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    The Sun InterviewBy Judith HertogTo RemainRaja Shehadeh on Living through Destruction in Palestine

    I have been thinking that people all over the world these days are feeling a sense of despair because, like me, they are seeing the destruction of the world as they knew it. But it has occurred to me that the real destruction of my world happened in 1948, when the Palestinians lost Palestine.

    Distractions
    Readers WriteBy Our ReadersDistractions

    Reading at work, listening to music during labor, swatting gnats while meditating

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August 2020

issue 536 cover
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Departments

Readers Write
Readers Write

Work

In a strip club, in an emergency room, in a refugee camp

ByOur Readers
The Dog-Eared Page
The Dog-Eared Page

Easter Morning

Like peasants everywhere in the history / of the world ours can’t figure out why / they’re getting poorer. Their sons join / the army to get work being shot at.

ByJim Harrison
Quotations
Quotations

Sunbeams

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that “hard work” was the secret of success: “Work hard and you’ll get ahead” or “It’s hard work that got us where we are.” No one ever said that you could work hard — harder even than you ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

Barbara Ehrenreich

August 2020

issue 536 cover
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Even Money
The Sun Interview

Even Money

Dietrich Vollrath On Repairing America’s Economic Inequality

I think the pandemic is changing people’s idea of what the government should and could do. It’s definitely made them frustrated with what it can’t do.

ByFinn Cohen
The Other Side Of The Moon
Tribute

The Other Side Of The Moon

A Tribute To Lyn Lifshin

A submission from Lifshin would often include dozens of poems about a single subject: a relationship, a memory, dancing the tango. (Dance — including ballet and ballroom — was her second great love, after writing.)

ByLyn Lifshin
Bayou Boy
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Bayou Boy

“Richest dirt in the world,” my dad is fond of saying. As I crumble the clammy soil in my hand, I think, If it’s so rich, why are we so poor?

Night Cows
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Night Cows

The cows showed up just as the world began to end. They were there when I returned to Minnesota from Manhattan, where I’d gone to pick up my older son after his spring 2020 college semester had been canceled.

ByJennifer Eli Bowen
For A Future You
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

For A Future You

I drop by on a Saturday. Your mom lets you answer my knock on the apartment door. The cap of your gastrostomy tube is outlined against your unicorn T-shirt.

ByOwen Cason
Future Generations Will Thank Me
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Future Generations Will Thank Me

My Campaign (Sort Of) For President

The virus is revealing new facts about the U.S. Who would have guessed that People Who Resent Science Because It’s Too Darn Complicated would become a major political force?

BySparrow
Poetry

Mothers Of All Pandemics

we call our moms    they’re in their / nineties now    some don’t remember / many do    we are worried sons of mothers / mugged by some motherfucker of a germ / going back to the days when our mothers’ mothers / were alive during the pandemic of 1918

ByBrian Gilmore

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