A week ago I wrote a post called The Collapse of Europe? Are We Next? It was 136 words long. I had been flipping through the news, the way I do on a weekend, and I kept catching fragments — protests, fires, police, governments in trouble — and I wrote down the impression the fragments gave me: Europe is coming apart, and it could happen here.

Here’s the problem with that post, and I’ll say it before anybody else does: it named no event, cited no figure, and kept no receipts. That’s not good enough, not for something that size. So I went back and found out what the fragments actually were. This is the first of two posts doing the job properly. This one is Europe. The second one is us.

Two Senate races from the November 3 midterms are still uncalled, a full week after election day: Alaska and Mississippi. Saturday’s anchor on this page walked through what to expect in both of them, and what it expected was a wait. The wait is what happened. Here is where the counting stands tonight.