To our readers

We've gained weight.

No, it's not that we overindulged during Mardi Gras or took too many creatine supplements; rather, we're proud to announce with this issue that TowerView is eight pages longer than ever before--an increase we hope to sustain in the future.

That's a nice announcement to make, but it quickly leads to the question of why size really matters. It's easy to claim that bigger is better, a phrase commercial advertisers have repeated so often it now sounds self-evident, and leave it at that. And while we've resisted the temptation to emblazon a bright yellow star saying "29% MORE FREE" on the cover, "bigger is better" is true to a certain extent. In this issue, we have more stories, longer stories, more photographs and more additional material--a wider array of content that we hope will examine more issues and interest more readers for a longer period of time.

But to see what makes me happiest about our new size, you need to understand it in the context of a few other developments--the decision to start mailing TowerView directly to student mailboxes last month, or the layout and design changes we made last summer, for instance. Taken together, those innovations all promise that TowerView is in an exciting new position, committed to taking on a greater role in answering the questions that our increasing number of readers want to ask.

Of course, to succeed in that completely, we'll need your assistance. If there's something you saw in this issue and didn't like, or would have liked to see but didn't--no matter how trivial or how important--we'd like to know what it was, and how you think we should fix it. If there's some type of content that we should have in the magazine but don't, or some issue we're leaving unaddressed, let us know, and we'll look into changing it.

Who knows? If you send us enough new ideas, we might even gain a little more weight.