THIS week's cover story on Billie Sol Estes brings out old-fashioned journalistic instincts--the pursuit of shenanigans, resolving contradictory stories--that all journalists, ourselves included, take professional delight in. We think we have something extra to bring to the story in the accumulation of fascinating detail that a television audience would not be expected to sit still for, and in the deployment of correspondents to many cities, weaving together their separate strands in a way that individual newspapers cannot match.

Still, in a period when journalism is swiftly changing, it is not this type of story that best illustrates our uniqueness. We try to extend our curiosity into areas that are not conventionally considered spot news, though we think they are; and in areas where radio or newspapers already bring the results first, we try to concentrate on the turning points of important trends, or to single out standout performances. For example, in this week's news: In Art, we report how the 30-year dominance of the glass box building came under attack, not by just a few iconoclastic critics, but by a significant number of U.S. architects at their annual convention in Dallas, where they cheered some viable variants. And another changing trend, long foreseen--the shift away from abstract expressionism in painting--became more visible. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, long a tolerant advocate of everything in art but the naturalistic, staged a new painting show to bring back the human figure, though not yet in a way that would have been recognizable to Rubens or Raphael. It is a story illustrated by four pages of color.

In Sport, where fans can be expected to know the score already, this week's stories isolate two great competitors: golf's Arnold Palmer, who has won more tournaments so far this season than anyone before him, and baseball's Stan Musial, who does not need the money, but is now breaking the biggest records after 21 years with the St. Louis Cardinals. Both men, incidentally, are old TIME cover characters revisited.

Another former cover subject (he has appeared there twice) is France's Andre Malraux, art historian, revolutionary, novelist, flyer, archaeologist, Resistance hero, politician--and now De Gaulle's culture commissar. Fresh from his gala at the White House with the Kennedys, Malraux in Manhattan had some eloquent words to say on the subject of mass culture. Even the New York Times, which yields to no one in its readiness to print long texts of politicians' dull speeches, missed this lively one, which we quote from extensively in Modern Living.

And in Science we report the story of a daring plane waiting to be built, now that a Government scientist has solved the trick of developing a fighter that can stretch its wings at low speeds, or fold them in the air like a peregrine falcon closing in for the kill.

These are just a foretaste of some of the stories that fill the following pages.

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