In the 1980s, when I worked at Saturday Night, it called itself a magazine about Canada. At the time, this seemed appropriate. Electronic and digital media hadn’t yet brought the world to us in real time (cnn and the Internet were start-ups, personal computers a novelty). Canadians were still preoccupied, for the most part, with Canadian affairs. But all that’s changed. To a degree previous generations couldn’t have imagined, advances in information technology — and, no less, the onslaught of globalization — have made us citizens of the world, hungry for knowledge of all its constituent parts, not just our home and native land. So it’s appropriate that The Walrus, born in this new age, should have as its mission to be a magazine, not only about Canada, but also about its place in the world.

In this issue, for instance, we bring you a profile of Stephen Harper by William Johnson, who wrote about the apprenticeship of our beleaguered prime minister in his 2005 book, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada. But the other three features address global phenomena. Peter Foster, who’s working on a book about Adam Smith, writes an essay about what the father of capitalism would have made of the massive government bailouts precipitated by last fall’s international credit crisis. J. B. MacKinnon reports on efforts to re-establish the bolson tortoise in the New Mexico desert, where its numbers, like those of thousands of species throughout the world, are a tiny fraction of what they were just a few hundred years ago. And from Fred Weir, a Canadian journalist who’s lived in Moscow for twenty-five years, a personal reflection on the events that shaped Vladimir Putin’s decidedly undemocratic Russia. Only one of these stories is actually about us, but all four matter to us.

This has been the mandate of The Walrus from day one. No change there, although, like most successful magazines, The Walrus is constantly changing — responding, in ways big and small, to the evolving tastes of its readers. You can see the process at work in this issue. At first glance, it looks much like the last one, but on closer examination you’ll notice, among other things, changes in its appearance. None of them is dramatic; all are riffs on what was there before. But taken together, they make the magazine more visually appealing and, ultimately, more readable. They also attest — better than I can in words — to the understated brilliance of Brian Morgan, our new art director (well, sort of new; he was a senior designer at The Walrus from 2004 to 2006 before moving to Maclean’s).

Brian loves type, collecting fonts the way some people collect books. (His personal library contains more than a thousand.) So it was no surprise that type was on his agenda when he returned to the magazine, starting with the logo. He commissioned French typographer Jean François Porchez to redraw its letterforms, making them more elegant, and moving the word “The” to one side, allowing more space for cover lines. Next, he turned to the magazine’s text and display fonts. “Because The Walrus is text heavy,” he says, “I wanted a text font that would be effortless to read — that would almost disappear. I wanted the typographic equivalent of a well-tailored grey suit, a text font that would allow the display fonts to function as sedate or flashy ties, as needed.” He chose a contemporary iteration of Caslon, a typeface designed by William Caslon in the eighteenth century. As for the display fonts — the “sedate or flashy ties” — there will be many, including Bodoni FB, a redrawing of a Victorian classic; and Scotch Modern, updated from Richard Austin’s original by Canadian Nick Shinn.

Brian joins a team of gifted young editors determined to make The Walrus as compelling to read as it is beautiful to look at, and they, too, are fine-tuning. To make the magazine easier to navigate, its architecture has been simplified. It now has three distinct parts: a front — short pieces about Canada and the world; a middle — essays, profiles, traditional magazine journalism, memoirs, and short fiction; and a back — criticism, essays, and profiles on the arts. In some cases, stories may be shorter, although our commitment to long-form journalism remains undiminished. So, too, is our resolve — as much a part of The Walrus’s dna as its belief in journalism as education — to work with the finest contributors in Canada and, when appropriate, the world.

Finally, I come to the magazine’s last page, important real estate, where this month we introduce a comic strip called The Walrus Presents, combining the satirical talents of writer/playwright Jason Sherman and illustrator David Parkins. We hope you’ll find it amusing. We doubt the prime minister will.