From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

"THE LABEL ESSAY IS RATHER INTIMIDATING," SAYS Michael Kinsley. "It makes you think, far more than when writing a weekly column, that you need to say something for the ages." Funny, he doesn't sound intimidated -- even though his Essay in this week's magazine does endorse "squeamishness" as a "healthy" attitude for yuppies confronting the servant problem. The rest of the Essay, Kinsley hopes, "will annoy people left and right" -- those on the left because he acknowledges that servants are necessary, those on the right because he recommends such steps as abolition of tipping and uniforms to lessen social distinctions.

For five years now, Kinsley has been annoying leftists, rightists and sometimes centrists who read TIME Essays. For the past five months, in fact, we have been his only journalistic outlet. Last January he began a six-month leave from the New Republic, which he once edited and where he had been writing the TRB column, to write a book. But he has continued to write for TIME and appear on CNN's Crossfire program.

Basically a Democrat, Kinsley is enough of an independent thinker that he occasionally argues with himself. Last fall, as an intellectual exercise, he set out to make a case for voting for George Bush. He produced some cogent arguments, then pronounced a one-word verdict on them: "Nawwwwww . . ." Now, bucking journalistic fashion, Kinsley describes himself as still "one of the bigger Clinton enthusiasts around." The President has made mistakes, he says, but "the center of his trouble is that he is seriously addressing problems that the past two Presidents have ignored," notably the deficit (Mike is a confirmed deficit hawk). And in proposing an energy tax, Clinton is bucking "a political system that makes it almost impossible" to demand that the middle class make any kind of sacrifice.

Kinsley, who had been writing for the New Republic since he was 25 (he is now 42), became a TIME essayist largely because he found the thought of writing for an audience roughly 50 times the size of his regular one irresistible. Before his debut, though, he was a bit dubious about this magazine's ways; he commented quizzically on our practice of distilling vast numbers of words into the tiny percentage that see print. Now he is part of the process: a recent Essay he wrote about taxes somehow never appeared. Is he bothered? "Goes with the territory, I guess," he says. In other words, Nawwwwww . . .