TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine, was first published March 3, 1923. It was a year of intermission. The war, the great debate over the League, the postwar boom and slump were moving off the stage. The U.S. was bewildered at the erratic behavior of women, Senators, prices, adolescents, Russians. Things, it was felt, were due to settle down.

They never did. Waiting in the wings was one of the most luridly confusing quarter-centuries in the history of man. Progress appeared, unexpectedly, in Turkey, where Mustapha Kemal led a westernizing crusade. In Italy, Benito Mussolini had marched on Rome but was not yet (quite) a dictator. The only man who called himself that was Gustav von Kahr, Dictator of Bavaria, against whom Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler plotted. In the U.S., John L. Lewis,* who had risen from statistician to president in the United Mine Workers, was getting ready for a trip to Europe. In New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt (shown as a pipe smoker on TIME'S 13th cover) had returned from convalescence to take up a fruitless job as head of the American Construction Council. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin/- was quietly getting his hammer lock on the Communist Party. In Ahmadabad, Gandhi, jailed, was finding words which were to become truth to scores of millions.

TIME, on the edge of this whirlpool, rashly promised its readers to tell what the news meant, to get it all into proper perspective. Even more rashly, it asked to be judged not by how much information it got between its covers, but by how much it got off its pages into the minds of its readers.

The attempt to keep that promise turned out to be far more difficult, exciting--and welcome--than the innocent simplicity of 1923 foretold. Before the quarter-century was done, TIME had tried to comprehend and convey the color, drama and meaning of such far-flung complexities as gangsterism, Franz Kafka, swing music, fancy funerals, Wallis Simpson, Marxism, aerial warfare, soap operas, Arnold Toynbee,* Barbara Hutton, the British spirit, Theodore Bilbo, Chen Li-fu, the Townsend Plan, Suzanne Lenglen, currency devaluation, Aldous Huxley, atomic fission, Jimmy Walker and the Supreme Court.

TIME'S effort to tell the news of this tragic and gaudy era through a new kind of journalistic medium, the newsmagazine, has been an experiment in communication. This report on where the experiment is today must begin with the newsmagazine idea, because that is still the mainspring of what makes TIME tick.

*TIME'S first reference to him miscalled him John J. Lewis.

/- TIME'S first reference to him called him Ivan Stalin; TIME in 1924 could not figure out whether Rykov or Kamenev was the best bet to succeed Lenin.

*Toynbee, the historian of civilizations on whom TIME wrote a cover story last March 17, was first mentioned in the issue of March 24, 1923, for his "admirably written" book, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey.

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