Dearly departed
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The honor roll of departed community icons is getting uncomfortably long. With the passing March 13 of Erik Daarstad, at age 87, Sandpoint has lost …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
The honor roll of departed community icons is getting uncomfortably long. With the passing March 13 of Erik Daarstad, at age 87, Sandpoint has lost …
By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff
This month marks my dog’s fifth birthday. I’ve come to learn in the past five years that, when it comes to knowing and loving an …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
In an ideal democracy, a government serves at the behest of its people, not in spite of them. We are oceans away from anything resembling …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
You can give no greater gift to an arch-conservative than mentioning the word “democracy” — it gives them the opportunity to puff up with pedantic …
By Sandy Compton
Reader Columnist
Long ago, my girlfriend and her sister took me skiing at Schweitzer Basin. Sort of. They got me in a pair of leather boots that …
By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Staff
It was like the climax of a sports movie, only less probable.
I was volunteering to help coach a girls’ junior high basketball game when …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
I love watching movies from the 1990s. There’s something nostalgic and warm about that decade right before we all became consumed by the internet, smartphones …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Here is a list of “North Idaho activities” at which I suck, am mediocre or lack experience in, and have tried but frankly don’t like …
By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
Maybe it’s because I was born the day after Christmas that I became a humbug. Throughout my childhood, Christmas always loomed before my birthday; the …
By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
There’s been a curious trend in the letters to the editor I’ve been receiving lately: people trying to claim that the Nazis were “actually” liberals …
The Sandpoint Reader is our town's local, independent weekly newspaper. "Independent" means that the Reader is locally owned, in a partnership between Publisher Ben Olson and Keokee Co. Publishing, the media company owned by Chris Bessler that also publishes Sandpoint Magazine and Sandpoint Online. Sandpoint Reader LLC is a completely independent business unit; no big newspaper group or corporate conglomerate or billionaire owner dictates our editorial policy. And we want the news, opinion and lifestyle stories we report to be freely available to all interested readers - so unlike many other newspapers and media websites, we have NO PAYWALL on our website. The Reader relies wholly on the support of our valued advertisers, as well as readers who voluntarily contribute. Want to ensure that local, independent journalism survives in our town? You can help support the Reader for as little as $1.