By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Our cover story this week focuses on marriage, a subject we have covered often through the years, most recently in a muchdiscussed cover story in August 1994 that looked at its flip side: infidelity. This time the focus is an informal but widespread movement, noted by senior editor Lee Aitken, aimed at shoring up marriage through the counseling of engaged couples and troubled husbands and wives, as well as through efforts to protect the children whom discord places at risk.

To write the story, Aitken turned to our newest senior writer, Elizabeth Gleick, who came to us from PEOPLE magazine (as did Aitken). Gleick, raised in New York City, attended Yale, where she enjoyed editing the Yale Daily News Magazine more than going to classes--though she still graduated magna cum laude in 1985. Back in Manhattan, she found an entry-level job at Vogue. ``I think I worked out because I could type fast and still get lunch every day for five people,'' she says. ``But there was no way I could dress as well as everyone else in the elevator.''

In 1987 Gleick joined a short-lived magazine, New York Woman. She relished writing and editing stories, but she was conscious of working in a one-sex world. When the magazine folded, one of the things she liked about moving to PEOPLE was the chance to ``work with men and write about them.'' While there she wrote about such men as Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson and various Kennedys, as well as about crime and earthquakes.

She came to TIME looking for a new challenge, and a major one awaited her: the story of O.J. Simpson's murder trial. Last month Gleick wrote the cover story on the opening of the trial, and we shall doubtless hear more from her on that subject. Says senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan, who has worked with her both at PEOPLE and TIME: ``She has a particular talent for delineating character, for sifting through reporting for the detail that is just right. She would always display the most poignant evidence of a subject's heart--or lack of it.''

Marriage is a subject that Gleick, who is single, was happy to explore. She and her friends ponder it frequently. ``Personally, I am sometimes amazed that people can make it work, but as a society we are re-examining it at many levels. There is an urgency about saving children, although I don't think that need necessarily involve marriage--families can take different forms.'' Enlightened views, but Gleick also has good reason to value the family's most traditional form: to date her parents' marriage has spanned 42 years.