Issue 526 | The Sun Magazine

October 2019

Readers Write

Worship

A miraculous experience, a mixed-faith couple, a big fat question mark

By Our Readers
One Nation, Indivisible

October 2019

Featuring Kathleen Dean Moore, Greg Palast, Shozan Jack Haubner, and more.

The Dog-Eared Page

A Pale Blue Dot

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark.

By Carl Sagan
Quotations

Sunbeams

Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

The Sun Interview

Tipping Point

Bill McKibben On A Planet In Peril

In a rational world, we would be devoting every resource to making a difference in the short amount of time we have left. Past a certain point, we won’t be able to.

By David Barsamian
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Shrinking World

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. . . . Even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is.

By Bill McKibben
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Button

The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.

By Makana Eyre
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Sleep Study

I wake at 2:34 AM and lie in bed staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, beating myself up for having awakened way before it’s time to get up.

By Evan Lavender-Smith
Fiction

Green Freak

He has developed a shorthand response to my entreaties: Landfill, he hisses, and he walks away.

By Angie McCullagh
Fiction

Goodbye, Sugar Land

I was still exploring my power to hurt others and was continually surprised by how potent a single sentence could be. I watched my mother’s face waver and then crack open.

By Becky Mandelbaum
Poetry

The Middle-Aged Joggers

We gather beside the pond in great ragged flocks, like birds. We run. Knees and backs stiff, we run — along the available routes, the ones before us, the paved and unpaved paths.

By David Rutschman
Poetry

The Extra Year: Selected Poems

from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.

By Jory Post
Poetry

What Was Astonishing

What was astonishing / was that after a summer of running around the yard / and dragging our rubber dinghy a mile to the lake and rowing / and doing backflips off the dinghy and bicycling around the lake

By Elizabeth Poliner