of Maple Street. Redwood City’s Maple Street begins at El Camino Real and skirts the edge of downtown Redwood City before crossing Broadway, Veterans Boulevard and then Highway 101. Next, it hits a section of Redwood Creek, where it makes …

Next year, I will be finishing my high school journalism career as the editor-in-chief of the Burlingame High School newspaper, the Burlingame B. When I walked into the journalism class as a freshman, never in a million years would I have been able to predict how these past years in the jour…

Will giving away 400 free diapers to parents who give birth at participating California hospitals make a difference in the affordability crisis? No, but it will cost $20 million and be good for one news cycle.

The ink on last week’s column barely was dry (or the electronic impulse barely pulsed) before the comments — mild curiosity gusting to outrage — began showing up.

It has been instructive — but hardly surprising — to watch our assembled Big Media (and even the not-so-big) fret about the upcoming June primary election here in the Golden State.

My ballot arrived last Wednesday, it sat on the kitchen counter for two days. I dropped it at the corner post box on Friday, and a text came through Saturday afternoon confirming it had been received. Four days from envelope-in-mailbox to envelope-in-the-system, not bad — thanks USPS.

The best thing a parent can do is let their young athlete be benched (sometimes).

I’ve never been a boat person, although I’ve had numerous occasions to become one. When I was a teenager, my father taught me to sail on his tiny sailboat. Later in life, my folks purchased a place on Lake Tahoe, complete with the requisite motorboat; there I learned to manage that type of c…

My school hosted our annual Decision Day celebration May 1. It’s a tradition that high schools across the country celebrate for National College Decision Day, the official date by which seniors are supposed to enroll in the college they plan on attending.

As California’s voters receive their primary election ballots and began returning them in to be counted, the seven leading candidates for governor on Tuesday night engaged in an occasionally slashing, two-hour debate that reflected a race that’s too close to call.

What a mess.

When it comes to higher education, it is probably understandable that the media tend to focus on four-year institutions. They are more visible and command our attention in a variety of important ways.

A few months ago, I started noticing something in my feed. Friends and acquaintances were posting about the volume of scam texts and phone calls they were receiving, not as a general complaint but with an energy closer to exhaustion. So I posted a question on Facebook: What scams are you get…

Primary election ballots are arriving in mailboxes to choose the top two candidates who will go on to compete with each other to become our next governor.

They are small signs, with white lettering on a green background, that you’ve undoubtedly passed thousands of times. Signs your eyes probably saw, but your brain didn’t really register. Both are along Highway 101 (one southbound, one northbound), and both read the same: “Redwood City next 5 exits.”

According to the internet, there are two types of students at the University of California, Berkeley: those who have dreamed of it forever, and those who ended up there after being rejected by their Ivy League dream schools.

When California’s independent redistricting commissions drew new maps of the state’s congressional and legislative districts after the 2010 and 2020 censuses, their members were emphatically told by legal advisors that the federal Voting Rights Act required them to maximize opportunities for…

It may not spring up until after the June 2 primary election, but there are quiet rumblings that a fight is brewing over whether local government employees ought to be required to return to their offices full time.

It’s a new world when it comes to premier high school athletes, both here on the Peninsula and elsewhere. For some of them who perform at a high level, agents, endorsement contracts and other trappings of professional performers are now routine for gifted teens.

San Mateo County has 23 school districts, 20 cities and a population whose daily lives respect almost none of those borders.

“Available now — protein coffee!” It sounds too good to be true (because it is), but truthfully, convenience has been the greatest marketing ploy for modern health trends.

Recently, a very close friend suddenly passed away. Adjusting to his passing will take some time for those of us who knew and loved him, and will be difficult. But he left behind a wonderful wife — who of course is an equally close friend — some terrific kids and five grandchildren. And so h…

In the first few months after my brother left for college, my mom kept saying that she couldn’t believe my brother wasn’t home anymore but, back then, I remember feeling as if he was here with us all the time.

Nothing like a screaming political scandal to shake everyone out of their doldrums so they can start thinking about just who should be the governor of the world’s fourth largest economy.

There will be 61 names of would-be governors on the June 2 primary election ballot, but the top two finishers will — as certainly as anything can be in politics — come from the six who participated Wednesday evening in the first statewide televised debate.

Despite opposition from three of his colleagues on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, David Canepa’s campaign for county assessor-clerk-recorder and elections chief appears to be thriving.

If you read any number of the skewed media accounts regarding the International Olympic Committee’s March decision to bar participation of biological men from competing against biological women in the upcoming Los Angeles Summer Games in 2028 and beyond, you may get the distinct impression t…

Last week in Miami, a 20-year-old named Braden Peters, who goes by Clavicular (whose name comes from his obsession with his own clavicle width), seemed to overdose on a Kick livestream at a bar.

One of my favorite episodes of the TV series M*A*S*H was when the unit prepared to “Bug Out.” Rumor had it that the enemy might be heading toward the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and the team might have to pack the unit up and move.

I’ve kept tabs on the progress of countless development projects in and around Redwood City, but there are few that I’ve monitored more closely than the city’s new Veterans Memorial Building/Senior Center.

I’ve been an editor at my school paper for two years; I spent my first as an editorial director, and I’m spending my second as an editor-in-chief. I am always frantic.

The San Mateo Daily Journal does not use artificial intelligence in its writing or reporting, neither will it in the immediate future. It also doesn’t accept any submissions that are written with the assistance of AI.

So, it occurs to me, almost no matter what happens between now and Saturday, that I will have had a better week than Eric Swalwell.

It is April 15. Gulp. Federal and state income tax payments for 2025 are due. So it’s an appropriate time to consider a financial reality again: We live in one of the most heavily-taxed regions of the nation. And it only gets more onerous.

In 1974, a series of burglaries, rapes and murders began across California that would terrorize communities for over a decade. The perpetrator was eventually given the name the Golden State Killer, and for more than 30 years after the crimes stopped, the case remained unsolved.

Sunday afternoon, during the television broadcast of a San Francisco Giants-Baltimore Orioles baseball game, an ad popped up, accusing Rep. Eric Swalwell of ducking tough votes in Congress.

In your vivid memory, recall a time when you felt utterly excluded from a group of people. Maybe it was a birthday party your whole second grade class was invited to except for you. Perhaps it was a friend trio where you were always present but not recognized.

Redwood City has been home to a number of large companies, the largest of which (most likely) was Oracle Corporation. Oracle moved its headquarters to Redwood Shores in 1989 and remained there until 2020, when it relocated to Austin, Texas. Although a number of Oracle employees still work in…

High school seniors applying to college constantly hear a downpour of well-intentioned words of wisdom from adults. Among the most common is the necessity of applying early decision. Early decision is a binding process in which students apply to a specific school early and, if admitted, are …

Watt Avenue is one of several Sacramento County streets named for famous inventors, in this case James Watt, father of the steam engine.

The word “unprecedented” got tossed around quite a bit at Tuesday’s event to protest the state absconding with more than $150 million in vehicle license fee revenue that should, by all rights, belong to San Mateo County.

When Burlingame officials began to consider options for a downtown community plaza, or town square, built on a city parking lot adjacent to construction on what was U.S. Postal Service land, there was more than one iteration under early consideration.

On Tuesday morning, county supervisors, city leaders, nonprofit leaders and public safety officials from across San Mateo County will gather at Fire Station 9 in Redwood City to deliver a single message to Sacramento: Pay what you owe.

I’m not a fan but my husband really does love cherries. His mother loved them too. She would get giddy when we’d stop by her apartment in Palo Alto with a huge bag. It was always a HUGE bag for her because we knew that within 10 minutes of us leaving she would start dividing those cherries u…

For more than 12 years I’ve been exploring the southern part of San Mateo County on foot and writing about my findings.

Just more than six years ago, the world shifted in a way that felt almost unreal at first. On March 13, 2020, I left school as a fifth grader for what was supposed to be a two-week break and didn’t return in person for nearly two years.