Fifty years ago, I met a young man working in Dr. Nate Weiner's laboratory at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine. As we talked, I learned how improbably he had arrived in Kansas City. Norman Cousins, the legendary editor of the original Saturday Review, had been a friend of his father and encouraged him to attend the city's new six-year medical school (another of Cousins' friends, E. Gray Diamond, was the school's provost). That man working Dr. Weiner's laboratory was Milton Grin.
We became friends that day. Half a century later, we still are.
Fifty years is a long time, and we have seen each other through both wonderful and difficult times. Milton has spent those decades feeding an entrepreneurial hunger, building one venture after another. My own path bent toward the humanities. I was, as it happens, the only member of my medical school class to hold a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Different roads, same friendship. What has held us together, I think, is a shared conviction that the practice of medicine is fundamentally a search for truth. A doctor’s task is to gather the evidence, interpret it honestly, and communicate it to a patient in terms they can understand and use. It is not so different from the task of a good magazine.
That, in essence, is the mission Milton and I bring to this inaugural edition of Saturday Review. Ours is an era of rapid, often bewildering technological change, and readers deserve guides they can trust: writers and thinkers who will gather the evidence, weigh it honestly, and explain it clearly, without condescension and without spin. We believe, as we believe about our own friendship, that some things endure: fine writing, intellectual honesty, and genuine thoughtful discourse among them. We hope this first issue earns a place among those enduring things and that you find it interesting, provocative, and worth your time.
Welcome to the new Saturday Review.
Mark Maslan M.D.
Vice Chairman
Executive Editor
