IT'S a rare occasion when TIME starts a new section, as we do this week. The competition for space (our inner space as well as the outer space shown on the cover) is so intense that it is hard for a new department to break in. This competition, producing a need for concentrated, sharp stories, probably more than anything else gives TIME its unique character. The new Modern Living section now joins the competition, and got there, as new sections do, by outgrowing its place in other parts of the magazine.

Show Business is the next youngest section. It dates from 1958. But in TIME'S 38 years of publication, along with the familiar standbys (Art, Theater, Religion, etc.) that have been with us from the beginning, a number of sections have come and gone. That first 1923 issue had Imaginary Interviews as well as two sections called Point with Pride and View with Alarm. It also had sections called Aeronautics, Crime, and Law--no longer with us, though their subject matter is. Other vanished sections include Animals, Transport, and Personality. Time Table (1929) disappeared but resurfaced in slightly different form as Time Listings (1958).

The charter of the new section, says its Senior Editor Henry Grunwald, is to "cover every aspect of how people, and Americans in particular, live--their cars, homes, travel, play, food, fads, fashions, customs, manners." Some of its subject matter has, of course, frequently appeared in the past in The Nation, Art, Business and elsewhere in the magazine. But now Modern Living has space of its own to roam around in, and this week ranges from the spread of crab grass to the immobility of trailers.

WE are still hearing from all over about TIME'S chillingly comprehensive coverage of the Cuban disaster--the Miro Cardona cover story (April 28) and related stories in The Nation. Aside from the letters we've received, the stories have obviously been the impetus for questions in Congress and the source of many subsequent accounts by reporters and newscasters (who last week reported the capture by Castro's forces of General Manuel Artime, the controversial young exile whom TIME introduced as the active leader of the invasion). CBS Correspondent Charles Collingwood, on his viewing the press TV show, last week said "TIME Magazine was the first of really national circulation" to report the story of the so-called secret invasion bases run by the CIA in Guatemala. The story of the invasion that went wrong, and why it did, was no pretty story, but TIME thought it to be in the national interest to tell, believing that the resilience of democracy consists in its right to know about the good and the bad, and its readiness, once it knows its mistakes, to profit by them.

TIME'S cover story this week is another fast switch and another example of Cover Artist Boris Chaliapin's quick brushwork. Shepard's weightless passage through the wild blue yonder, is, of course, strictly symbolic.

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