Issue 556 | The Sun Magazine

April 2022

Readers Write

Concerts

At Woodstock, at a school in Nepal, at an all-ages punk show

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Market Street

The sea of people looked like a great heartbroken circus, wild living art, motley and stylish, old and young, lots of Buddhists, people from unions and churches and temples, punks and rabbis and aging hippies and nuns and veterans — God, I love the Democratic Party — strewn together on the asphalt lawn of Market Street.

By Anne Lamott
Quotations

Sunbeams

They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew much about the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better they could argue.

Richard Wright, “The Man Who Went to Chicago”

The Sun Interview

Sticks And Stones

Yascha Mounk On The Erosion Of Good-Faith Discourse In America

It’s hard to be optimistic about this country overcoming its current political challenges without some disaster happening.

By Daniel McDermon
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Past Lives

I know now this is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship: right before the woman leaves. It’s when some women get murdered. I was lucky.

By Alison Clement
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Beacon

I felt a flash of hope for you, even though I knew — because of the distant and resigned tone of your voice — that you were going to die soon.

By John Paul Scotto
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Evanescence

Everything new disappears, within and without. Alzheimer’s disease is eroding her hippocampus. . . . She has what the neurologist calls “rapid forgetting,” so she lives in a state of evanescence; nothing holds.

By Maureen Stanton
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hard Times

After that incident I sorted people into two categories: those who could sing and those who couldn’t. I was now relegated to the land of Couldn’t, an exile from the country of music.

By Alison Luterman
Fiction

Saved

It was true what Mrs. Berry said: no one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a red and black Mustang convertible with a scooped hood and an engine that ran with a throaty hum.

By John Fulton
Photography

We Were All Just Kids, Really

It was never wholly about music; it was also about being part of a community of like-minded misfits and broken dolls. I felt a responsibility to capture these bands and that world specifically because it seemed like nobody else was.

Photographs And Text By Michael Galinsky
Photography

A Thousand Words

April 2022

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Photograph By Lodiza LePore
Poetry

I Pledge Allegiance To The Republic

Every morning the public school chooses a student to lead us in patriotic worship over the intercom. I stand before my classroom flag and count my heartbeats. At recess I draw stars and stars.

By Yasmine Ameli
Poetry

More Of This, Please

In grad school I had a writing teacher who’d completely cream my essays. / Cross-outs and tracked changes. He took me at my word / when I said I wanted to get better.

By Emily Sernaker