Derek Askey

Contenders

From the Archive

In our April interview [“Lesson Plan”] Pranav Jani, an English professor at The Ohio State University, discusses the current state of activism on college campuses. With the Trump administration bullying schools into cracking down on political speech, are our institutions of higher learning still a free marketplace of ideas?

The Sun and Higher Education

This month’s issue begins with a revealing, in-depth interview with professor Pranav Jani on campus activism. Although The Sun has never had a university affiliation, we’ve been located in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for our entire existence, and the work, interests, and values of university students have always been important elements of the magazine.

Difficult Jobs

Selections from the Archive

One of my favorite pieces in our January issue is Mishele Maron’s terrific “Bad Lunch,” an essay in which she describes a challenging job preparing meals for guests on a luxury yacht. Difficult jobs—or great jobs, or bad jobs, or downright horrible jobs—are familiar to many of us, and they’ve certainly had their place in The Sun over the years. Below are some standouts from our archives.

Looking at the Impossible

Selections from the Archive

A few months ago I sat down with Jeffrey J. Kripal, the chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University, to discuss a wide range of “impossible” phenomena—experiences that don’t gel with a strict materialist view of the universe. That conversation appears in our October issue, alongside an essay by Sun founder and editor emeritus, Sy Safransky, where he relays what can only be described as a spiritual experience with his deceased cat, Cirrus.

It’s one of the many things I love about the magazine: its longstanding willingness to invite readers down some pretty unusual avenues, and to treat those explorations with the seriousness they deserve.

Rifling Through the Impossible

On the Road with Associate Editor Derek Askey

Earlier this year I traveled to Houston, Texas, to interview Jeffrey J. Kripal for the October issue of The Sun. While I was there, he granted me access to what are known as the Archives of the Impossible, housed in a nearby building on the Rice University campus. Accompanied by a Sun contributor, I was permitted to explore some of the Archives' materials. What I didn’t know at the time, however, was that, not long after stopping by, my life would change irrevocably.

The Cat Who Woke Me Up

Longreads Roundup Top 5 Selection

We’re delighted that this piece was chosen as a top 5 selection for the Longreads Roundup.

Radar and Revelation

Jeffrey J. Kripal on Archiving the Impossible

I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen.

Old Souls

Jim Tucker on Children’s Memories of Past Lives

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

Sun Dial: Pieces About Phones

Selections from the Archive

Phone evangelist, Becky Mandelbaum, describes the hours at a time—hours!—spent with her ear to the receiver, and all the pleasure she’s derived from it, in her essay in our November issue, “The Telephone Mode.” Phones have come up in The Sun about as frequently as you’d expect. Here are some selections from our archives where a phone plays a pivotal role.

Coping Mechanism

Peter Stenson on Writing, Parenting, and Phish

The Sun publishing Peter Stenson’s story (“Bone Frag”) was a good opportunity for me to catch up with him, which we did over Zoom a few months ago. He was older and wiser, sure, but in many ways still the Peter I had known and liked so well back in Colorado. We talked about where our lives had gone since grad school, where they were headed, and even touched on some of our questionable-to-others musical tastes.