The Sun Magazine

This month’s issue features an interview with Susan Schneider on the possibility of AI becoming conscious. The discussion with interviewer Michael Owen is at times philosophical, as the two ponder the nature of consciousness and how we can even know what another’s experience of it is like. It made me think about the attitudes toward new technology that have been expressed in...

Poet, activist, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry was an inspiration to The Sun’s founder and longtime editor, Sy Safransky. Berry’s ability to blend ethics, aesthetics, and earthy common sense appealed to the Brooklynite who’d moved to the South in pursuit of an agrarian ideal.

The breadth and depth of the problem is stunning. But I’m not a person who stays focused on how bad a problem is. I’m interested in what we can do about it. How do we get the numbers back up? How do we help?

Anne Falkowski’s short story “Rise” [May 2026] is such a tightly written piece. Every sentence communicates the tensions in the protagonist’s life. There is so much going on in Ana’s heart—she is as tough as tempered glass and as fragile as a vase. (I never watched General Hospital, the soap opera Ana is devoted to, but I now understand why it was the talk of th...

Elizabeth Paley lives in Durham, North Carolina, and may be the only person to have a publication trifecta in The Astrophysical Journal, 19th-Century Music, and Pottery Making Illustrated. She took this month’s cover photo after six long days of point-to-point hiking with her husband along the Via Alpina in Switzerland. Havin...