Europe’s future includes a post-Merkel Germany, the fallout over the AUKUS technology deal, a shaky NATO alliance post-Afghanistan, Ukraine’s uncertain outlook, plus Russian control of natural gas supplies. Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster and John Cochrane discuss the mood on the other side of the Atlantic, as well as President Biden’s UN address and China’s financial reckoning.

In their new book, Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and David Cutler characterize COVID and related issues as an “existential threat to the urban world, because the human proximity that enables contagion is the defining characteristic of the city” (see our review, Survival of the City: The Need to Reopen the Metropolitan Frontier (Review).

The potential for another white-knuckle flirtation with default by the U.S. government via a debt-ceiling showdown is helping to raise “policy uncertainty,” analysts noted Wednesday.

Fifty-one years ago, a book by two centrist Democrats caused a commotion among their party’s progressives, who resented counsels of restraint. In “The Real Majority,” Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg highlighted a Gallup poll question from February 1968: “Is there any area around here — that is, within a mile — where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” The “yes” response: men 19 percent, women 50 percent.