There is something I have always loved about magazines.

The best ones invite you to wander. You start with one story, get distracted by something three pages later, fold down a corner, circle a sentence, gossip about it at the water cooler, and eventually hand the whole thing to someone else saying, “You have to read this.” I am a terrible passive reader. I underline things. I send articles to people. Occasionally, I argue with the page.

That may be why I have been especially excited to watch our team think about what more we can get out of Opera America Magazine — how the magazine can become an even more interactive part of our field: something we read closely, respond to, talk about, disagree with, share, and use to spark new thinking and action. Bravo to our magazine team for taking up that charge with such imagination and care.

You will notice some new emphasis in this issue: more journalism, more reporting on what is happening across the field, and more room for questions without easy answers.

And there are some wonderfully good questions here. Should operas be shorter? Is Europe still the essential proving ground it once was for American singers?

I found myself lingering over these stories because they reflect something I have come to love about this field: Opera people have opinions. Strong ones.

We care deeply about this art form. We know its history. We have inherited traditions and practices that matter to us. And everywhere I go, I also meet people who are tinkering, adapting, questioning, borrowing an idea from somewhere unexpected, or trying something they have never tried before.

That tension interests me.

As OPERA America continues to evolve, I hope the magazine becomes an even more vital shared table and public square for the field: a place to bring what we are seeing, learning, making, questioning, and celebrating. And increasingly, I hope it is interactive — that what begins on these pages continues in conversations online, at our convenings, and in the work happening in communities across the country.

Opera is serious work, but it is also wonderfully strange, extravagant, funny, human, and occasionally ridiculous. A publication about opera should feel alive enough to hold all of that.

I hope you dog-ear a page or two.