Media

Become A Friend Of The Sun

Fri, 15 May 2026 14:17:36 -0400

The Sun has always belonged to its readers. It exists because people believe in quiet conversation, in close listening, in honest storytelling. It exists because readers like you decide that this endeavor is worth sustaining.

Become A Friend Of The Sun

Fri, 15 May 2026 14:17:36 -0400

Sunbeams

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

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power.

Frederick Douglass

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

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.

Sunbeams

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

In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.

Newt Gingrich

Opportunity Knocked

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

Records

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A favorite album, a fastest time, a handwritten note about an adoption

Become a Friend of The Sun

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0500

There’s something about art that too often goes unnoticed: art requires we engage. Each month we receive thousands of submissions of prose, poetry, and photography from people hoping to be published in The Sun. And we engage with each submission in hopes of finding those that will resonate most with you. Our commitment is to bring you the best we can find, the writing and photography that help to unwrap the layers of gauze we wind around ourselves and which obscure the things that matter most. We are profoundly grateful for your support.

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.

Mind the Gap

mcdermon@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Transvestite Freak

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

Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.

Blind History

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. . . . Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other.

Athens, Revised

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.

A House Is Not a Home

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The buyer closed on the property in late April of this year. Despite all the logical, practical, convincing reasons for the sale, letting go wasn’t easy. The Sun’s offices had been in that house since 1989, and photos of its well-landscaped exterior had become familiar to subscribers, a couple dozen of whom would stroll up the front walk each year and knock on the door, hoping to get a glimpse of where their favorite magazine was produced and to meet the people who created it. If he was in, our founding editor, Sy Safransky, always welcomed them.

Become a Friend of The Sun

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

The Sun is not immune to the relentless business pressures and tectonic shifts in the media landscape over the last two decades. And while I am grateful these changes have underscored what is vital and unique about The Sun, it seems that every week I read about a worthy publication having to close its doors. We are committed to bringing our readers the best writing and photography, free from the distraction of advertising. With this choice comes the reality that the price of a subscription doesn’t come close to what it costs to print and distribute the magazine and curate the website. As we have throughout our history, we are asking you again, with great humility, to be our partner on this journey and formally become a Friend of The Sun.

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.

The Peaceful Circle—Year in a Wild Marsh

leathtonino@gmail.com — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

@grimeygrimey: Projected this on the wall so that it was superimposed on my TV, then dosed LSD and played Mario Kart 64 until dawn. Yoshi was in the willow maze! Don’t hit that muskrat, bro! It was sick.

Is This Desire?

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

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.

Become A Friend Of The Sun

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

Every person around us contains a whole universe. The Sun has always seemed to me like a place where we throw a bunch of universes together and see what happens. . . . If you value the way The Sun brings a variety of voices to your ear — some candid, some cajoling, some joyous, and all of them looking you in the eye and telling the capital-T Truth — then I hope you’ll consider making a donation and becoming A Friend of The Sun. Any amount you give helps bring us together in the magazine’s pages month after month.

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

This Month In Sun History

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Forty-four years ago this month, we offered a special holiday rate on gift subscriptions. That was the first time, and it’s a tradition we’ve continued every year since. The announcement of that original offer in 1979 described The Sun as “the ideal gift for friends who’d share your enthusiasm for a totally independent journal, a forum for those who lead lives of intensity and impact” — a description that, happily, has remained true.

The American Dream

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

An Indian immigrant, an oil-company man, a bicycle-riding nomad

This Month In Sun History

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

In October 1974 The Sun, still in its infancy and called The Chapel Hill Sun, reached a milestone. Its sixth issue featured a visual element that has defined its look for nearly fifty years: a black-and-white photograph.

Local Haunts

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

I think every place is haunted to one degree or another. And there will always be people who have a feeling when they visit a place, or believers who will say that they’ve seen something.

Television

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

Sneaking cartoons, escaping into a sitcom, watching the election results

A Brief And Highly Subjective Appreciation Of Fifty Years Of Sun Covers

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

One history that especially fascinates me is The Sun’s. On the wall of my office is a calendar the magazine sent to subscribers — all forty or so of them — at the beginning of 1977. It’s outdated and nonfunctional, but I hung it there because of its . . . well, grooviness. I like the horoscope-adjacent artwork and the handmade feel. It’s very much a product of its time, the kind of thing my brother would call “crunchy.”