Finn Cohen

Reason To Believe

Randall Sullivan on Faith and Evil

Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.

The Highs and Lows of Getting High

Selections from the Archive

In The Sun’s archives there are dozens of selections about the ways people find meaning in nature. We’ve gathered a few favorites below that we hope you’ll enjoy.

Like Flying a Kite

Mark Gozonsky on Hope, Children, and Letting Out the String

I struck up a bit of jovial correspondence in early 2020 with Mark Gozonsky, just before we published our second essay of his. Several members of our staff were planning to attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in San Antonio, Texas, that year, and Gozonsky invited us to play Wiffle ball. But the pandemic had other plans for us that spring. So, when we all got sent home in mid-March, I spent many hours out in my yard relieving stress by hitting gumballs from our sweet gum tree over our house with a Wiffle ball bat I found in the bushes. In those early months of lockdown, my backyard batting average got pretty good, and Mark and I shared a few videos with each other of our respective hitting techniques. Then I was diagnosed with golfer’s elbow and spent several months in physical therapy, ending my Wiffle ball career.

November Preview

Dash Lewis’s conversation with billy woods

“Past Futures” will be published in the November issue of The Sun, but we’re inviting you to read it a bit early because we think Dash Lewis’s conversation with billy woods is important to mull over in the coming weeks, regardless of what happens on Nov. 5 (or beyond).

Woods is not a politician or a political theorist or a pundit. He is a rapper whose work over the past two decades has undoubtedly been shaped and influenced by the decisions and attendant consequences that come from the offices of power around the world. In his conversation with Lewis woods talks about the cycles that have defined much of human history while also acknowledging how unpredictable they can be. While not necessarily comforting, woods’s view of the world is at once tangled and clear minded.

Blind History

Tiffany Griffin on America’s Narrow View of Africa

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.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar

Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy

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

Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us

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.

Transformation

Jen Silverman on Writing for Different Mediums

I caught up with Jen Silverman late this summer, after we finished the edits on “Scale,” their new short story in our October issue. Jen was a few months into returning to New York City from Japan, where they worked as a producer and writer on the Max series Tokyo Vice. Jen had just switched gears back to theater, working on the book for a new musical with the composer Dave Malloy, workshopping an upcoming new play called Spain about propaganda, and wondering how long the writers’ strike in Hollywood (which has since ended) would keep a number of other projects on hold.

Kelefa Sanneh Interview Playlist

My conversation with Kelefa Sanneh covered so many artists and so many genres that we thought readers would enjoy a playlist. My hope is that something here gets stuck in your head long enough to prompt some investigating of your own.

Open Ears

Kelefa Sanneh On What Popular Music Can Teach Us About Each Other

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.