A Letter From The Publisher, may 5, 1958

• Share

FOR this week's first observation of Law Day, U.S.A., TIME correspondents and stringers across the U.S. sought out lawyers, judges, law professors—even bail bondsmen—and pinned them down on their favorite subject. Into TIME'S wire room poured thousands of words of reportage that portrayed a picture of the U.S. that was a surprise even to serious students of the law—a genuine awareness that it is time to think beyond mere laws to find the principles of Law itself. For the sum of the reportage, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Work of Justice.

WHEN 486 students from a high school graduating class of 698 win $792,000 in scholarships, it is not only big business but a good story. Students at New York City's famed Bronx High School of Science managed that last year—and walked off with the city tennis championship in the bargain. For the story of an extraordinary school for gifted youngsters, see EDUCATION, Training for Brains.

RUSSIA'S diplomacy was busy last week, in a private luncheon with prominent French ministers and ex-ministers in Paris, and in a gesticulating private conversation with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn. But for all the activity, there was an emptiness in the total performance, reflecting a confusion at home. For the symptoms see FOREIGN NEWS, Bad Week for Them.

THE Greeks conceived the idea of the atom, and over the centuries it made the nature of matter seem a nice, simple thing. Modern physicists opened the nucleus of the atom, and the whirligig inside opened up a new and wonderful world. But man continues attempts to explain the universe as the harmony envisioned by the Greeks. Einstein thought he could, but never found a way to put his unified field theory to a test. Last week two new and impressive efforts toward harmony were announced in Manhattan and West Berlin. See SCIENCE, "Assumptions of Symmetry."

THE news of television is not confined to what is seen on the end of the picture-tube. All that viewers saw or heard was Elsa Maxwell sassily telling Host Jack Paar that Walter Winchell had never voted; but this erroneous remark set off an off-camera scratching match between Columnist Winchell, Maxwell and Paar that was as ludicrous as anything visible on TV. See TV & RADIO, The Titans of Babel.

FAMED Viennese Painter Oskar Kokoschka has long boasted that his portraits captured the secret life of his subjects. Onetime Big Time Dancer Adele Astaire, who had never seen the original, last week viewed a color reproduction of her Kokoschka portrait (see color page) for the first time since it was painted in 1926, let out a cry of anguish, posed for a photographic version, finally calmed down enough to remark, "Well, it's better to be remembered as hideous and funny than not to be noticed at all." See ART, Psychological Portraitist.