News & Notes

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.

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.

March: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th 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.

February: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th 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.

Rachel J. Elliott on Twenty-Five Years with The Sun

Rachel Elliott started at The Sun as an editorial office assistant in 1997, processing the mail and fulfilling book orders. Now, as editorial associate and photo editor, there is not much of the magazine production process that Rachel isn’t involved in.

January: This Month in Sun History

A Look Back for Our 50^th Year of Publication

Sixteen pages, if you include the front and back covers. A twenty-five-cent cover price. Each issue sold by hand on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. . . . The office: the backseat of founder and editor Sy Safransky’s Nash Rambler. And a fifty-dollar loan to get the whole thing off the ground.

Magazine Delivery Delay

The November issue is late.

Please wait to request a replacement copy of the November issue until December 15.

Through the Years

Stephen Gaskin and Ina May Gaskin

In our November issue, Rupert Fike discusses The Farm in his poem “He Arrived in a Hollowed-Out Studebaker Lark.” From 1971 to 1983 The Farm existed as a spiritual commune, home to more than a thousand “voluntary peasants” on 1,750 acres in southern Tennessee. It continues today as a reorganized cooperative with members in charge of their own finances. The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin with the help of his wife Ina May Gaskin, both of whom are Sun contributors. We present links to content by and about Stephen and Ina May through the years.

October’s Most Popular Reads

Competing perspectives take center stage in this month’s most-read selections.

The Hope and Heartache of Parenting

This month’s archive selections explore the fraught connections between parents and children.