Editor's Desk: Showing Vs. Telling

A break from Alex work to give my opinion on a question that frequently comes up for new writers:

Yesterday a friend commenting on my posts asked:
Just out of curiosity, what is your view of showing versus telling? I wonder this because there seems to be this very hard and fast rule currently that everything possible must be shown rather than told. But if you go back some years and look at what is considered great literature, there is a lot of telling. I recently read a short story from the...