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.

Two or three years into my tenure as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain, I was meeting with someone with ties to the tech industry — an executive, a high-level employee, a self-important marketer or programmer, or someone like that.

The San Mateo County Community College District is attempting to recover from a long nightmare. It hasn’t been a painless process by any means.

If you have been in an airplane, you should know what to do in an emergency. Something along the lines of “put your oxygen mask on first before helping anyone else.” Flights are unpredictable. It is a prayer before takeoff and hoping for the best situation.

A couple of years into being a parent, I became a dad. Not that I wasn’t a dad from the day my first child was born, but as soon as my oldest was able to open doors, flip switches and turn on faucets, I realized that I had become a “dad”: a guy who constantly went around the house closing ca…

This week, I have been traveling around Italy with my classmates in the Italian program at Burlingame High School. Never having been to Italy, I expected the biggest shock to be surrounding the food, architecture or fashion, but what I didn’t expect was the fulfillment of trying to communica…

Nine months into the 2025-26 fiscal year, state tax revenue is running several billion dollars ahead of projections in the budget that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last June.

Up and down the Peninsula this Saturday (and across the nation) people will be participating in the latest round of “No Kings” events.

Gas prices are rising. We all know why. War in the Middle East is once more the culprit, made even worse by California’s high gas taxes and restrictive refining rules, among other anti-petrol factors.

By tomorrow, some of this may change, who knows. News cycles are moving too fast for everyone, but here we go.

To maintain strict operational security (OPSEC) during a time of war I won’t tell you what time I usually take our dog, Holly, out for a walk.

Stanford’s growing presence in Redwood City has been fascinating to watch. Stanford’s first foray into the city began with the purchase in 2005 of four four-story buildings between Broadway and Highway 101, buildings that had been constructed as the headquarters for ISP/web portal Excite@Home.

I recently realized more than half the songs on my current in-rotation playlist were recorded before 2000. As someone born in 2008, this statistic briefly shocked me, but it’s not out of line with general Gen Z trends.

Last week’s news that Peninsula Lively Arts, formerly known as Peninsula Ballet Theatre, will be shutting down in June calls into question our community’s commitment to the arts.

California is not only the nation’s most populous state; it’s also the nation’s most economically, ethnically, culturally and even geographically diverse state.

Take a look at the website for Connect Bay Area, the organization pushing for regional sales tax increases to pay for transit systems, and this headline pops up: “Stronger Muni for All.”

It just kept coming, showing utterly no sign of halting whatsoever. The Waymo vehicle appeared to be on a collision course with our aging Honda sedan. It was more than a bit unnerving.

A now-removed set of locally distributed social media posts that included AI-altered images that violated at least one community platform guideline got me wondering how much of the content we’re served on social platforms really deserves a harsher eye than most of us give it. 

Who knew your most vital productivity hack could be done in about seven hours or more?

I was saddened to discover that University Art, the fabulous art supply store located on El Camino Real in Redwood City, is closing. Although we are by no means artists, for years my wife and I shopped there for picture frames, foam core, glue, colored pencils and markers. We had countless a…

Many times I’ve been asked by family members, friends, peers, interviewers and teachers why I dedicate so much of my time to mental health advocacy. From a meeting on Monday for my school’s National Alliance on Mental Illness chapter club and co-leading a Zoom call with the county’s Behavior…

In the early stages of a contentious discussion this week by the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors on regulating e-bikes and e-motos, Supervisor Ray Mueller said he hoped a model ordinance by the county would provide a “unifying voice” and “one clear message to the community.”

For all intents and purposes the tall, grizzled black locust tree that dominates our backyard has become a quasi-part of the family.

I bought my kids some San Francisco Mint gold coins last October as a keepsake, something they could hold onto for a long time and give to their kids.