The Sun Magazine

Some AIs can already outthink us in certain respects. If they become conscious as well, then we’ll have intellectual rivals that are also conscious beings.

Danielle Ferguson drops everything she’s doing when the moon looks especially beautiful. She lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest, where she leads sound baths, saunas, and cold plunges year-round. She captured this image on a misty morning, from one of her favorite spots on Bainbridge Island.

I read Finn Cohen’s interview with Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah [“Ancestors,” May 2026] on the musical and cultural legacy of New Orleans the same morning I learned from the news that we’ve reached a point of no return: By the end of this century, New Orleans will disappear under a rising sea along with an enormous swath of southern Louisiana.

The interview validated m...

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

I often marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forged in some early chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous fever we call consciousness. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream, and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it w...