"How fares the world?" asks TIME's Essay this week, and in effect replies: "Better than you think." Essay's tour of world horizons beyond the Viet Nam battleground is a reminder of the fact that some of the most important news is made not by instant headlines but by gradually developing trends. Such news-in-progress is exemplified by two major TIME stories in the fields of foreign affairs and medicine.

EAST GERMANY is less accessible than any other of Eastern Europe's Communist countries, and less is known about it. But the Walled-in domain is in many ways a crucial area in a new Europe of growing East-West contacts. Thus TIME explores, in words and twelve pages of unusual color pictures, the half country that is politically retrograde but economically trying hard to progress. The story was written by David B. Tinnin and edited by Edward Jamieson. They drew on extensive on-the-scene accounts from Bonn Bureau Chief Herman Nickel, who had to wait three months for his visa but finally got it, plus background reports from the Bonn bureau's Gisela Bolte and Burton Pines.

Nickel was preceded into East Germany by Marshall Loeb, who edits TIME color projects, and Photographer Jerry Cooke. Their entries also took much wangling, but once inside the country they encountered only minor harassment. Once, while Cooke was photographing the Wall from the western side, a soldier from the other side kept blinking a mirror into his lens. One frustration for the visiting journalist in East Germany is the obligatory, ever-present "guide," for whose services the government charges $40 a day. Nickel's escort was a friendly but ideologically correct type who called the Western correspondent "beloved enemy." But, said Nickel, "when my conversation with people touched on sensitive matters, he discreetly hid his head behind a newspaper to make us feel at ease, although he later nonchalantly asked what had been said."

In a cover story on the population explosion seven years ago (TIME, Jan. 11, 1960), we quoted from a United Nations projection which suggested that 600 years hence there will be only one square meter for each person on earth to live on, unless some new means of population control are found. Scientists, our story said, looked ahead to "the still-undiscovered oral contraceptive."

Now the long search is over, as is made clear by this week's cover story on birth control and "the pill." The article traces the history of "the pill" over two decades of trial and error; it deals with its medical aspects as well as with its moral and social implications. It was written by Gilbert Cant, TIME's Medicine writer for 18 years, edited by Peter Bird Martin and researched by Jean Bergerud, with the help of many TIME correspondents. The cover picture is the work of Photographer Robert S. Crandall, who assembled most of the currently available pills into a shape representing the scientific symbol for "female." If the pastel colors of the pills create a rather cheery, vernal effect, that is not inappropriate to the title of the cover story: "Freedom from Fear."

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