LIKE a piece of sculpture, a detective story or a cake, a publication is shaped as much by what is left out as by what is put in. Trying to tell a week's history in an average 44 pages, TIME'S editors must be, above everything else, selective. Other magazines--even newsmagazines--often rigidly cast their mold way ahead of the breaking news. While a great many TIME stories are the result of careful ad vance planning, all are flexible and subject to the changing pressures of events right down to press time--and occasionally beyond. The result is a form of weekly evolution in which only the fittest stories survive --those held by the editors to be most important, significant, interesting. To choose from a worldful of events, each clamoring for attention and space, is a difficult, exciting and sometimes painful business.

Only a part of any TIME issue is based on suggestions from our correspondents, the rest grows out of ideas developed in the New York office. For this week, we received 168 suggestions from correspondents, of which 54 were accepted, with many others requested for a later date. A total of 133 stories were tentatively scheduled at the beginning of the week; new ones were added, and many were deleted when events required. The magazine you hold in your hand contains 72 stories. Some of the ones originally listed were never written, as the news shifted or research proved disappointing or insufficient. Others were written but dropped. These ranged from a survey of unemployment in Poland (didn't prove important enough) to the comings and goings of President Johnson's White House staff (forced out by more urgent happenings), to how celebrities give up cigarettes (not enough flavor, but may be relit next week).

The ultimate judge of the life and death of a story is the managing editor, who must see the magazine as a whole, orchestrate and conduct it so that all the parts will blend. He usually kills a story by marking it with the ominous letters NR, for "not running." This does not necessarily mean that it is bad or that the event covered is unimportant. For example, when the Religion section was reluctantly dropped from this issue, it did not represent a judgment of the importance of the subject as against others. It simply meant that the stories that were prepared and possible within the field of religion this week did not seem as compelling or newsy as some other stories within their own fields.

Among the things that are left out of TIME are innumerable facts that would complicate or lengthen a story beyond a reasonable point. Also left out on occasion are some of our writers' most cherished literary touches. TIME'S theater critic is still smarting from the fact that when, in a recent issue, he tried to describe Margaret Leighton's eyes "as pools of blue starlight," the phrase was changed to "wounds of inner pain" (on reflection, perhaps both were a bit much). One of our movie critic's most painful losses was his description of Tony Curtis as "a sort of Gary Grunt." And this week the People writer attempted to summarize a congressional move to lift Richard Burton's U.S. visa on grounds of moral turpitude in a poem that began thus:

Poor Dickie and Liz; they get no respite

Now an Ohio Congressman's tossing a fit . . .

Cooler heads prevailed. NR.

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