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Navigating the New World

4 minute read
Richard Stengel

I don’t have to tell you that this is the worst economy since the Depression. Or that this is a difficult and uncertain time in America and around the globe. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know when I say that our world is changing before our eyes–and that a new world is being created. That’s your daily reality–and ours. What I am telling you is that our mission at TIME is to help you navigate this new world–to explain what is changing and why and what you can do about it. Our task going forward is to use great reporting, great writing, great photography and great video online to be your guide to this new and changing world.

In many ways, TIME functions best in a crisis, and we’re determined to help you understand the economic crisis we’re all living through. It affects us too, but our job is to explain how it’s affecting you. We have been doing this for the past 10 months, beginning with our cover stories “Surviving the Lean Economy” and “Job #1: The Economy” during the presidential campaign. And we’ve been doing it ever since, not with opinion and conjecture but with reporting on the ground and a concern for how all this is affecting real people’s lives. We did that last week with “So You Think You’re Insured?” and the week before that with our special economic package “Holding On for Dear Life.” And we’ve been defining this economic crisis since our signature cover story “How Wall Street Sold Out America” the week Lehman Brothers went under. We captured the mood of the nation with our “The New Hard Times” cover in October, not to mention channeling a sense of the public anger in our much discussed “25 People to Blame” package last month.

This week our second annual 10 Ideas issue concentrates on new ways that people and thinkers are reckoning with this new economy. Senior writer Lev Grossman edited the package, starting from the premise that the ideas, as he said, “are meant to explain the world as it is, not as it used to be.” In the face of economic contraction, we’re rethinking things we used to take for granted. The opening piece, by Barbara Kiviat, acknowledges that in these difficult times, plain old jobs, not stocks or real estate, are our most valuable assets. Sean Gregory writes about a new minimalist model for the shopping experience, and Bryan Walsh looks at how the suburbs are reimagining themselves now that the economy can no longer support the massive shopping centers that used to define them. Krista Mahr in Hong Kong reports on how the crunch is fueling a new kind of international trade: countries with money but little arable land are renting huge tracts from countries rich in soil but poor in cash. Alex Perry zeroes in on the unexpected star of the global economy: Africa.

Amid all the anxiety out there, if there’s a theme to the special Ideas issue this year, it’s renewal. This is not false hope or irrational optimism but the power of ideas and innovation to transform the world and us. A decrepit transport system becomes the nerves of a new, greener network. A 16th century sect inspires a new generation of believers. The power of ideas is to make old, broken things work in fresh new ways. In fact, transformation is at the heart of what is going on in America and around the world, and we’re tracking it and explaining it for you every week in TIME and every day on TIME.com

Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

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