News & Notes

May: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th Year of Publication

Asking for help is often difficult, and can be doubly so when the person you’re asking is an idol of yours — someone you’d claim “has done for religion what the Beatles did for music.”. . . At the tail end of the 1970s the number of Sun subscribers hovered somewhere south of a thousand, and the magazine was in dire financial straits. . . . The ultimate result, on a warm night in May 1980, was a benefit lecture that Ram Dass gave in a large hall with no air-conditioning on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Camille Guthrie on Writing Fiction

Camille Guthrie sent her short story “Dating Profile” to The Sun in response to a submission call for humorous writing. “Make us laugh,” we said, and she certainly did. I spoke with Camille about books, TV shows, and the challenges of writing humor, and she even offered a small preview of what’s next for the narrator of “Dating Profile.”

Introduction to The Language of Trees

A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape

In this new collection from Tin House, Irish artist and editor Katie Holten gathers writing in celebration of the natural world from more than fifty contributors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, James Gleick, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Holten includes an illustrated version of each selection based on her tree alphabet. We are pleased to share Ross Gay’s introduction to the book as an exclusive online excerpt. The Language of Trees is out today, April 4, 2023.

April: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th Year of Publication

By the time The Sun’s number of subscribers had grown to ten thousand, its number of employees had grown, too — enough that the magazine’s charming but shabby office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, “still fits us, but just barely, like a rumpled sweater with too many holes,” as founder and editor Sy Safransky put it. So in April 1989 The Sun bought a new property, right around the corner at 107 North Roberson Street.

March Recommended Reading

Take a trip through our archive and read about The Sun’s psychedelic origin story, our readers’ drug experiences from 1979, and Poe Ballantine’s metaphorical meadow that is guarded by an evil troll.

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.

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.