Sy Safransky
Sy Safransky is founder and editor emeritus of The Sun. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
April 2010
I read that there’s enough lead in the average pencil to write fifty thousand words. Does that mean the words are in the lead? Of course not. Are the words in my head? Just where are they, those fifty thousand words?
April 2010March 2010
Soon I’ll celebrate another birthday. It’s too bad the earth doesn’t have a real birthday. It might remind us that the planet had a beginning and — as it circles a medium-sized star whose days are numbered, too — is moving inexorably toward its end.
March 2010February 2010
I dreamt that a beautiful stranger had fallen in love with me. The only way to find out where she lived, however, was to look her up on Facebook, which I’d steadfastly refused to join. So that’s what I get for my neo-Luddite posturing, for telling a friend yesterday that the world needs an About-Facebook.
February 2010January 2010
I’m grateful for this clean sheet of paper. I’m grateful for my Pilot Precise V7 Rolling Ball pen. I’m grateful for the genius who invented the alphabet and for all the punctuation marks that come bundled with it at no extra cost.
January 2010December 2009
You’d think someone as productive as I am could learn how to stop worrying and be happy. But the black dogs of depression keep nipping at my heels. Women haven’t cured me. Sigmund Freud hasn’t cured me. Nor have all the self-help books I’ve read, or the legal and illegal drugs I’ve ingested, or the spiritual big shots I’ve met who’ve told me God is right over there; no, a little to the left; now back up a step; you forgot to say, “May I?”
December 2009October 2009
Global warming is irreversible, Lovelock says: We’ve already pushed the planet past the tipping point. Solar panels and compact fluorescents aren’t going to avert disaster. By the end of this century, he predicts, floods, droughts, violent storms, and melting polar ice caps will make most of the world uninhabitable.
October 2009June 2009
The morning light makes promises it has no intention of keeping, but why quibble? Look how it shines on my aging face and my fading to-do list. Look how it caresses my wife of twenty-five years. As if darkness has been banished. As if everything is lit from within.
June 2009May 2009
Yesterday is gone. “Wednesday,” we called it. So far Thursday is looking a lot like Wednesday except for one obvious difference: Wednesday is no more. Wednesday has ceased to be. Yes, Wednesday is like the dead parrot in that Monty Python skit: Stiff. Bereft of life.
May 2009
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
SEND US A LETTER