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Correspondence
Correspondence
Although it’s always difficult to read about a woman repressing a part of herself to hang on to a relationship, I greatly appreciated Moonshine Matthiessen’s essay “Waterfall” in the January 2026 issue. The piece is beautifully written, and Matthiessen is incredibly candid about her experiences. I admire her courage to voice her desires, her shame, and her struggles.
I, too, stayed longer than I should have in a past relationship, and I’ve often wondered about the mechanism of denial. How is it that, so often, we can’t or won’t recognize when remaining in a situation is bad for us?
Perhaps if there were more studies on denial, we would have answers as to why people stay in abusive relationships, how others justify their addictive behaviors, and why so many people in our country remain true to a president who continues to destroy us.
Name Withheld
June 2026Correspondence
I’ve enjoyed The Sun for years, and I devour each issue cover to cover. In the February 2026 issue, two articles really stood out for me. The first was “The Fourth Estate,” Finn Cohen’s interview with Sheila Coronel. Coronel offers reassurance that fact-based investigative reporting is still being taught in journalism programs, and that brave souls continue to pursue it despite the risks. She also validated my feelings about the importance of commentators and comedians like Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel.
The second was “Sleeping Children,” Kevin Peraino’s essay on what he witnessed in Gaza as a reporter for Newsweek in the early aughts. His chronology of Palestinian politics gave me a new perspective on the events that have led to Israel’s diabolical erasure (with US weapons and support) of a people and their homeland. I used to hope for a “two-state solution,” which I thought was fair and just, but as I read Peraino’s essay, I didn’t feel as if he was pushing me to take sides—rather, he was helping me understand the different factions’ strategies to consolidate power, and how families became the collateral damage.
Pat Milone
Redland, Florida
Correspondence
It has become fashionable to pooh-pooh The Population Bomb [Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book about the threat of overpopulation—Ed.] and even the idea that the explosive growth of the human population over the last century is a problem. But when I dig into the root causes of any given problem we grapple with as a society, I end up concluding that there are just too many of us. So it’s heartening to hear researcher William Rees [“Glass Overfull,” interview by Leath Tonino, December 2025] calling out what has seemed so clear to me for so long.
Some of my friends, who have bought into fantastical notions of technology conquering all, look at me with pity when they hear my perspective. For my part, I’m shocked by this cult of “abundance,” as well as its proponents’ seeming lack of concern for all the other species who share this planet with us—species that, I believe, have a right to the space they need to survive.
Nick Reynolds
Lakeland, Minnesota
Correspondence
Whenever The Sun addresses society’s challenges, it brings to light complexity, rather than quick fixes. The November 2025 issue is no exception.
Daniel McDermon’s thoughtful interview with John Washington [“The Golden Door”] dealt with the question of borders in ways I had not considered before. My heart is heavy as I think about the United States’s treatment of immigrants and the current push for deportation.
Later in the issue, Carrie Knowles’s short story “Her Mother’s Suitcase” captures the urgency felt by émigrés: “She didn’t know where she was going or what she might need, so she took every bit of clothing and packed it together with all the dreams she’d once had, not knowing anymore where she might arrive.”
Martha Worcester
Olympia, Washington
Correspondence
I am grateful for Derek Askey’s wonderful interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal [“Radar and Revelation,” October 2025]. My father was an open-minded Methodist minister, and in my family it was a natural step to go from believing in angels and the divine to believing in parapsychology.
My family witnessed one of the 1994 UFO sightings in Michigan that Kripal mentions. We were living in Ann Arbor at the time, and my sister was walking home from middle school late one fall afternoon when she noticed a silent, circular craft ringed with colorful lights flying above her. When she turned the corner, it turned as well. She walked faster and turned again. It followed right behind her. She started running as fast as she could, afraid to look up.
Minutes later my sister flew into the living room, shouting. My mother was in the kitchen, and she looked out the sliding glass door and saw the craft hovering over the neighbor’s backyard. It left just as my sister burst into the kitchen. When my mother called the police, she learned that they had received over 350 calls that same day. Later The Ann Arbor News featured a photo of a big circle of burned grass in the center of a local college professor’s yard.
Kripal mentions the vertical dimension, which is often scoffed at by materialists and academics. But the vertical dimension is precisely what gives me hope and sustains the feeling that anything is possible. I would be bereft without these signs that we are not alone.
Mary Olmsted
Petoskey, Michigan
Correspondence
In her Readers Write piece on “Graffiti” [October 2025], Celia Barbour mentions that her sleepaway camp’s outhouses were called “kybos.” She writes that the name was “one of those camp-lore terms whose origin is shrouded in mystery.”
At our boys’ camp in Ontario we have called the outhouses kybos—which stands for “Keep Your Bowels Open”—since the camp’s inception in 1947. In fact, we used to have a kybo chart in every cabin to make sure the boys were using it daily.
Anne Morawetz
Peterborough, Ontario
Canada
Correspondence
My thanks to Daniel McDermon and Richard Reeves for their courageous interview [“Under Construction,” June 2025]. I’ve been a proud teacher for over twenty-five years. In my professional life I’ve observed how masculinity has been demonized and young men ostracized. I agree with Reeves: Young men today lack the incentives to succeed.
In A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, Edward Abbey writes, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” I’ve often thought about that quote when I see a forlorn student on his way to class. Every young man seeks a tribe where he feels like he belongs—whether that’s in a punk band or on a soccer team. Where can young men today find that sense of belonging? How might their souls be saved?
Name Withheld
December 2025Correspondence
Richard Reeves’s work is important. Still, I wish Daniel McDermon’s interview [“Under Construction,” June 2025] had ended without Reeves’s statement “but we still need men.” The status of women cannot be trivialized in any sense. How have we “arrived” when women make up merely 15 percent of the engineering workforce? His statement isn’t useful when we’re all struggling with white patriarchy.
Valerie Lloyd
Acme, Washington
Correspondence
I believe The Sun has run the risk of alienating some of its readership by printing Judith Hertog’s interview with Shaul Magid on the evolution of Zionism and Israel [“Long Shadows,” July 2025] and what I see as its companion piece, Adam Rouhana’s photo essay about Palestinian people, “Before Freedom.” But the greater risk is to remain ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the reactionary, sadistic, and ideologically driven slaughter in Gaza. I will continue to speak out against these daily atrocities and refuse to join history’s ignominious list of regretful deniers.
Kenneth Klonsky
Vancouver, Canada
Correspondence
I sobbed for more than a half hour after reading Jessica Marsh’s essay about her father’s cognitive decline [“Dear Old Dad,” June 2025]. I sobbed for my dad, for my mother—and, perhaps, for my future self.
Michal Lynn Jones
Shelocta, Pennsylvania
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