Vocation

The Good End of Pleasant Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.

My Bowstring Heart

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

On the field I was all animal instinct and brute force—a bruiser, a bone breaker. Every tackle was a rebuke against a life where fathers die. When I played rugby, I wasn’t a broke, lost little girl. I wasn’t a struggling amateur writer. I had goals. I was a winner. I was MVP. I was someone.

Practice Losing Everything

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

Eating Free

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Perhaps this isn’t the case at all Embassy Suites, but in Flagstaff, Arizona, between 5 and 7 pm, the hotel provides unlimited snacks and beer, gratis. I’ll repeat that: unlimited. Granted, I never imbibed more than three Michelobs and a cubic yard of Chex mix, but still. The possibility of unlimited is delectable.

The Fourth Estate

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:45 -0500

I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The press must be free. It has always been so, and much evil has been corrected by it. If government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct, and it will find the cause.

Thomas Erskine

Bad Lunch

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I’d come to think of being a chef on a yacht as a kind of psycho-spiritual quest, like Homer’s Odyssey, only instead of tumultuous seas and six-headed monsters, our challenges were wealthy clients who arrived by private jet with Louis Vuitton purses on their arms.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Putting this magazine together has remained a profoundly human endeavor, the work of many hands, even as the media landscape has become more automated.

Red Desert

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sometimes I think of my early years of living in the city, that watery phase of life when you don’t plan beyond the next week, or even the next day, and every new connection is imbued with promise.

A Good House

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.

Tips

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Waiting tables at a diner, playing in a wedding band, giving massages at the Phallus Palace

Missing

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

One week before the planes flew into the towers, I secured my first full-time, salaried job. I had applied to work for the New York City Parks Department at the suggestion of my roommate, Ethan. He’d recently quit his Parks job—not because he hadn’t liked it, but because he was, by his own reckoning, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, brought on by the unexpected death of his father a few years earlier. Ethan regarded me as lucky because my mother had at least told me about her cancer diagnosis before she’d died. From his father he’d inherited a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, just one subway stop and a short walk from Central Park. Ethan sublet my room to me for $667, a remarkably low rent for a building with a doorman, pool, and gym.

Sunbeams

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:00:00 -0400

In the beginning was the beat, and the beat was the rhythm of God, and the rhythm of God became the harmony of humanity.

Clarence Glover

Past Futures

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

Penumbra

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

If Roe was created in the liminal space of the penumbra, Dobbs is the total eclipse that makes all go dark.

Extrication Day

lukepatterson59@gmail.com — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

It is easy to forget your own body with a patient under your hands. In training we learned how to call the air ambulance—how to say the right words on the radio, hand off our patient to the flight crew, and keep our heads beneath the spinning helicopter blades.

Occupation: Fool

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Any comedian will tell you, losing an audience’s attention for even a split second can snowball. Handle it wrong, and you may die onstage like Elvis on the toilet, like Lenny Bruce beside the toilet, like William Howard Taft in a bathtub near a toilet.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

But I’m talking about joke structure; you’re asking about the purpose of comedy as a whole. When my first book came out, people would ask me in interviews, “Why is comedy important?” I don’t know that it is. There are lots of people, believe it or not, who don’t care about comedy. And they can live to the age of eighty or ninety.

This Month In Sun History

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The most important December in Sun history is, well, this one: the month in which Sy Safransky, after fifty years of laboring to put out the magazine he founded, steps away from his desk and becomes, deservingly, editor emeritus.

A Letter From Sy’s Desk

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

In January my implausible idea of working at the magazine for fifty years will have come to pass, and I will comfortably step into a new role as editor emeritus. That having been said, it’s hard for me to say goodbye.

Sunbeams

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.

Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006

Lawn Skeletons

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 04:00:00 -0400

As far as I know, the first house in the neighborhood to adopt a year-round skeleton display was a small Cape Cod a couple of blocks from me. The skeletons sat side by side, day after day, in their Adirondack chairs, holding hands as if starring in a Cialis commercial.

What I Don’t Tell My Wife

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:05:00 -0400

There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.

A Face In Judgment

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

A young man stands at the lectern: nineteen years old, athletic, thick black hair down to his shoulders. I’ll call him Marco. Today my job is to decide whether to send him to prison.

Quiet, Please

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0400

We must recognize that we’ve largely lost quiet, even in our most pristine, natural places. But we can still choose to value quiet more as a culture.

Field Guide to Falling Ill

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 04:05:00 -0400

I can’t say what it’s like to suffer from a severe, chronic illness, the kind that knocks your life into a new orbit. But I can tell you what it’s like to be in the postscript of illness, its undead state, where the crisis has passed but recovery isn’t certain. It’s a dull, heavy place.

Ode To The Man Who Gave Me A Dinosaur Notepad On Our Hinge Date

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:05:00 -0400

Because he didn’t think girls don’t like dinosaurs. Because he didn’t assume / he was entitled to have sex with me because he bought me a taco. / Because our date was an hour. Because what he gave me was light / and easy to carry.

Sparrow’s Guide To Business

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:05:00 -0500

When you walk on sand, you leave footprints. When you work, you leave “workprints.” The people who come behind you will judge you by your workprints.

Mister Kim

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Mr. Kim is abrupt. He is brief. He is short. He is terse. He is direct. He does not beat around the bush. He brooks no nonsense. He is from elsewhere.

I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Often, when I’m out wandering with my camera, some kind person will help me with directions, then call out as I’m heading down the road, “I hope you find what you’re looking for!” It’s a wish that floats around in my mind, challenging me.