Issue 168 | The Sun Magazine

November 1989

Readers Write

Dancing

Miss Valentine’s School of Social Dance, jitterbugging in Calcutta, the “big girl’s ward” in the crippled children’s hospital

By Our Readers
Quotations

Sunbeams

I respect kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society, except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

Brendan Behan

The Sun Interview

The End Of Economics

An Interview With Hazel Henderson

[Economics] tries to use equilibrium concepts to model a system which is in a constant state of disequilibrium and is continually evolving. As I began to dig into all of this, I decided that economics is politics in disguise. It is simply a way of rationalizing certain decisions about how to allocate resources from the point of view of the people who have the money to pay economists: the powerful interest groups like military contractors, politicians, trade associations, and the like.

By Ralph Earle
Fiction

Alice’s Hunch

Dickens, I find myself thinking. Not Toulouse-Lautrec drawing in smoky bars, but Dickens; this morning I am Dickens walking around with eyes wide open, seeing a pure beam of humor illuminating human squalor.

By Jean Rukkila
Fiction

Second Thoughts

I had seen the boy many times before, but never really looked. I did not actually know his name until the day he was being escorted to the front office by a smug-looking assistant principal.

By Kenneth Klonsky
Fiction

Thin Ice

When we got to the pond, he stopped calling her name. The hole was black, and little black waves splashed against the jagged edges of the broken ice. Father took one step onto the pond, but had to jump back.

By Candace Perry
Fiction

The Reverend Clearwater Immler Meets The Devil

Evil crouched above him in the eaves, watching, soundless. Infinitely patient evil, colorless, invisible in all lights. If evil has a mouth to smile, it was smiling. Its long waiting had at last been rewarded.

By Kay Levine Spencer
Fiction

Tales Of Lord Shantih

Once the Lord Shantih was asked to write down his teachings. He took a sheet of paper and covered one side with ink until it was a solid black. The other side he left clean.

By Thomas Wiloch