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Race

The Sun Interview

Is This Desire?

Clarissa Smith on the Intersection of Human Sexuality and Pornography

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

By Staci Kleinmaier February 2024
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
The Sun Interview

Speak, Memory

Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

By Derek Askey November 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
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Face In Judgment

A young man stands at the lectern: nineteen years old, athletic, thick black hair down to his shoulders. I’ll call him Marco. Today my job is to decide whether to send him to prison.

By Devin Odell August 2023
Photography

Portrait Of US

Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.

Photographs By Monica Jane Frisell, Interviews By Adam Scher June 2023
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Footprints In Alabama

My mama’s family is Alabama for at least four generations. Though I grew up in Illinois, my soul is rooted here. So whenever anyone narrows their eyes and cocks their head to question how I — a Black woman — could possibly love this place, my answer has been: “Because generations of my people’s blood and footprints are in this soil.”

By Jamila Minnicks June 2023
The Sun Interview

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.

By Finn Cohen June 2023
The Dog-Eared Page

Some Thoughts On Mercy

When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen.

By Ross Gay May 2023