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Everything Old Is New Again

6 minute read
Richard Stengel

TIME turns 90 this week. When we started talking about this around the office, a couple of people said to me, Let’s not make too much of it, because it only shows how old we are. I’ve never liked birthdays, so I wasn’t completely unsympathetic. But I noticed that enthusiasm for celebrating our anniversary was inversely proportional to age: the younger the staffers, the more enthusiastic they were; the older, the less. For me, 90 is not so much a milestone but evidence that for nine decades TIME is always new, always of the moment. We have to be because we cover the way the world is changing and that never stops.

So we are celebrating in ways that are of the moment and on all our many platforms–curated by TIME.com assistant managing editor Steve Snyder. At TIME.com/90years you can watch a two-minute video history of the TIME cover. We also showcase the history of the past nine decades through a discussion of 90 memorable TIME covers. Plus, you’ll get a tour of the past 50 years of show business, with more than 100 covers of actors, directors and celebrities. We have a gallery of covers by great artists, from Roy Lichtenstein’s portrait of Bobby Kennedy to Jacob Lawrence’s Jesse Jackson to Andy Warhol’s Michael Jackson. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous: readers will be able to vote on the cheesiest covers we’ve ever done, and we’ve selected 50 of those. (CATS: LOVE ‘EM! hate ’em! is my favorite.)

Also, in October we will publish a book, Inside the Red Border, a chronicle of history told through the TIME cover, the most important real estate in journalism. And in a few weeks, you’ll be able to go inside the Time & Life Building via the magic of Google Street View and take a tour of our offices. Finally, don’t miss Joel Stein’s column in this issue, which generally makes fun of the whole thing.

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

90 YEARS INSIDE THE RED BORDER

From Watergate to Facebook, TIME’s covers have captured the spirit of the times

STARS

Icons on the cover include the Marx Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Toni Morrison and Bart Simpson

PORTRAITS

TIME’s cover artists include (clockwise from top) Roy Lichtenstein, Jacob Lawrence, Larry Rivers, Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol and Ben Shahn

MOST APPEARANCES

Our final Nixon cover story, marking his death in 1994, chronicled the disgraced President’s life and legacy

31

BARACK OBAMA

33

GEORGE W. BUSH

37

BILL CLINTON

38

RONALD REAGAN

47

RICHARD NIXON

1,295

BIGGEST GROUP

For TIME’s May 31, 2010, cover on Facebook and privacy, we created a mosaic of user profiles

1,788

MUSEUM WORKS

Much of the original artwork used for TIME’s covers is housed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington

HERBERT HOOVER

He is the only U.S. President who never made the cover of TIME as a sitting President–although he was on the cover four times while out of office

Conversation

#BitterPill

TIME’s special report on health care costs opens a crucial national debate

Within hours of its online debut, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” written by veteran journalist Steven Brill, dominated the national discussion about health care. In the first two days alone, the story drew 1.2 million visits to TIME.com and readers shared it more than 167,000 times across social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

In online comments and personal e-mails to Brill, readers shared health care nightmares similar to those detailed in the story, in which ordinary Americans describe their struggles with confusing bills and crushing debt. Brill calls the reaction to the story unprecedented, leaving him with the feeling that he “just scratched the surface.” A retired attorney even offered Brill his services in investigating the issue further. One commenter on Time.com expressed aggravation after receiving a $10,000 bill for a visit to the emergency room: “Why does having the best medical care in the world matter when you can’t afford to use it?”

“Bitter Pill” also unmasked a shadowy enemy in the health care wars–the chargemaster, the arcane and much reviled price list used by every hospital to determine patients’ bills. On Twitter, @robin_h_p likened the chargemaster to “the villain in TRON,” while reader Lorelle Silverman added it to a long list of bad guys: “Charles Ponzi, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff … Chargemaster.” The length of the story–more than 24,000 words–did not deter readers like @Karoli, who called it “the #LongRead you really must read.” Those joining the #BitterPill discussion on Twitter ranged from influential journalists like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who called the story “superb,” to readers who observed that our medical system “creates customers not cures.”

On television, the story pushed health care policy back into the spotlight. Charlie Rose wove Brill’s idea of lowering the Medicare age into a discussion about Obamacare and drug companies. Jon Stewart (above with Brill) called the piece “required reading” for U.S. citizens and lawmakers, adding that he hoped its publication would be a “Silent Spring moment for health care.”

The Next Pelé

Brazil’s Neymar

Bobby Ghosh’s TIME International cover story on the soccer star showed how Brazil’s thriving economy explains the career of its most valuable sporting asset. Unlike previous generations of players, Neymar doesn’t need to move to Europe to make a fortune; he’s one of the world’s best-paid players without leaving his hometown of Santos. Neymar tweeted, “Very proud to be the eighth Brazilian to be on the cover of TIME.”

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

In “Bitter Pill” by Steven Brill (March 4), we miscalculated the percentage of overall revenue that, according to advertisements by the American Hospital Association, hospitals provided in uncompensated care to the poor in 2010 either through programs providing financial aid to the poor or because patients did not pay their debts. The value of this care is calculated based on cost, not charges, and it is approximately 5% of U.S. hospitals’ annual revenue, not “less than half of 1%.” In the same piece, we compared the salary of Ronald DePinho, president of the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, with that of the head of the University of Texas system but misidentified that official. We should have said that DePinho earns nearly 2½ times the $750,000 paid to Francisco Cigarroa, the chancellor of the entire University of Texas system.

In “Upward Mobility” by Fareed Zakaria (March 4), we referred to a paper by scholars from the University of Chicago and University of California, Davis, as being published in September 2011. While it was released as a working paper in 2011, the version of the paper mentioned in the column was presented in June 2012.

FOR MORE ON THIS STORY, GO TO time.com/bitterpill

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