News & Notes

This Month’s A Thousand Words

To celebrate The Sun’s fiftieth year, we’re reprinting images from our archive. This image of Thomas Clark’s is an exceedingly quirky moment — we created the feature A Thousand Words to make room for more pictures exactly like this.

Five Questions for Five Decades

March Reader Spotlight: Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle

In this new feature, we’ve asked Sun subscribers and contributors about their experience with the magazine and their thoughts about the future. For March we are featuring subscriber Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle, who was born and raised in Maseru, Lesotho.

Five Questions for Five Decades

March Writer Spotlight: Heather Sellers

In this new feature, we’ve asked Sun subscribers and contributors about their experience with the magazine and their thoughts about the future. For March we are featuring contributor Heather Sellers, who published the first of many pieces in The Sun in April 1996.

The Sun at the Mission Creek Festival, April 8

Iowa City, IA

In celebration of The Sun’s fiftieth year of publication, we’ll be at the Mission Creek Festival, a music and literature festival in Iowa City, Iowa. Festivities begin Thursday, April 6, and conclude Saturday, April 8. We hope you’ll join us at one — or all — of The Sun’s free events on Saturday.

Friends of The Sun

As The Sun enters its fiftieth year of publication, we’ve been more grateful than ever for the readers who have sustained our ad-free, nonprofit magazine above and beyond the cost of a subscription. We simply wouldn’t be here without the dedication of our readers. Friends of The Sun have kept us in circulation through paper shortages, postage increases, and technical difficulties. Here are just a few ways your donation made a difference last year.

Heavy Lifting

Casey Johnston on Diet Culture and Exercise

Our interview this month with Jaclyn A. Siegel [“The Strong, Silent Type,” by Sam Risak] focuses on masculinity and male body image, and part of that discussion addresses muscle dysmorphia that is characterized by an obsessive focus on muscularity and associated with weight lifting. But there’s an aspect of weight training that can be beneficial to everyone. The writer Casey Johnston has been advocating that idea for several years, after discovering that picking up heavy things in deliberate ways could improve her quality of life. In the past year her newsletter, She’s a Beast, has become popular enough (23,000 subscribers) to land her a book deal about her experiences with weight lifting.

March: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th 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: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th 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.

Rachel J. Elliott on Twenty-Five Years with The Sun

Rachel Elliott started at The Sun as an editorial office assistant in 1997, processing the mail and fulfilling book orders. Now, as editorial associate and photo editor, there is not much of the magazine production process that Rachel isn’t involved in.

January: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th 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.