"THE ever-whirling wheel of

change," as Poet Edmund Spenser put it, is whirling ever faster. This is probably the most important fact of our age -- and the reason why TIME last week sponsored the second in a series of conferences on "the Environment of Change." For four days at Sterling Forest, Tuxedo, N.Y., 42 leading U.S. businessmen discussed the technological and social shifts around us with 13 professors from various disciplines.

The environment of change is, of course, very much the weekly concern of TIME. In the current issue, for example, almost every section reports and interprets change, some of it familiar, much of it little known. The cover story in WORLD introduces the new woman Prime Minister of a vast and struggling country where many women still cling to the old tradition of purdah. SCIENCE carries a report and the first color photographs of the remarkable new underground headquarters for NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), which has been in construction for five years inside Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.

ART chronicles the dizzying evolution of kinetic sculpture, the latest fad, from such beginnings as Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's 1913 mobile. SHOW BUSINESS notes how TV brought about the hideously funny reincarnation of Batman, a comic strip still fondly remembered by the middleaged. And MEDICINE seems to confirm again that many old wives' tales contain a granule of fact; the human palm, it now appears, does reveal secrets -- but not the kind looked for by devotees of palmistry.

At Sterling Forest, Oxford's Sir Isaiah Berlin remarked: "You can plan change, but you can't foretell the consequences." At least in some of our stories, we try.

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