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Economics
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
June 1990 was the first ad-free issue. . . . “I wanted someone reading the magazine to be able to experience another person’s words, another life, without distractions,” Sy wrote when he announced his decision. “If I were trying to do this in a room, where people could talk quietly and seriously with one another, I wouldn’t turn on the television or the radio.”
May 2023
Become A Friend Of The Sun
I’ve now been here for fifteen years. In that time I’ve been gratified to see that the values that drew me to The Sun years ago weren’t just words on a page. They’re reflected in every part of the magazine.
May 2023Don’t Panic
Rebecca Priestley On Finding Hope Amid The Climate Crisis
I’m not talking about burning the system down. . . . I simply think that the things we can do to respond to climate change will also make the world a better place for most people.
May 2023
Sunbeams
May 2023I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
Asking for help is often difficult, and can be doubly so when the person you’re asking is an idol of yours — someone you’d claim “has done for religion what the Beatles did for music.”. . . At the tail end of the 1970s the number of Sun subscribers hovered somewhere south of a thousand, and the magazine was in dire financial straits. . . . The ultimate result, on a warm night in May 1980, was a benefit lecture that Ram Dass gave in a large hall with no air-conditioning on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
April 2023
Speaking Of Tongues
Justin E.H. Smith On The Mysteries Of Language
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.
April 2023
Updating My Bio
The Mystical: Leath Tonino is the author of a fragmented novella and 30 billion profound thoughts that blew away on the wind. His work has appeared in snowy fields and dusty canyons, and he has pieces forthcoming on the surface of moonlit lakes. His memoir is currently being translated into stardust and deep-violet silence.
March 2023
How To Be A Woman
I learned a woman could wield the power to turn heads. She could capture a room’s attention and make everyone laugh. Everything else I knew of women’s lives told me not to trust this kind of power, but I wanted it nonetheless.
March 2023
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
By the time The Sun’s number of subscribers had grown to ten thousand, its number of employees had grown, too — enough that the magazine’s charming but shabby office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, “still fits us, but just barely, like a rumpled sweater with too many holes,” as founder and editor Sy Safransky put it. So in April 1989 The Sun bought a new property, right around the corner at 107 North Roberson Street.
March 2023
