Mark Leviton’s interview with bee researcher Lars Chittka [“Hive Mind,” March 2025] fascinated me. I was amazed to learn how these tiny animals share directions to nutritional sources. Leaving aside whatever agricultural uses there may be for this knowledge, the intricacy of the life of a single bee and the functioning of its colony challenge my imagination.
The interview reminds us there are fields of study whose value may not depend on some practical application. In the age of Trump 2.0, with drastic cuts being made to research of all sorts, I found much beauty and wonderment in what Chittka shared. Keep these fantastic interviews coming. We need them now more than ever.
Your March 2025 issue is revelatory. The interview with Lars Chittka, followed by John Colman Wood’s transcendent short story “Nectar,” transported me into the minds of honeybees. I’m especially interested in how we might move beyond valuing these creatures only for their utility and instead recognize their innate worth—and even sentience.
Leath Tonino’s interview with conservationist John Davis [“Where the Wild Things Are,” February 2025] caused me to well up. Davis is so sensitive and protective toward animals. I routinely experience a mild panic when driving around dark corners at night, anticipating a violent collision with a possum or raccoon just going about their business. I curse to myself every time I see an animal’s corpse along an interstate. It feels disrespectful to leave their bodies out to rot in the sun. I tend to feel alone with these thoughts, and in my general approach to the world.
Then came Didi Jackson’s poem “Wild”: “I was a sleepwalker / through most of those days. A passenger in / my own life. I couldn’t look / to my family and see myself reflected there. I was / born to no one. I was wild.” Here was another writer, reaching out across the void to assure me I’m not alone.
I met Sun founder Sy Safransky in the 1970s when he was hawking his new magazine to passersby on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At the time I was writing a humor column for a local arts magazine, and Sy recruited me to write for him too.
At that time Sy was also editing Theta, a publication of the Psychical Research Foundation, which studies life after death. When he no longer needed the side job, he handed it off to me. “You can do it in your sleep,” he said. “It only takes me about one day a month.” It took me a whole month to edit each issue. So by that measure Sy was thirty times the editor I was.
Since then I’ve written for many editors and have retired as editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, where I was on the masthead for twenty-four years. Hands down, Sy was the best editor I’ve ever known. He introduced me to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and demonstrated its lessons routinely by reducing every piece I wrote for The Sun by at least half—without changing any of its substance, and always while making my prose shine.
I read his essay “This Is Hard to Write” [February 2025] through tears. For a mind so keen as Sy’s to be diagnosed with “severe cerebral atrophy” is a cruel and wicked curse.
When I paid for genetic testing a few years ago, I asked 23andMe not to tell me if I had a marker for Alzheimer’s disease. They told me anyway. I do. At seventy-seven I’ve shown no signs of mental decline, but my chance of getting Alzheimer’s by the time I’m eighty-five is one in three, with even greater odds after that. But to persist as an elder in any condition is a blessing I thank God for every day.
The possibility of life after death was a topic I visited in several of my writings for The Sun. The longest of those was on A Course in Miracles [September 1977]. To the Course, time is not real, but it does have a purpose, as I wrote then: “to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.”
But what if your ability to learn is progressively impaired over time? Sy is exploring that frontier now. I look forward to talking to him about it after we’re both gone.
I’m not sure if Sy Safransky’s “This Is Hard to Write” was an elegy, a confession, or a lament, but it was the most beautiful, heartbreaking piece of writing on being/not being I have ever read.
I think the new Sy is wiser than the old Sy.
Ron Currie’s accounting of his friends’ deaths [“The Only Alternative,” February 2025] reminded me of how close I came to dying, save for the expert intervention of mental health professionals, the kindness of a meditation group, and some measure of self-determination. I, too, have seen my best friend die from despair. Still, I’m so goddamn lucky. I think Currie is too.
As someone whose two dearest and oldest friends are both struggling with terminal illness, I felt a wave of horror after reading Ron Currie’s words “My best friend has died, my best friend is dead.” I appreciate the tenderness and fondness with which Currie recalls Gary, and his thoughts about whether he could have been a better friend.
Grief can be overwhelming. Currie’s attempt to understand and bear it provides much for me to consider as I watch my own friends slip away. Perhaps there’s no way out of the cycle of grief, only brief respites of gratitude for the time that I’ve had these people in my life.
I’m an eleventh-grade student who is fortunate not to have been personally affected by gun violence. At the beginning of this school year, however, my school received several threats. Thankfully nothing came of them, but I was afraid to go to school. Students shouldn’t feel fear in a place they spend eight hours every weekday. Active shooter drills shouldn’t be something we have to do.
Dana Salvador’s “After All This” [February 2025], in which she shares both personal stories and historical accounts of guns in schools, moved me. The warnings she describes giving to her students—such as not staying silent if they see or hear something about a gun in school—demonstrate the toll of living in a complicit country. I found it especially heartbreaking to read about the teacher in Uvalde, Texas, who was falsely blamed for the deaths caused by a shooter.
Salvador’s essay made me wonder why so many are stubbornly on the side of their Second Amendment rights, instead of the side of their teachers, neighbors, children, family, and friends. I wonder how many incidents it will take to change their minds.
As a subscriber to The Sun for three decades at least, I’ve seen hundreds of your cover photos. Many were astonishing, some challenging, others timely, and still others inexplicable. Mark Montgomery’s shot of the two French mastiffs on your December 2024 cover took my breath away. Not just because I am a bona fide dog person, but because the personalities of these two—the openness of their thoughts and feelings—are so evident and welcoming. I smile every time I look at them.
I had no choice but to frame the cover and place it prominently in my studio. It’s the perfect antidote to these times.
The beauty of The Sun catches me off guard. As I scroll past pictures and words, I feel transported to another dimension. Am I distracted from the day, or brought home where I belong?
