85th Anniversary Issue: Editor's Letter

Let’s not tiptoe around the obvious: We’re old. Eighty-five is almost six years beyond the life expectancy of the average American, let alone the average magazine. We’re old enough that when we warned in our first issue that the Dow Jones industrial average was at an unsustainable high, 1) that high was 381, and 2) we were proven right a few weeks later by the stock market crash of 1929. When we launched, many people still referred to Istanbul as Constantinople and parts of the world were still on the Julian calendar. We predate Clarence Birdseye’s invention of frozen food and James Dewar’s creation of the Twinkie. Older than Twinkies may as well be older than the earth itself.