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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.

T-Shirts

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Poorly—and purposefully—placed slogans, baby-goat encounters, and uncanny AOL connections

Without the Gate

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Usually he has a morning episode, then he’s placid most of the day, chatty, gently losing his mind in starts and stops. But after dinner the maximum horror falls on him. He stiffens, his face wracked. He’s at the threshold; he can almost remember the “thing.”

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.

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.

Down in the Valley

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

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.

Sunbeams

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J.G. Ballard

Don’t Think Too Hard about Avocados

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:10:00 -0500

I swear my brain wasn’t always like this. I used to daydream during church sermons, school lessons, and long bus rides. I may have been a shy, awkward nerd with good grades and bad social skills, but inside I was building worlds, whole continents created from nothing and populated with sprawling cities, brave heroes, and looming threats. These days the continents are barren, the heroes defenseless against spotted produce.

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.

Kissing Strangers in the Street

camerondezenhammon@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Afterward I checked my phone. There were a dozen messages from three of my girlfriends who knew where I was. Like a chorus of Muses they asked, Are you alive? The dom was in the shower. I leaned against the glass-topped desk, my abandoned martini on the nightstand. I was very much alive.

This Month In Sun History

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

The Sun’s first-ever website launched in August 1999, into a world of staticky dial-up tones, GeoCities, and frequent buffering. It came about thanks to the generosity of two Sun subscribers. . . . Shelley Sherman and Meredith Tupper took it upon themselves to build a modest, stately website that perhaps undersold the magazine: “If you haven’t heard of The Sun,” the About page read, “you’re not alone.”

Open Ears

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

It wouldn’t surprise me if people looked back in twenty or thirty years and said, “This was the Bad Bunny era” — that those Spanish-language musicians have the same kind of influence today as the hip-hop pioneers and the punk pioneers did in the 1970s.

Heavenly Bodies

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

As the new millennium drew near, Erin’s family began preparing for the apocalypse. Jesus was going to return at the stroke of midnight, appearing in the New York City skyline as the ball dropped on TV and the moon turned to blood.

Speaking Of Tongues

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

This is an extremely creative and spontaneous moment for language. There are whole sociolects that you and I don’t even know about, because we’re too old or we don’t belong to the communities of people who have come up with them. Emoji are fascinating because they’re a return to the ideographic sources of a lot of writing.

Dissent

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:10:00 -0400

The protesters were quite something to watch. On Zoom calls I would describe them to a friend in Brooklyn, who kept calling this the Summer of Discontent. What is happening to us does not have a name yet, I wanted to say. But it did not matter. The protesters were beautiful and bold, like revolutionaries.

Losing Our Religion

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

It seems every year a new survey comes out in which the category of “no religious affiliation” grows larger and larger. A small portion of those people embrace the label atheist or agnostic, but the vast majority don’t, and some would say the phrase “spiritual but not religious” applies to them.

Dating Apps

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

Meeting a spouse, rediscovering an ex, matching with yourself

Sticks And Stones

mcdermon@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 04:00:00 -0400

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

OR-93

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 04:20:00 -0400

The wolf has traveled a thousand miles in two months. A director of a wolf-advocacy group said his arrival here is “something akin to the [first] moonwalk.”

Spam From The Dead

jamesdavismay@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 04:10:00 -0400

And two months after the cancer finally ate through / the last tissues that separated him from death, / I get a message from his e-mail address, / urging me to click on a link I know I shouldn’t

Stay Safe, Be Well

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 17:10:00 -0500

Found poem from the corporate e-mails in my inbox, March 2020 | In these times In these unprecedented times / In these uncertain times In these trying times / You are probably exhausted by all the information. / Rest assured, we are vigilant. / The situation is complex.

Sunbeams

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

In the past censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

Yuval Noah Harari

November 2020

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

Featuring Nicholas Carr, Julia Butterfly Hill, Jaron Lanier, and more.

Dark Corners

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

When COVID-19 hit, Dr. Anthony Fauci was portrayed on the Right as a deep-state villain, one of these “elitists” who are trying to tell “us” how to live in Middle America.

Parade Day

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Today is the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. I am watching it on television in Brooklyn while the Puerto Ricans are parading up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.