Follies take a year off
By Soncirey Mitchell Reader Staff After weeks of speculation, Angels Over Sandpoint confirmed Jan. 22 that the nonprofit will put the annual Follies variety show at the Panida Theater on hiatus this year, citing...
Category: Random Digital Madness
Winter hiking in the Scotchmans
By Reader Staff Hiking season doesn’t have to end once the snow starts falling. Despite the low snow down low, the local mountain snowpack is looking strong. The winter hike series from the Friends...
Documentary film Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams, rediscovers one of 20th-century literature’s true originals
By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff Of the many hazards of being an artistic trailblazer is that your creations turn into tropes while your hand in inventing them gets forgotten. That’s the fate suffered by...
A few thoughts… On learning to ski
By Sandy Compton Reader Staff Winter has finally arrived, though the frosting on my small forest looks more like December than January. Thankfully, the frosting is much thicker on our mountains. I’ve not had...
208 Fiction results for 2025
Here we present the winners of the fourth annual Sandpoint Reader 208 Fiction contest, in which we invited writers to submit a work of fiction totaling exactly 208 words for consideration by a panel...
The films of 2024
By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff The past year lacked anything like “Barbenheimer” in more ways than one. No two films captured the cultural imagination like Barbie and Oppenheimer did in 2023, much less one....
2025 year in preview
By Reader Staff Even if you’ve never read any of the works of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, you’ve probably heard someone repeat his famous line: “A pessimist is an optimist in full possession...
Notes on a vicennial deadline
By Zach Hagadone Reader Staff This week marks 20 years since the first edition of the Sandpoint Reader hit the streets on Dec. 23, 2004. That feels like a trick of the calendar —...
The white elephant in the room
By Soncirey Mitchell Reader Staff Over the last thousand or so years, the rituals and traditions surrounding Christmas have been solidified in our minds as perfectly ordinary, though they’re anything but. In reality, if...
Con artists, armed Boy Scouts and Santa Claus
By Ben Olson Reader Staff Nobody knows who wrote the first letter to Santa Claus, but the practice didn’t catch on in mainstream America until a con artist named John D. Gluck became intertwined...
