To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

If you are a "typical TIME reader" (this week, men only) you have blue eyes and brown hair, are 5 ft. 9 in. tall, weigh 165 Ibs. and wear glasses. The chances are 100 to i against your wearing a beard, 10 to 1 against your having a mustache. Instead you shave clean every day, and you are more likely to swear than sing while you are doing it. You don't admit to a bay window--and you have no use for setting up exercises.

You support a family of three or four (statistically speaking, you have 1.25 children and think they are getting a better education i , ,=. than you did). You own your own home, contribute $84.12 a year to charity, spend $97.95 for medicaland dental care, pay out $301.97 in insurance premiums. You bought your present car new in 1941 and have driven it about 31,250 miles; you usually trade it in every three years, but now you will hang onto it until the new models come out after the war. You own four business suits and at least one suit of dinner clothes, and your wife has three evening gowns (you think she should have more). Chances are you are in business, an executive or department head with 33 people under you--and you're probably earning more money than a year ago (69.7% of TIME subscribers are). You own stock in at least one company--and you don't claim to have made more than you lost in Wall Street. You're working longer hours than ever before, but you still find time for civic activities and civilian defense, and for your favorite hobbies-- gardening, photography, golf, fishing. You have a radio, of course, and your favorite programs are Information, Please, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Jack Benny. You are likely to play a musical instrument yourself, and you admit you play it pretty well (the odds are it's the piano, but it could be the violin, clarinet or saxophone, or even the tipple, zither or glockenspiel). You go to the movies only once every other week or so (whenever there's a picture you really want to see) and once or twice a week you have friends in for dinner or bridge (you don't like restaurant meals nearly as much as those your wife serves at home).

These days, of course, you can't travel the way you used to--but you still have a tremendous interest in the world around you--for not only do you read TIME every week, but you buy two daily newspapers as well --spend 38.4 minutes a day looking through them. You ' listen to the radio commentators (Raymond Gram Swing, Lowell Thomas and Fulton Lewis Jr. are your favorites). You own 241 books, buy eight more every year (TIME subscribers buy about one-eighth of all the adult, non-technical books sold in the U.S.). Your three favorites last year were They Were Expendable, Berlin Diary and See Here, Private Hargrove--in that order.

One reason we have to find out so much about our subscribers is that TIME, alone among all U.S. magazines, is written "as if by one person for one person." By that I mean that TIME is planned to be read from cover to cover like a book--that nothing goes into TIME that we do not think you would be interested in knowing.

And so when we write TIME we need an unusually clear and accurate mental picture of the very special kind of educated, successful or headed-for-success American who has hired us to help him keep quickly well-informed.

Cordially,

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