To Hoover fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, America’s promise remains undimmed.

The coronavirus has persuaded democracies around the world to trade individual rights for public health measures, surrendering liberty for safety—or so we keep hearing. Not so, says Josef Joffe. Citizens are not “endlessly docile.”

After twenty years of an uneasy peace in the Balkans, Belgrade is moving closer to Europe—but also displaying Russian-style autocracy and flirting with China.

Call it financial wellness: Hoover’s Michael J. Boskin and John Shoven have launched an innovative personal-finance class to guide students on “your life journey.”

Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, explains that all innovation involves an element of surprise—as do challenges, such as Covid-19, that we can only meet by innovating. “We should have been worrying about pandemics all along.”

As the year of the coronavirus nears an end, consider the devastating flu epidemic of 1918–20, an even more severe trial of the American spirit.