TO bring order and meaning to the news -- to cast a sharp, bright light on the major events of each week -- has always been a cardinal aim of TIME. In recent years a growing number of issues and events have transcended the ordinary boundaries of section headings and cover stories. These exceptional subjects have demanded the broader focus of a special section encompassing many areas. One major topic -- Black America -- commanded a special issue.

This week TIME'S readers will find a special section on "The Cooling of America" -- an examination of the nation's new mood, still uncertain but distinctly changed from a few months ago, the mood of a country still beset by problems but weary of constant confrontation. The project was born, explains Senior Editor Jason McManus, "out of a journalistic sense of something stirring in the land that no one had quite captured, corner-of-the-eye perceptions that needed to be looked at head-on and related to one another."

To do so, we called on correspondents across the U.S. Detroit Bureau Chief Peter Vanderwicken analyzed the role of the recession in easing social tensions. Greg Wierzynski, our Boston-based education correspondent, spent much of his time last year dodging rocks and tear gas. This year he found the boards gone from shop windows in Harvard Square and the students getting on with the business of learning.

New York Correspondent Karsten Prager noted much the same sense in the black community, where "black moves on the political and economic front are clearly not as eye-catching as the sit-ins, protests and mass demonstrations of the 1960s." San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum, who has long observed neighboring Berkeley as well as the radical scene generally, contributed the section on the New Left's retrenchment. He drew on the work of New York Correspondent Robert Anson, who recently turned from the conflicts in Southeast Asia (he was captured by the Communists in Cambodia last August) to those at home. Los Angeles Correspondent Tim Tyler spot lighted the counterculture, which has long been his special beat. Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey, who frequently returns to his home town of Greenfield, Iowa, described the mood as perceived both in Middle America and in the capital.

The introduction to the entire section was the work of Associate Editor Lance Morrow who, in evaluating the present situation, was struck "by a sense of fragility and tentativeness. The mood could change very abruptly. But for the moment, I think that people are tired of both fatuous optimism and fatuous pessimism regarding America."

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