Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free.

Selections from the May issue

The Science Of Happiness:
Barbara Fredrickson On Cultivating Positive Emotions
“There’s a famous paper in psychology called ‘Happy but Mindless?’ which suggests that people who are happy are somehow bubble-headed softies, not critical of the world and therefore not intellectuals. I think that’s a distorted stereotype that highly critical people cultivate to justify their own negativity.”
Interview by Angela Winter

 

Boy Squared
Fantasy and reality collide in the Bronx
Essay by Akhim Yuseff Cabey

Moving In
To a husband’s dream house, a friend’s basement, a Japanese American internment camp
Personal stories by our readers

Plus: Poetry by Jeanne Lohmann, Sy Safransky’s Notebook, and Sunbeams

Favorite from the archives

From the March 1983 issue:

Stealing Souls:
Thoughts On Photography
“As photographers, we find those persons most alien to our bourgeois training — the hapless, the homeless, the tacky, the truly marginal; that is, people most unlike ourselves — and we ‘document’ them, as if the sole intention of their suffering and aimlessness was to earn them the right of becoming an ‘interesting’ subject.”
Essay by John Rosenthal

This essay appears in the anthology A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky: The Best of The Sun, Volume II.

Help us expand our online archive by recommending your favorite piece from The Sun. We may include your suggestion on our website and in our newsletter.

What bloggers are saying

A writer in Boston discusses the dread she felt as she read Sam Wilson’s short story “A New Painting of Marianne” [May 2009].

Using The Sun as a positive example, editor and Harvard fellow Doc Searls questions whether journals can live on subscriptions as he contemplates “a world with fewer (or no) newspapers and many fewer magazines.”

An author and CEO in West Newton, Massachusetts, gets excited about chaos theory and collaboration as she reads Angela Winter’s interview with Barbara Fredrickson [“The Science of Happiness,” May 2009].

Adbusters features Arnie Cooper’s interview with Nicholas Carr [“Computing the Cost,” March 2009] as part of its Digital Detox Week.

A baker in Knoxville, Tennessee, receives an unexpected gift from a stranger while reading The Sun in a cafe.

An evening with The Sun in Northampton, Massachusetts

You’re invited to join Sun authors Krista Bremer, Sy Safransky, Sparrow, and Genie Zeiger for a reading at the Northampton Center for the Arts on Sunday, May 17. The authors will read from The Sun’s newest anthology, The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love.

The reading begins at 7:30 p.m., and admission is free. Click here for directions and parking information.

Are Sun readers meeting in your area?

More than 150 groups of Sun readers meet regularly to discuss the latest issue of the magazine, or write, or both. Groups have recently formed in:

Littleton, Colorado
Orlando, Florida
Evanston, Illinois
Amherst, Massachusetts
Valhalla, New York

To view the complete list of Sun groups, or to start your own, click here.

Weekends with Sun authors

Into The Fire
The Sun Celebrates Personal Writing

Join Sun authors, readers, and staff — including editor and publisher Sy Safransky — for a lively weekend of conversation, reflection, and inspiration. The Sun will host two gatherings this year: one on May 15–17 at the Rowe Conference Center in Rowe, Massachusetts, and the other on October 30–November 1 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Online registration is now available; click here for details. Spaces fill quickly, so we recommend registering soon.

Most-read on our website

1. Computing The Cost:
   Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains
   Interview by Arnie Cooper
   (March 2009)
2. Faith
   Readers Write
   (April 2009)
3. The Good Red Road:
   Leslie Gray On Rediscovering America’s Oldest Psychology
   Interview by Barbara Platek
   (April 2009)
4. Ode To The God Of Atheists
   Poetry by Ellen Bass
   (April 2009)
5. The Fine Art Of Quitting
   Essay by Poe Ballantine
   (April 2009)

Free trial offer

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