(Click on the title to view the whole piece)
 

Abundance
 
So focused are we on wealth and acquisition, that we shiver at the thought of not having enough. We find it hard to imagine that someone might want less, not more. In such an intellectual and imaginative climate, our fears drive us to focus on the scarcity that seems to surround us. Abundance seems a mere dream, a chimera.
 
Sister Elizabeth Wagner

 

On Houses
 
Yet for all that we proclaim home ownership an essential pillar of the American Dream, the aim of which is supposed to be the provision of a better life for our children, we do not provide them this advantage. It is an expectation of our society that every child will start its adult life homeless, and that our sons and daughters will, each and every one, shackle themselves to decades of debt in order to have a house of their own.
 
R. Joseph Capet

 

First Drink of the Day: A Recovering Alcoholic Looks at Drinking in the Movies
 
I'm no film critic, but I am a card-carrying recovering alcoholic, and that makes me wonder what they've been doing before this scene... why is this always the first drink of the day among alleged hard drinkers? Rarely is anyone tipping a glass before the conversation starts.
 
Alison Iglehart

 

Berlin: the Vice-Consul and the Defector
 
Like any other federal government in Germany, the Berlin Senate ran the city. But Berlin was different. It was not a normal German city. It was suspended in a state of Limbo. Until the Wall was toppled in 1989, and Berlin reverted to being a united city, it was a demilitarized zone divided into four sectors—American, British, French and Russian—under the military command of the four nations. The Soviets had chosen to incorporate their sector into East Berlin and seal off access to it with a high wall.
 
Patrick McDermott

 

On Our Way To Californiay!—Wonderland by the Sea
 
The remark had come about when the wife of the faculty's classicist had advised us "not to fret" about leaving that historic Eastern College. She herself had spent some time in Berkeley and found it quite tolerable. But when I enlightened her to our going, not to Berkeley, but to the University branch further south at UCLA, she had looked aghast and concluded archly, "Los Angeles! Oh, my poor dear, how vulgar!"
 
Julia Braun Kessler