IN this issue, the editors launch a major new department: The TIME ESSAY. Its sights are high.

Like the other sections of the magazine, Essay will treat topics in the news, but (except for the cover story) in greater detail and length. Essay will take a problem under current discussion and lay it bare. The new department will not treat a story or an issue when it is making the biggest headlines. That will be done in the appropriate section. Essay will come in later, when the problem is still far from settled but when second thoughts and greater reflection can be of particular benefit.

Essay will also seek to anticipate a problem or an area of discussion before it reaches its peak of interest, thus having prepared the reader in advance. All big topics--and Essay will confine itself to the big and overriding questions--have a cyclical or recurring interest, and Essay will attempt to touch that interest at a time when an expository and reasoned discussion can be the most provocative.

Essay will be unlike other TIME stories in two respects: 1) there will be little narrative quality to its prose, and 2) it will only rarely deal with personalities. It will resemble other TIME stories in that it will present the most pertinent and basic facts, examine and analyze them, quote experts about them, give divergent views, and pass judgment.

As its first subject, Essay this week takes a searching look at the troubled United Nations--its history, performance, assets, liabilities and prospects. Among the topics now being considered by the editors for Essay treatment: the new status of the intellectual in the U.S.--more highly respected than ever but with fewer great causes; pornography and obscenity and the probable beginning of a decline in public permissiveness; the status of philosophy in the U.S.; the non-hero in literature and on the stage. And many more.

THIS week's cover story might well have been an Essay were it not for Artist Boris Artzybashefr's compelling fascination with the unhuman condition and his gift for rendering machines as covers. To complement his study of the care and feeding of a computer at work, the cover slash depicts a segment of five-channel, punched paper tape used to get man's message (known as "input" in the new vocabulary) into the machine. The story throws new light on how pervasive the computer is becoming in our society, but it also makes clear that it is a new breed of technician--human--who gives the machine its logic.

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