The Sunday Times Magazine

In his 1945 book The Newspaper: It's Making and Its Meaning, Lester Markel longtime editor of The Sunday New York Times, outlined the three key functions of a Sunday paper as providing the news of the day, analyzing the week’s event, and presenting a broader perspective of a more permanent value. The latter primarily was the function of the magazine and the book review. The The New York Times Sunday Magazine was among the innovations introduced by Adoph S. Ochs when he took over the newspaper in 1896. From the beginning its focus was current events.

The most intriguing articles in the issue from a present day standpoint were Harvard president James B. Conant’s essay on the challenges, opportunities and questions presented by the GI Bill’s democratization of higher education; a piece by Edith Efron on the habits of America’s drinkers and celebrity journalist/illustrator S.J. Woolf’s attack on modern art.

In keeping with Ochs’s mission, the cover story in The Times Sunday Magazine of April 14 was a piece by urban planner and architect Albert Mayer on the worldwide postwar famine, a pressing subject du jour, written from the perspective of a serviceman who had witnessed the situation first hand. Mayer, a New Dealer, predictably calls for a government program that would combine mandated food rationing to allow more grains to be shipped overseas with a generous foreign aid program.

Another major piece, written by Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, decried the news blackout in Eastern Europe. A counter essay from Pravda editor David Zaslavsky, who as Stalin’s leading mouthpiece was the Communist regime’s Goebbels, asserted that the Soviet Union’s sole intention was to promote peace. A summary of the magazine's other content is on this page.

Luxury goods dominated the ads in the front of the book but back in the service section you could find ads for packaged foods and household goods.