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We had never heard of a kid who had cancer. We knew of teenagers who’d been killed in farming accidents and at least a few who had been maimed riding ATVs with no helmets, their skulls coming into contact with country roads. But not cancer. It seemed like something that happened to aunts and uncles. Combined with the lack of rain and the impending foreclosure, 1983 was beginning to feel apocalyptic.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2024Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.
By Mark LevitonJune 2024Any comedian will tell you, losing an audience’s attention for even a split second can snowball. Handle it wrong, and you may die onstage like Elvis on the toilet, like Lenny Bruce beside the toilet, like William Howard Taft in a bathtub near a toilet.
By Andrew GleasonMay 2024Once 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.
By Finn CohenApril 2024Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.
By Dash LewisFebruary 2024A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop
By Our ReadersDecember 2023In twelve months I hadn’t set foot in a supermarket, hadn’t compared the prices of two brands of bread, hadn’t stood in a checkout line to buy anything, not even a pack of Tic Tacs. Everything I ate had been thrown away. Everything I ate, I’d found first.
By Anders Carlson-WeeNovember 2023Some people remember childhood bike rides and ice-cream sundaes; I remember acetone and moon-slivers of nails.
By Gabrielle Behar TrinhNovember 2023A chair flies through your window and someone’s screaming for you to come out and you’re fourteen and he’s twenty and there’s nowhere to go and no cops coming and no one to make this any better, and you become a flame that can’t be extinguished.
By Daniel DonaghyNovember 2023For two years The Sun was a lighthouse that guided me through rough, dark waters: Every line of mine that Sy [Safransky] published penetrated a little more of the fog called imprisonment. Every poem revealed my wrecked spirit dashed against the reef. Not only had Sy loved them, but Sun readers sent letters of appreciation, which Sy printed in the magazine. I’d never been complimented for anything, much less a literary contribution. My life had some hope in it now.
By Jimmy Santiago BacaNovember 2023Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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