Our patented early-warning system.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's note - Editorial

When I worked at U.S. News & World Report, we had an editor, a world-weary veteran of Time, who liked to tell the following story. In 1979, he said, Time ran a cover story on cocaine, then a hip, growing but still fringe phenomenon. That issue of the magazine turned out to be one of the worst-selling in Time's history. Two years later, when coke had spread to the American mainstream and was wreaking all kinds of havoc, Time published another cover story on cocaine. That issue became one of the magazine's all-time bestsellers. The lesson, he said, was that it is dangerous to get too far ahead of the news; what readers really want is sense made of the news they've already heard about.

I thought of this editor's story as we were putting together the current issue of the Washington Monthly, which celebrates the magazine's fortieth anniversary. Flipping through stacks of yellowing old issues, looking for great pieces that would make engaging reading today (the excerpts begin on page 26), I was struck by how often the magazine did precisely the opposite of what my U.S. News editor recommended. The Monthly has long made a habit of publishing stories that were months or even years ahead of the news, usually for the purpose of sounding alarms about unrecognized problems--alarms which often turned out to be well worth heeding.

A few examples: In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook wrote a cover story explaining that the space shuttle, then under construction, had so many problems--especially its solid rocket boosters and heat-shielding tiles--that it risked being destroyed in flight. Which, alas, happened in 1986 and then again in 2003, for precisely the reasons Easterbrook foresaw. In March of 2003, Nicholas Confessore predicted, rightly, that the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq would undermine the readiness of our already-overstretched all-volunteer army and lead to falling reenlistments and crushingly burdensome redeployments. A year later, Benjamin Wallace-Wells looked at the supercharged real estate market, the Fed's loose money policy, and Alan Greenspan's odd pronouncements about the splendors of adjustable rate mortgages, and predicted that the housing bubble "is likely to burst, and when it does it may very well take the American economy down with it." Those are just three of the many, many stories the magazine called right (there are a number we called wrong, too; you can see a collection of both sprinkled among the excerpts in this issue).

So what is...