This week one of our most discussed sections -- the TIME Essay -- begins its second year. From the very first one, examining the United Nations and its prospects, Essay has elicited a remarkable amount of public interest. The U.S. Mission to the U.N. distributed 10,000 reprints of No. 1 to college campuses and civic groups, and Harlan Cleveland, then Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, said of it: "Somehow your editors managed to squeeze into two fascinating pages the essence of the U.N.'s problems and prospects which have occupied our energies for the past several years."

Since then, one or more Essays have been broadcast, translated, reprinted or otherwise used by the Department of State, the U.S. Information Agency, the National War College, units of the Army and Air Force, the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Government's broadcasting system in West Berlin, and private organizations as diverse as the Anchorage, Alaska, League of Women Voters and the Columbia Broadcasting System. The American Automobile Association is distributing Ode to the Road (Sept. 10) to its nationwide membership. A student found a boon in What (If Anything) to Expect from Today's Philosophers (Jan. 7). "More than anything else," he wrote us, "those two pages helped to wrap up a semester's course in modern philosophy--and just in time for the final exam." Protestant Theologian Henry P. Van Dusen deemed On Death As a Constant Companion (Nov. 12) "the most masterly in a notable sequence."

Moved by Communism Today: A Refresher Course (Aug. 6), a reader suggested that Essay "should be required reading in every high school classroom." As a result, our Education Department sent reprints to social-studies department chairmen in 18,400 public high schools. Some 800 college radio stations and campus editors have signed up to receive copies of Essays that have particular pertinence for the undergraduate. Another large area of interest is the world of business. An anthology* of 20 Essays that ran before Jan. 1 drew appreciative response from the business executives to whom it was sent. Characteristic was the appraisal of Radio Corporation of America's President Robert W. Sarnoff, who wrote us: "I have watched the development of this new journalistic form with interest and admiration and I am delighted to have a volume of selections for my library."

Essay was conceived by Managing Editor Otto Fuerbringer as a means of probing and laying bare, relatively free of fast-breaking news, the big questions, the overriding issues of our times. Like any other TIME story, Essay is the product of many minds: editors, writers, researchers, correspondents--and the experts they interview. But it takes one man to pull everything together, and from the start that editor has been Henry Grunwald. Three senior editors, A. T. Baker, Champ Clark and Marshall Loeb (this week's author), have taken turns at writing Essays. Among the other writers of one or more are Douglas Auchincloss, Joe David Brown, John T. Elson, Fred Gruin, Bruce Henderson, Robert Jones, William Johnson, Stefan Kanfer, Ed Magnuson, Jason McManus and Robert Shnayerson. The principal researchers for the section are Mary Vanaman, Marion Pikul and Nancy Faber.

When Essay was launched a year ago, one of our colleagues on another magazine said, in some surprise: "You're not going to try to do that almost every week, are you?" We are.

*Some of these are still available to readers at cost. Send $1 to Room 23-29D, Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020.

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