Issue 506 | The Sun Magazine

February 2018

Readers Write

Dating

A late arrival, a second chance, another woman’s husband

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

February 2018

Featuring Frances Lefkowitz, Howard Zinn, Jim Ralston, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

Izzy

In an age when young men, setting out on a career of journalism, must find their niche in some huge newspaper or magazine combine, I am a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers. I am even one up on Benjamin Franklin — I do not accept advertising.

By I.F. Stone
Quotations

Sunbeams

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Derrick Bell

The Sun Interview

Separate And Unequal

Chuck Collins On How Wealth Divides Us

As we divide into affluent and poor enclaves, people’s sense that they share a common destiny withers, replaced by fear, misunderstanding, and class and racial antagonisms.

By Megan Wildhood
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

His Hands

A friend tells me, Back pain is always anger. I don’t believe him. Maybe, though, grief settles in the muscles there. That, I could believe.

By Mary Jane Nealon
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Short-Lived Ecstasy Bordering On Madness

Well honed by disappointment, my instincts told me this book contract was not going to work out (it wasn’t) and that the philosophical differences I had with my editor were not going to be resolved (they weren’t). But at the age of forty-three and looking at my first — and maybe last — realistic shot at a career in letters, I was like an old dog not yet willing to let go of a bone.

By Poe Ballantine
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Stray

One winter, years ago, a stray cat lived under my rear deck. He was long and skinny and had a tattered gray coat, a whip tail, a block head, and a set of elephant nuts that hung low off his hind end. He survived by eating scraps of leftover food my mother threw to the birds. The sight of him disgusted me.

By Stephen A. Waite
Fiction

Rubbish

Eventually, when it was clear that things could not go on as they were, and it was obvious to everyone that matters were now completely out of hand, that something had to be done, we had a meeting in the town hall, all of us crowded in.

By Tom Payne
Fiction

Plants Don’t Have Birthdays

It’s pizza night. Dad went to pick it up, and my mother is using our time alone to take subtle jabs at me, encouraging independence.

By Andrea Gregory
Poetry

Illness And Literature

In those cold rooms with the blue plastic chairs, / sometimes the human condition / is an old Texas redneck with a brushy mustache / reading a Louis L’Amour novel / while waiting for his chemotherapy

By Tony Hoagland
Poetry

The People I Work With Don’t Talk About Trump

We’re janitors, but we’re called floor-crew technicians. / We work at night. / Darius lives in a trailer with his dad / because his dad has cirrhosis and emphysema.

By Mathias Nelson