OUT to our 39 correspondents abroad and our 45 correspondents in this country, in the clipped and sometimes cryptic language of cablese, go hundreds of questions and requests each week from the writers and editors in New York. Sometimes all that is asked is one quick question, such as one requested for this week's comprehensive year-end business review: Are there any computers yet in Cameroun? (Back came the answer, in puzzled French--wow.) Whether the query asks clarification of a small obscure point or seeks a correspondent's full appraisal of a long-observed crisis, diversity is the correspondent's lot--and the reason that he did not pick a more prosaic trade.

Two stories this week illustrate how it goes. To tell how the Peace Corps is really doing, as opposed to what its press agents boast and its critics suspect, correspondents headed for the hinterland to see young people on the job. John Blashill sought out Peace Corpsmen upcountry in Chile and Colombia; Lee Griggs interrupted his watch on the uneasy Congo to fly to Tanganyika, and Herman Nickel from Johannesburg turned up with Peace Corpsmen in Nigeria. Still another set of correspondents here in the U.S. went off on a different trail--to see what Congressmen home for Christmas recess are hearing from the voters. They found the U.S. voter worried less about jobs and taxes and more about peace on earth. Both stories, condensed from thousands of words of reporting, are to be found in THE NATION.

Not all TIME'S reporting comes from the ends of the earth. Contributing Editor John McPhee, who wrote this week's cover story on Jackie Gleason, had only to pursue his subject a block away--to that upholstered saloon for the rented-Cadillac set called 21. Despite the convenience. McPhee's assignment deserves some kind of endurance prize, for he saw his subject in a gamut of moods: testy, comradely, hostile, candid, suspicious, trusting. Cover Artist Russell Hoban too, spent hours with his man, and sought to catch--in one portrait--some of the restless complexity of Gleason's character.

YEAR'S end is a time for auditing the books, reviewing the old. anticipating the new. In the spirit of the season. Cinema Critic Brad Darrach, with his usual mixture of slyness and seriousness, picks the best films of 1961, and TIME'S book reviewers make their collective judgment on the best books of the year. Another of TIME'S hardier traditions is the year-end business review. It attempts to say where we've been and where we're going. This year the review pays special note to a facet of the economy that has long been underestimated: the impact of automation and computers on businessmen's actions and plans. Because of the year's demands for extra copies of this special report, we're planning to make reprints available. If you would like copies of this economic study for your business associates, please drop a note on your letterhead to: Mr. James Donley, TIME & LIFE Building, Rockefeller Center, New York 20, New York.

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