IN the category-making so dear to journalism, the city generally comes under the file marked Problems. The subject suggests TV panels where earnest sociologists talk of urban renewal, of megalopolis, juvenile delinquency, blight, population movement and traffic. The mayors of these vast places seem to spend their time either shaking hands with somebody for the photographers or complaining of their burdens. TIME, a city-made product itself, takes up the subject this week by selecting, but not at random, the mayors of five U.S. cities--New York, Chicago, Boston, Houston and Los Angeles. Its cover story verifies the existence of all the problems everyone complains about, but tries to bear in mind that many of the problems of the city are the price of its attraction to such numbers of people that they get in one another's way. The story was written by Richard Oulahan Jr., who, as a typical New Yorker, works in Manhattan and commutes home to Yonkers, but once the kids grow up (all seven of them) dreams of moving into The Plaza. The TIME bureaus of five cities contributed their thousands of words, and the story was researched by Dorothea Bourne, who in girlhood lived on a ten-acre ranch that is now part of the city of Los Angeles. The editor was Ed Jamieson, who has endeavored to let no bias show in favor of his native Boston.

THE Problems of the world--Khrushchev's threat to lob rockets to the underside of the U.S., the gathering in Geneva, and the gunfire in Guatemala and Viet Nam--all find their proper places in this week's news budget. But some of the out-of-the-way stories in the issue are not to be missed. Just as France's famed gourmet Guide Michelin (see THE WORLD) confers one, two or three stars on France's best restaurants and decrees which are "worth a detour,'' our own chefs have a few specialties de la maison to commend:

o The girl in the suitcase, or how to get out of Communist East Germany in the worst way (see THE WORLD).

o The new match game, in which the first player doesn't seem to have a chance, one of the more comprehensible features of the new French movie, Last Year at Marienbad (see MODERN LIVING).

o The way in which Tula Ellice Finklea, Doris Kappelhoff, Archie Leach, Frederick Austerlitz, Norma Jeane Baker, Dino Crecetti and Roy Fitzgerald became household names, though not their own (see SHOW BUSINESS).

Once these appetizers have been sampled, either on a detour or in their proper sequence, the rest of the news may be approached in a confident frame of mind. It has never been a TIME rule that the magazine must be read from front to back, though most people do. Those who skip ahead to their favorite section--whether it be People, Medicine or Art--or take a preliminary skim of the magazine, just looking at the pictures and reading what catches their eye, have our affection too. We have a first page but not a Front Page, and the writers and editors in what we call our back of the book like to think that theirs too is the Front Page news in their field.

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