Browse Topics
Economics
Estate Sale
On the first day of the estate sale I strung a backdrop from a tree in the front yard and did what any photographer trying to deal with a difficult personal situation would do: I took pictures.
March 2024
Yard Sales
Hunting for bargains, letting go of possessions, emptying out a home
March 2024
Down in the Valley
Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us
Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.
March 2024
Tangled Avenues
Wade Graham on the Interlocking Challenges of the Modern City
Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.
January 2024
Lumps of Coal
He was ten and drove a team of mules / through the shadows in mine shafts, / pulling a wagonload of coal / that glinted in the carbide light / anchored to his cotton cap.
December 2023His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
November 2023
Become A Friend Of The Sun
Every person around us contains a whole universe. The Sun has always seemed to me like a place where we throw a bunch of universes together and see what happens. . . . If you value the way The Sun brings a variety of voices to your ear — some candid, some cajoling, some joyous, and all of them looking you in the eye and telling the capital-T Truth — then I hope you’ll consider making a donation and becoming A Friend of The Sun. Any amount you give helps bring us together in the magazine’s pages month after month.
November 2023Gratitude
A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop
November 2023
The Salmonella Special
In twelve months I hadn’t set foot in a supermarket, hadn’t compared the prices of two brands of bread, hadn’t stood in a checkout line to buy anything, not even a pack of Tic Tacs. Everything I ate had been thrown away. Everything I ate, I’d found first.
October 2023
