When I first went to Mechelen, Belgium, the summer was hot and angry. Leaders everywhere in 2018 seemed to be building ever-higher walls and declaring new definitions of us and them. In the United States, the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. In Israel, the Knesset passed a law rendering the right to self-determination in the State of Israel a privilege “unique to the Jewish people.

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, the news from the financial markets was grim. America’s stock markets suffered losses worse than anything in 2008. Only Black Monday, in October 1987, and the darkest days of 1929 were worse. That was bad, but for insiders, the stock market was not the real worry. A “correction” was in order. The world was heading into shutdown. It was to be expected that share prices would fall.

Once again, politicians and judges are limiting abortion without any understanding of what pregnancy can, and often does, ask of the human body. To conservative legislators in Texas, a new law banning abortion after about six weeks of gestation is a ploy to subvert Roe v. Wade. But to doctors like me, the measure reveals how thoughtless its designers are and how willing they are to let pregnant patients suffer and die.I’m an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk cases.

Twenty years ago, al-Qaeda hijackers carried out the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil, killing nearly 3,000 innocents, terrifying the nation, and forever changing the course of history—ushering in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Yet September 11 was also something else: our worst intelligence failure in more than half a century. It was a surprise attack that should not have been a surprise.