TO OUR READERS

By WALTER ISSACSON MANAGING EDITOR

One of the worst things for a newsmagazine is a long drought of news. Almost as challenging is being hit with two stories the same week. Sometimes they pair interestingly in our minds and on our cover: Kerri Strug's golden heart and a two-bit pipe bomber's tarnished mind allow us to grapple with the courage and cowardice of the human soul. But sometimes the stories are eerily disparate, hard to balance in our minds because the relative weight of each seems more difficult to calculate the closer together we bring them.

Such was the case last week as we debated what should be on this cover: the tantalizing evidence of life on Mars, or our Republican Convention package featuring Dole's choice of a running mate. One so timeless, the other so temporal. Other than through jokes about signs of life on Mars and in the G.O.P., it was hard to juxtapose them. And both subjects--the wonders of American politics and the marvels of science and technology--happen to be passions of mine.

The Mars discovery made us wonder not only about whether there was life on Mars, but also why life exists at all. It was an ideal story for TIME, which has always sought to wrestle with the ramifications of startling headlines; just last February we did a cover called "Is Anybody Out There?" after scientists found evidence of two distant planets that seemed to have water. We jumped on the Mars story last week, scheduling pieces by former science editor Leon Jaroff, new writer Jeffrey Kluger (who co-wrote the book that became the basis for Apollo 13), correspondent J. Madeleine Nash and essayist Lance Morrow.

But when national political correspondent Michael Duffy called Wednesday morning to say that Bob Dole seemed set to surprise folks by picking his longtime antagonist Jack Kemp as a running mate, we realized that the convention package being prepared by Stephen Koepp, Priscilla Painton and their Nation team was becoming the most fascinating political story of the year. It embodied all the marvelous interplay between politics and personality that has been TIME's franchise for 73 years. If the presidential race is destined to tighten (and I suspect it is), this could do it, and it will help clarify the very real choice voters face in November. America is sometimes infected by a cynical view that politics doesn't matter. I think that's wrong. It does.

So when we saw the pictures from Russell, Kansas, we decided to give the Republican earthlings their moment in the sun, so to speak. But in the end, the choice was mainly symbolic. Readers get both cover-length packages in this week's magazine. As we continue a year of covering down-to-earth politics with a passion, we'll likewise over the coming months (and years and decades) keep our curious eyes on the doings of any other cohabitants of the cosmos. It's all part of our own temporal mission to tell the tales and synthesize the complexities of our fascinating world--and universe.