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Finn Cohen is an associate editor of The Sun.
This is an extremely creative and spontaneous moment for language. There are whole sociolects that you and I don’t even know about, because we’re too old or we don’t belong to the communities of people who have come up with them. Emoji are fascinating because they’re a return to the ideographic sources of a lot of writing.
May 2023Our interview this month with Jaclyn A. Siegel [“The Strong, Silent Type,” by Sam Risak] focuses on masculinity and male body image, and part of that discussion addresses muscle dysmorphia that is characterized by an obsessive focus on muscularity and associated with weight lifting. But there’s an aspect of weight training that can be beneficial to everyone. The writer Casey Johnston has been advocating that idea for several years, after discovering that picking up heavy things in deliberate ways could improve her quality of life. In the past year her newsletter, She’s a Beast, has become popular enough (23,000 subscribers) to land her a book deal about her experiences with weight lifting.
Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.
Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.
December 2022We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that because we went to Whole Foods and bought the organic product, we’re not participating in suffering and death.
May 2022I think it is fascinating how the Roma, a people who have continuously moved or been expelled from one country or another, and who have been often denied the use of their language, have managed to hang on to a sense of Roma-ness, if you will.
September 2021Some of these children do need help, but is this the right type of help? Over the years counselors have been charged with sexual abuse, physical abuse, and predatory behavior.
August 2021When COVID-19 hit, Dr. Anthony Fauci was portrayed on the Right as a deep-state villain, one of these “elitists” who are trying to tell “us” how to live in Middle America.
November 2020“White Folks,” a short story in our September 2020 issue, was written by John Holman, who grew up in Durham, North Carolina, just a few miles from The Sun’s editorial offices in Chapel Hill. Holman was preparing to teach an online class at Georgia State University for the first time due to the pandemic when Sun Associate Editor Finn Cohen caught up with him.
Another woman’s husband got a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage at home. He would threaten to put it in the bed or the shower with her. That kind of emotional torture needs no physical violence.
September 2020I think the pandemic is changing people’s idea of what the government should and could do. It’s definitely made them frustrated with what it can’t do.
August 2020Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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