From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Sophfronia Scott and David Gross are among TIME's youngest journalists, but they already know how to spot a story their older colleagues might overlook. The result is this week's cover report on the twentysomething crowd, the little noticed generation that has bobbed along in the backwash of the much larger baby-boom group. The two TIME reporter-researchers brought firsthand experience to the task: Scott is 23 and Gross is 24. "David and I knew that we had different ideas, tastes and goals than baby boomers do," says Scott, who wrote the story with Gross. "When we began interviewing other people roughly our age, we were surprised to find how much we had in common."

Scott, a native of Lorain, Ohio, came to TIME after graduating from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in English and American literature. Gross, from Long Island, N.Y., joined the staff later, after completing his major in Latin American studies at Brown University. Like some of his peers, Gross took a semester off before finishing college; he spent the time touring Central America. "My father used to complain that I had no long-term plans," says Gross. "When I told him last month about this story, he thought it was great. Now he knows that lots of other parents worried about the same kinds of things."

Chicago-based senior correspondent William McWhirter, 48, brought a different perspective. Says he: "The first big project I worked on for TIME back in 1963 was a story about my generation. I remember sitting around the floor in college dorms, asking a bunch of people my age what they wanted out of life. And here I was again, 27 years later, asking people the same age the same kinds of questions, but getting different answers."

This week's cover features five twentysomething adults. From left, they are: John Neubauer, 27, of Baltimore, a teacher; Raul Alvarez, 23, an auto mechanic in Ventura, Calif.; Christina Chinn, 21, of Denver, a communications and business student; Sonja Henderson, 23, an art student in Chicago; and David Robinson, 25, a graduate student in English at the University of California, Berkeley.