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Poverty

The Sun Interview

Tangled Avenues

Wade Graham on the Interlocking Challenges of the Modern City

Cities 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 Lewis January 2024
Readers Write

Gratitude

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

By Our Readers November 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Salmonella Special

In 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-Wee October 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Nail Salon

Some people remember childhood bike rides and ice-cream sundaes; I remember acetone and moon-slivers of nails.

By Gabrielle Behar Trinh October 2023
Readers Write

The American Dream

An Indian immigrant, an oil-company man, a bicycle-riding nomad

By Our Readers October 2023
The Dog-Eared Page

Selected Poems

For 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 Baca October 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Fire

A 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 Donaghy October 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

How To Be A Woman

I learned a woman could wield the power to turn heads. She could capture a room’s attention and make everyone laugh. Everything else I knew of women’s lives told me not to trust this kind of power, but I wanted it nonetheless.

By Patricia Fancher March 2023
The Sun Interview

Unsheltered

Eric Tars On The Human Right To Housing

The Martin v. Boise decision stands for the very simple principle that punishing a homeless person for undertaking basic, life-sustaining activities like sleeping or sheltering themselves — when there’s no adequate alternative accessible to them — is cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

By Thacher Schmid January 2023
Poetry

At The Market

It’s Sunday at noon, and the open-air / vendors are planted in their usual spots — picklers / pressed against the outer edge while growers / forest the pathways with kale, collard greens, / and patches of lavender.

By Lori Romero January 2023