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December 2023

News & Notes

December: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50th Year of Publication

December 1, 2023

Upcoming Readers Write Deadlines

Uniforms, Shaving, and Fuel

November 22, 2023

An American Disease

Anders Carlson-Wee on Dumpster Diving in a Culture of Waste

By Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor • November 9, 2023
All news & notes
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Letter From Sy’s Desk

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.

By Sy Safransky
The Sun Interview

Speak, Memory

Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

By Derek Askey
Fiction

Deformation Catalog

I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.

By Emet North
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

His Body Of Work

I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.

By Doug Crandell
Readers Write

Gratitude

A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop

By Our Readers