Browse Topics
Media
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
Don’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
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
Sound Art
Outside the airport he saw a white girl with dreads in a T-shirt with the Rising Phoenix logo — a bird with wings on fire. She’d even written his name with a Sharpie on a piece of paper, along with the word Media, which is what he’d claimed to be.
April 2023This 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
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
Sitting with his first wife, Judy, and a friend on a sunny beach in Algeciras, Spain, Sy Safransky embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately led him to create the magazine you now hold in your hand. In March 1970, for the first time, he placed a tab of LSD on his tongue. He was twenty-five years old.
February 2023
The Strong, Silent Type
Jaclyn A. Siegel On Masculinity And Male Body Image
Risak: How is the “masculine body” defined?
Siegel: In the U.S. we typically see a mesomorphic ideal: lean, muscular, and with a low body-fat percentage. This is persistent across the U.S. and common in LGBTQ+ communities in particular. Sexual-minority men are at elevated risk for eating disorders due in part to the lean ideal being perpetuated in their communities.
February 2023
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
Although The Sun had already released three books of material from its pages, The Mysterious Life of the Heart, released in February 2009, was the first to be centered on a theme: romantic love.
January 2023
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
Sixteen pages, if you include the front and back covers. A twenty-five-cent cover price. Each issue sold by hand on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. . . . The office: the backseat of founder and editor Sy Safransky’s Nash Rambler. And a fifty-dollar loan to get the whole thing off the ground.
December 2022
