Writer
Direct your hot tips, job offers, fan mail, hate mail at: rickpaulas@gmail.com
My Books
Buy them or find them if you'd like.
The Palmer Hotel
A series of spooky short stories set over a century in a downtown hotel.
COMING SOON.
Eastern Span
A neo-noir set in Oakland circa 2013.
It's sold out, but you can read it at the Internet Archive, available here.
Features
Some are long, some are not as long.
Curbed
“It has been—often all at once—a landfill, an encampment, a community, an art installation, a museum, a music venue, a playhouse, a racetrack, and a dog park”
CityLab
To be an off-season caretaker of Bodie, California (winter population: 5), you need a high tolerance for cold, solitude, and two-hour grocery runs.
HuffPost
The 2016 warehouse fire that killed 36 people was a civic tragedy decades in the making.
The New York Times
A profile of the constantly expanding club for those who have gone through a uniquely American experience.
The New York Times
Anti-fascist activists believe in dressing for the job they
want. Right now, many think, that job is punching Nazis.Longreads
The thing margins of the IRL storytelling society.
Longreads
Since the dawn of the internet, online platforms have allowed clients to take advantage of sex workers. Now, they’re fighting back.
Longreads
Jeff Hull’s Latitude Society explores the possibilities of art, intimacy, experience, and membership.
Longreads
Five days after I published the above piece, the project shut down. Here's what happened.
The Awl
A tour of the internet’s haunted auction house and examining those who drive these spooky marketplace.
The Kernel
A deep dive into the virtual online art scene incubator that ended up being hugely inspirational to the world's comedy scene.
SB Nation Longform
A trip to the world of bat doctoring, the dark side of amateur softball.
The Awl
Catching up with a handful of former MLB players who got to played in only one game before their careers ended.
Popular Mechanics
For nearly two decades, Monkey Brains has slowly built up a an alternative to getting reamed by mega-monopolies that usually control access to the Internet.
Popular Mechanics
Right in front of your eyes, but going generally unnoticed, is the secret code that tells you what's right under your feet.
Splinter
Running around to try to find the alt-right in the Bay.
Popular Mechanics
How one man used the guts of a 1960s telephone to invent a ball that beeps and gave the visually impaired a way to play America's pastime.
The Kernel
John Sears, who’s spent years walking California like a roaming preacher with three mules in tow, spreading his unique gospel of environmental conservation.
The Kernel
Excavating the mystery of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple with the husband-and-wife team who spent their lives building the archive.
The Kernel
Nearly four decades ago, the Zodiac Killer terrorized the Bay Area, taunting newspaper readers with coded clues to his identity. Online code-breakers are still battling his final puzzle.
SF Weekly
Two competing ballot measures propose a fix to California's broken, costly death penalty procedure, in two very different ways.
The Awl
How a series of possibly collected murders 128 years ago lead to a never-ending content mill.
Vice
The history of why we don't talk about our salaries, and why it hurts us.
Longreads
What a Berkeley filmmaker found when he took a little league team from West Oakland to Cuba.
VICE
Residents of Santa Rosa's Coffey Park neighborhood, leveled by last month's wildfire, would like things to be just like they used to—skeptics be damned.
VICE
Barring another reprieve in court, the Bay Area's relatively uncontroversial Here/There community could be vacant in a matter of days.
Vice
Something’s about to burst, and it might just be society itself.
San Francisco Chronicle
A profile of the Bay Area's Osha Neumann.
OneZero
The platform built for neighborhood news often scapegoats the most disadvantaged communities.
Essays & Ephemera
These mostly don't have a unifying theme or concept, which in itself, I suppose, is unifying.
The Awl
I went to this, and it was weird and sad.
The Awl
Somewhat behind-the-scenes of a strange part-public-art installation, part scavenger hunt, part multimedia experiment, part narrative story experience.
The Awl
The experience comes to an end, and not everyone is satisfied.
ESPN Page 2
On Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" becoming a sports arena anthem.
ESPN Page 2
A profile of Stew Thornley, who has been to the gravesite of every MLB Hall of Famer. (The dead ones, at least.)
Outside
Why Allen Carr's The Easy Way To Quit Smoking book is still effective.
Pacific Standard
A person named "John Titor" started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Pacific Standard
Exploding movie theaters, things being dumped into the Pacific, byzantine corporate bureaucracy—all part of Eddie Muller's efforts to preserve the film noir era.
Pacific Standard
To others, glasses can make you look cool or like a dork, but they can also change your self-perception.
Pacific Standard
Selective disposal of digital artifacts is the best way to deal with the aftermath, but you might need your friends and an algorithm to help get you there.
Pacific Standard
Which is scarier: an all-powerful deity or your mom?
Pacific Standard
Getting a better sense of how people visualize their neighborhoods could be the first step toward improving them.
The Morning News
Some people require the Heimlich Maneuver a bit more than the rest of us. A report on the four times—so far—that the author has relied on the assistance of others.
Pacific Standard
BuzzFeed, YouTube, and (former) Gawker stars all describe a similar psychological rush, but riding the viral wave comes with dangers too.
Atlas Obscura
Simply a pair of eyes can change how you act.
The Morning News
How nostalgia works and why social media may destroy it altogether, or restore it to its original purpose.
The Classical
Trying to get to the bottom of why the best quarterback in Chicago Bears history is also the most hated.
SF Weekly
A look at the Division Street tent city that was jammed up more than usual due to Super Bowl tourists coming to town.
VICE
A look at the portentous relevance of PropertySex.com
The Awl
A compilation of tales of how people found their way to their first cigarettes.
VICE Sports
What's going on when fans call for the coach's head.
The Daily Dot
There are lessons to be learned from the dusty webpages of Demand Studios
VICE Sports
Navigating the murky geographical borders of sports fandom.
VICE Sports
Who is really watching those internet trade rumors, and what's the hidden messages they're looking for.
New York
What's going on with crowd stampedes at LAX, JFK, and other public places.
Atlas Obscura
The woman's recorded voice has been heard all over South America, and maybe even farther.
VICE
The long road of the most important press release in sports.
The Awl
Interviewing my parents about that time they took away my Nine Inch Nails album.
Vice
That time I was an extra in Lynch's Inland Empire, an under-appreciated classic.
Vice
Kind of self-explanatory.
The Awl
A socialist reading of the heavily anti-capitalist zombie movie, George A. Romero's "Land of the Dead."
Vice
The struggle for labor activists and organizers is to convince a skeptical public of that fact.
New York
How the rise of map apps and ride-shares have wrought havoc on city infrastructure.
FREEbyVICE
'Moneyball' taught fans to root like a boss instead of basking in the thrill of the game.
New York's Select/All
Why the obsolescence of our smart homes will kill us all.
Columbia Journalism Review
The importance of broadcast news paying attention to their archives.
The Atlantic
Employees at Google and elsewhere are protesting their bosses’ business decisions. Will that evolve into a more sustained labor movement?
Vice
Chances are everything you think you know about fare evasion is wrong.
History!
Sometimes I write about history. Here's where that's located!
Atlas Obscura
Six-feet-tall and pure nightmare, she was once one of America's most popular funhouse amusements.
Atlas Obscura
The story of how those bubble jets came to tickle the rumps of millionaires and layfolks alike.
The Kernel
How the creators of the horror movie sensation tricked the early internet world.
VICE
The story of the beefed-up wrestlers who ripped Bibles and ran through ice for Christ.
Broadly
How one trans woman helped excavate the rebellion that came before the one that everyone remembers.
Broadly
The story of America's first supermodel, who posed for dozens of statues that still grace New York and San Francisco, and spent the last 64 years of her life in a mental hospital.
