From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

In recent years TIME has devoted special issues of the magazine to compelling and urgent subjects ranging from women's trials and triumphs to the U.S. Constitution. The extra pages in these issues provide for protracted reflection outside the current sweep of news and allow us to bring you a bonus package of our best journalistic efforts, applied to a larger subject than we can ordinarily tackle in a week. This week readers will find at newsstands and in mailboxes perhaps our most ambitious project yet: "Beyond the Year 2000: What to Expect in the New Millennium."

This peek into the future is not the result of a single stroke of inspiration from one editor; the idea grew over a year from more modest proposals by several staff members. And then, over the past six months, it was prepared under the direction of editors Edward Jamieson and Stephen Koepp. Vacationing in the Grand Canyon's timeless beauty soon after he began the project, Koepp felt inspired to think about the millennium. "We decided to do this issue now because the '90s are really the advent season of the new millennium. In the relative scale of things, it's just a few minutes before midnight, and time for humankind to start preparing for what lies beyond," he says. "The year 2000 has always been so symbolic of an idealized future, the better world that we'd like to see. Considering the rapid pace of change, we can't predict all the news that the 21st century will bring, but many challenges and opportunities are already coming into view."

A sole advertiser, IBM, appears in the pages of this issue. We are pleased that the company chose to associate itself with this project, a review of how far we've come in the past millennium and how much further we may be going in the next.

On page 58 of this issue is a story by correspondent Sylvester Monroe, telling of his return to the Chicago housing projects he grew up in and the public high school he attended a generation ago. In very personal terms, Sylvester documents the even harder struggles today's blacks confront as they attempt to climb out of poverty. As part of this extraordinary report, he will appear on The Issue Is Race, a PBS special produced in association with TIME that will air Oct. 2 on public television stations.