The Median Scenario.

Polling Thuringia.

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1. NYC’s commercial real estate woes:

Last year, a team of academics from Columbia University and NYU published a paper with the eye-catching title “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.” In it, they estimated that New York office buildings had lost 39 percent of their long-term value. A couple of months ago, they revised their projections based on newer data and came up with an even steeper decline — 44 percent on the average path.

“If anything, I feel like as time has progressed, this has started to look more and more right,” said one of the paper’s co-authors, Columbia finance professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, when I went to see him in June. The Belgian academic’s own office, in one of the new buildings at Columbia’s campus extension in Harlem, is pleasant and private and has a view of the Hudson River. A large whiteboard was filled with stochastic equations: the predictive formulas that have rattled the real-estate industry. After the first paper was published, the professor said, one of the city’s large office landlords summoned him for a grim briefing. “I knew we were on to something here,” Van Nieuwerburgh said, “because the folks who breathe this day in and day out for a living, they are scared.”