A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Beginning this week, Michael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic and author of that magazine's provocative "TRB" column, joins TIME as a regular contributor. If you are like most of his loyal readers, you'll love him. You'll also hate him from time to time. After all, Kinsley has a reputation for infuriating conservatives and liberals alike, except when he is busy delighting them. Apart from writing in the New Republic, Kinsley has been a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and has written for the Washington Monthly, Harper's and FORTUNE. No one is safe from his bite. After dedicating his 1987 collection of writings, Curse of the Giant Muffins (Summit Books; $17.95), to his parents, Kinsley added, "Any factual errors or lapses of judgment are strictly their fault."

So when we offered Kinsley a chance to write for TIME, he could not resist. "After a decade of writing for a magazine with a circulation of 100,000," he says, "a magazine of close to 5 million looks pretty tempting." The pieces he will pen for TIME each year will appear in the Essay section, though Kinsley does not describe himself as an essayist. Once, while criticizing Financial Expert Felix Rohatyn, Kinsley wrote that one "laughably easy" way to earn a reputation as a philosopher is to "refer to your own writings as 'essays,' not articles." Says Kinsley: "I write articles. If people want to call them essays, I'm extremely flattered."

A Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Kinsley, 36, began writing for the New Republic at the age of 25. Three years later he became the magazine's editor. This week in TIME, Kinsley takes on the State Department and its recent decision to shut down the U.S. offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He won't tell us his plans for future TIME Essays . . . oops! articles, but we are braced for angry letters from just about anybody. We know what it is like to be on the receiving end of his wit. In a "TRB" column three years ago, Kinsley divided the number of words in TIME by the number of word journalists on our masthead. "That works out to slightly over 100 words a week per journalist," he wrote, explaining that the staff generates and then digests vast amounts of reporting, most of which never sees print. He then added a barbed compliment: "It is a system of literary creation like nothing else on earth, except Newsweek." Welcome to our masthead, Mr. Kinsley.