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History

April: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50th Year of Publication

By the time The Sun’s number of subscribers had grown to ten thousand, its number of employees had grown, too — enough that the magazine’s charming but shabby office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, “still fits us, but just barely, like a rumpled sweater with too many holes,” as founder and editor Sy Safransky put it. So in April 1989 The Sun bought a new property, right around the corner at 107 North Roberson Street.

April 1, 2023
History

March Recommended Reading

Take a trip through our archive and read about The Sun’s psychedelic origin story, our readers’ drug experiences from 1979, and Poe Ballantine’s metaphorical meadow that is guarded by an evil troll.

March 21, 2023
Five Questions for Five Decades

Five Questions for Five Decades

March Writer Spotlight: Heather Sellers

In this new feature, we’ve asked Sun subscribers and contributors about their experience with the magazine and their thoughts about the future. For March we are featuring contributor Heather Sellers, who published the first of many pieces in The Sun in April 1996.

March 21, 2023
History

This Month’s A Thousand Words

To celebrate The Sun’s fiftieth year, we’re reprinting images from our archive. This image of Thomas Clark’s is an exceedingly quirky moment — we created the feature A Thousand Words to make room for more pictures exactly like this.

March 21, 2023
Five Questions for Five Decades

Five Questions for Five Decades

March Reader Spotlight: Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle

In this new feature, we’ve asked Sun subscribers and contributors about their experience with the magazine and their thoughts about the future. For March we are featuring subscriber Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle, who was born and raised in Maseru, Lesotho.

March 21, 2023
Events

The Sun at the Mission Creek Festival, April 8

Iowa City, IA

In celebration of The Sun’s fiftieth year of publication, we’ll be at the Mission Creek Festival, a music and literature festival in Iowa City, Iowa. Festivities begin Thursday, April 6, and conclude Saturday, April 8. We hope you’ll join us at one — or all — of The Sun’s free events on Saturday.

March 15, 2023
Announcements

Friends of The Sun

As The Sun enters its fiftieth year of publication, we’ve been more grateful than ever for the readers who have sustained our ad-free, nonprofit magazine above and beyond the cost of a subscription. We simply wouldn’t be here without the dedication of our readers. Friends of The Sun have kept us in circulation through paper shortages, postage increases, and technical difficulties. Here are just a few ways your donation made a difference last year.

March 15, 2023
Interviews

Heavy Lifting

Casey Johnston on Diet Culture and Exercise

Our interview this month with Jaclyn A. Siegel [“The Strong, Silent Type,” by Sam Risak] focuses on masculinity and male body image, and part of that discussion addresses muscle dysmorphia that is characterized by an obsessive focus on muscularity and associated with weight lifting. But there’s an aspect of weight training that can be beneficial to everyone. The writer Casey Johnston has been advocating that idea for several years, after discovering that picking up heavy things in deliberate ways could improve her quality of life. In the past year her newsletter, She’s a Beast, has become popular enough (23,000 subscribers) to land her a book deal about her experiences with weight lifting.

By Finn Cohen, Associate Editor & Anna Gazmarian, Outreach Coordinator • March 8, 2023
History

March: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50th Year of Publication

Sitting with his first wife, Judy, and a friend on a sunny beach in Algeciras, Spain, Sy Safransky embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately led him to create the magazine you now hold in your hand. In March 1970, for the first time, he placed a tab of LSD on his tongue. He was twenty-five years old.

March 1, 2023
History

February: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50th Year of Publication

Although The Sun had already released three books of material from its pages, The Mysterious Life of the Heart, released in February 2009, was the first to be centered on a theme: romantic love.

February 1, 2023
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